The request peeps out on the media with cyclical punctuality. Is it possible, one wonders, that thehomosexuality Are you still a taboo in football? It’s a hypocritical question which finds its explanation in the very way in which the question is treated. Both by those who are part of that world and by those who narrate that world. Because the balloon is a closed environment and stereotyped, an ecosystem that has learned to immortalize a cliché: the footballer hunter of tissue, model sledger, adventure collector. A machismo ostentatious that does not tolerate exceptions. Also because this is how football has been narrated for years. With the winning team that “show attributes” and that loser who becomes “female”. Such a toxic environment where revealing one’s sexual orientation is mistaken for a sign of “weakness”. declare yourself homosexual it means to expose yourself. Making fun of his classmates. To the chants of the fans. To the waste of sponsor. It is like this everywhere, even if in Italy the question tells almost a century of immobility.
Because the incipit of this dark story was written as early as 1934. So Carlo Carcano he is an almost totemic figure of Italian football. With Victor Pozzo forged what will go down in history as the Method. But he also drove there Juventus to the victory of four consecutive championships and as assistant coach he accompanied the national team to victory in the 1934 World Cup. His glory was shattered on December 10 of the same year. Edward Agnelli summons him and communicates his exemption with immediate effect. His relationship with a young soccer player South American had been discovered. And Fascist Italy didn’t exactly like homosexuals. The team, entrusted to Charles Bigatto e Benedetto Gola, wins his fifth consecutive title. Carcano is instead removed from the collective memory.
After almost ninety years the relationship of Italian football with homosexuality is still questionable. Because we often talk about homophobiabut always using the wrong words, cutting with an axe concepts delicate. And by dint of grotesque exits, the matter has taken on the contours of one joke that doesn’t make anyone laugh. On 19 May 2007 Juventus asphalted theArezzo and is promoted to A league. Immediately after the final whistle, the players wear a pink jersey with the writing: “B…stA!”. A few minutes later the coach Didier Deschamps he appears in front of the cameras and says: “I don’t like the shirt because pink in France is the color of gays”. But the reverse literature in our football is so sad exterminated which could give rise to sub-genres. For some, in fact, homosexuals would even be unfit to play football. In 2005 Gianni Rivera says to Corriere della Sera: “It’s clear that I’m wrong, given that there are gays in football and I imagine they live their problems. It seems to me difficult to think that they would choose such a male game, with such decisive contrasts”. For Luciano Moggi, on the other hand, homosexuals could have created problems inside the locker room. In the truest sense of the word: “There are no gays in football, I don’t know if i players are against, I certainly am – says a Klaus Davi in 2008 – In the companies where I’ve been I’ve never had any. I’m old-fashioned but I know the football environment and one who is gay cannot live within it. A homosexual he can’t do the footballer’s job. Football is not made for them, you are naked in the shower”. It is an image that crops up a few years later in the words of Damiano Thomasmidfielder who in Rome was nicknamed “Anima Candida” and then a leading figure in theAssociation players: “I advise against outing homosexual players, of course. In a football team you share an intimacy, I don’t know in what other professions you all take a shower together. I don’t consider mine a message omertosobut simply appropriate. (…) a outing it could turn out to be a boomerang, you would be reduced to a speck.” And to think that in 1998 Daniela Finian ardent Lazio fan and wife of the then number one of the Alleanza Nazionale, had let slip to Tmc: “A footballer, if ostentatiously homosexual, could not play, they would not let him play”.
In the year of our Lord 2008, so with the Middle Ages already a few centuries behind, some leading players openly take sides against gays. And they do it for what they define as “cultural” reasons. An oxymoron that brings Gennaro Gattuso to speak openly about homosexual marriages: “Even if in 2008 they say that everyone can do what they want, it doesn’t exist for me, in church. I’ve been a believer in family since I was a child, and for a person who believes in his religion they seem a strange thing to me marriage gay. It shocks me.” Nicola Legrottaglieone who after converting to Christianity in 2006 calls himself Brother Nicolahe adds shortly after: “The Bible clearly says that homosexuality is a sin”.
For reasons exactly contrary to what can be considered “cultural”, Anthony Cassano earned the cover of the newspapers in June of 2012. Responding to an interview of Cecchi Paonewho claimed the presence of “at least two homosexuals” in Italy by PrandelliFantantonio lets himself go a little. “There are fags in the national team? If I think what I say, you know what comes out – he assures – they are fags, their problems, I hope they are not really in the national team”. It is such a ferocious sentence that it makes you think about Ninna Nanna Of Chuck Palahniuk, where the author insistently repeats: “Bones and sticks may break your bones, but watch those fucking words”. Cassano’s show brings with it an infinite number of positions. Carolina Morace, something more than a simple icon for our women’s football, embraces the theses of the Bari native. “I’m with Cassano – he tells the weekly A – The one who stirs up the turbidity is Cecchi Paone: he exploits these arguments. In football the problem is not thehomophobia, discrimination in the female world is more serious. Now in the national team the coach is Goats“. A little later Francesco Totti goes haywire: “I respect homophobia,” he says. Only that she wanted to say: “I respect homosexuality.” A few months earlier, in April, national team player Prandelli had asked his players to come out. The idea had been publicly rejected by Toto Di Natalewho had sharpened his thinking to Chi: “I respect the coach and I’m fond of him, but I don’t agree with him. Breaking this taboo in our sport is a difficult, almost desperate undertaking. I am against the hypothesis of making such an important choice public. How would the fans react?”. Gianni Riveraone particularly active in providing his opinion on the subject, had added: “I don’t understand what’s the point of saying it around, heterosexuals don’t go saying it in public”.
It is a sentence so out of focus that it becomes unsettling. But that fits perfectly into a context where sometimes you don’t even notice the words that are chosen. So here’s that Tavecchio thunders: “Gays stay away from me, I’m perfectly normal”; Then Eziolino Capuano who assures: “The players have to go on the pitch men with balls, not faggots.” The effect Checco Zalone it is assured, even if in this case it is difficult to smile. In some cases, even the word ‘gay’ is used as an insult to address to an opponent. It happened in 2016 during the match between Inter and Napoli, when Maurice Sarri he turned to Robert Mancini calling him ‘faggot’ and ‘fennel’. Small detail: two years earlier, when he was coaching Empoli in B, Sarri commented on the expulsion of one of his players against Varese saying that “football has become a sport for fags” and that in Italy “there is much more booing than in England with homosexual interpretations”.
The trend, however, does not only concern Italy. In 2007 a judge of São Paulo, in Brazilwent a little further in the interpretation of the law arriving to affirm that the homosexuals they could not play as professionals, but had to create their own parallel league. A little later Eduardo Berrizzocurrent coach of Chilehad left theOlympique Marseille saying that “homosexuality proliferates in French football” and that “living with so many gays was annoying”. The most sensational cases come from Germania. In 2012 the magazine Fluter had collected the testimony of a homosexual footballer who wished to remain anonymous: “I’m forced to act and hide – he said – it’s easy to say you’re out when you’re not going to the stadium the next day”. Thomas Hitzlsperger, instead, he had put his face on it. But only at the end of his career. He had decided to come out and announce to the newspaper Time his homosexuality: “The cliché wants the footballer to be virile, macho and the homosexual fragile and delicate – he said – My nickname, the “Hammer” proves that this is not the case. It is a topic that is not taken seriously. And then there’s the problem of sponsor: difficult to find by declaring themselves homosexuals”.
The first footballer to speak publicly about his homosexuality was Justin Fashanu, an English striker of Nigerian origins who toured almost all of Great Britain in 1990. His story, however, ended very badly. His brother Johnthe idol of Teo Teocoli a Never Say Goaldecided to cut ties with him. And even the black community sided against him, complaining of “image damage”. Justin lived alone for a few years, at the mercy of despair. He then he committed suicide in 1998, by hanging himself with a electrical cable after being investigated for abusing a boy. In 2021 Josh CavalloAustralian midfielder fromAdelaide United, he decided to come out. But after an avalanche of messages of support and Well done, things got worse. Because every game Josh is heavily insulted by fans opponents. It is a collage that gives an exhaustive answer to the initial question. Homosexuality will be taboo as long as there are stereotypes, until football is told in certain terms. THE prejudices they are still sharp. And they seem to survive the passing of the years as far as they are rooted among the players themselves, among the coaches, among the fans and among the institutions. The problem is that football is not better or worse than real society. It’s only his mirror. Now we will see what happens after the coming out of Jakub Jankto.
