Football's ‘Coming Out’: Soccer and Homophobia in England's Tabloid Press

Abstract

This article examines the current contradictory discourses on homosexuality and soccer within the British (specifically English) newspaper media. While support ostensibly is given in the press to the eradication of homophobia in relation to soccer, the continuing promotion of traditional masculine football stereotypes, such as the ‘hard man’, imagines an ongoing heterosexual normativity. Furthermore, the media fascination with professional soccer players ‘coming out’, although expressed in supportive terms, may be decoded as an attempt to publicly reveal the deviant other. Such ambivalent representation is even evident in coverage of the Kick It Out anti-homophobia campaign. News releases from the campaign have been reinterpreted within media representation to fuel a perceived public interest in wanting to know which Premier League soccer players are gay. Accordingly, by employing a psychoanalytic and post-structuralist perspective on the instability of discursive constructions of heteronormative masculinity, the article considers soccer and its related media as a site of hegemonic contestation in which the dominant discourse of male heterosexuality is at once undergoing challenge and reinforcement.

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Winning and losing: the dynamics of pride and shame in the narratives of men who play competitive country football

“…Sociologists understood football masculinity within an institution-media-football complex that exploits players for profit. The most profitable expression of masculinity was always understood as (hetero)sexual, fit and heroic (Atherley, 2006;Bale, 2003;Beynon, 2002;Brown, 1998;Hughson & Free, 2011;Jones & McCarthy, 2010;Magee, Caudwell, Liston, & Scraton, 2007). In sum, the institution-media-football complex had power over the gendered life of players.…”

Racism and homophobia in English football: The equality act, positive action and the limits of law

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