10 - Tackling Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia in Football: What (If Anything) Works?

Summary

Introduction

The online racist abuse of Black England players Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho after they missed penalties in the decisive shoot-out at the end of the 2020 UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) European Football Championship (Euro 2020) final against Italy (held in July 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic) brought the issue of hate crime in football to the fore. Described as ‘unforgiveable’ and ‘just not what we stand for’ by England manager Gareth Southgate (quoted in Morse, 2021), this was part of a surge of abusive online behaviour directed at England players at the time, which prompted the setting up of a specialist hate crime investigation team as part of the United Kingdom Football Policing Unit (Jackson, 2021). Overall, as it is within society more broadly, the most prominent type of hate crime in football is racist, with these incidents making up 74 per cent of hate crimes recorded by police at football matches during 2021/22 (283 out of a total of 384; Home Office, 2022a). Hate incidents relating to sexual orientation (106) made up 28 per cent of the total recorded for that season (Home Office, 2022a). While antiracism in football has been the focus of active campaigns for many years, and other contributions to this book detail some of the progress that has been made in turning once-normalized racist attitudes into stigmatized minority ones, it is only recently that serious attempts have been made to eradicate homophobia from football and to make football a more inclusive environment for LGBT+ fans. This chapter focuses on those LGBT+ campaigns and aims to identify what progress has been made in tackling homophobia, biphobia and transphobia in men’s professional football in England.

In the last decade, LGBT+ campaigns have developed a momentum of their own. Early antidiscrimination campaigns focused on race and, to a lesser extent, gender and disability. The reasons why football institutions failed to embrace LGBT+ rights have been analysed by Brackenridge et al (2007), who concluded that a lack of financial incentive (that is, ticket sales) meant that this group were not acknowledged by sports professionals, who tended to prioritize a fan base they believed could be monetized more easily.