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Another high-profile sportsman made the decision to come out as gay this week. Gary Andrews wonders if we’ll ever see a change in attitude to sexuality in top flight football now that other major sports have openly gay players on the field.

Amidst Monday’s news headlines about Libya, Oscar winners and Ashley Cole’s sniper practice was the calm, measured, almost blink-and-you’ll-miss-it news that England wicketkeeper Steven Davies had come out publicly as gay.

In a world where openly homosexual sportsmen and women are few and far between, the most reassuring thing about Davies announcement was that this didn’t feel like big news. It seems strange to write this in 2011, but also a sign of progress in sport in general.

Even more refreshing was the attitude of the England cricket team, who were told this just before jetting off to Australia and simply shrugged, supported their colleague, and got on with the far more important business of winning the Ashes.

Yet anyone who proclaimed Davies’ coming out to be a non-story should take a quick glance at Jacqui Oatley’s Twitter feed. The football commentator made an excellent point about sportspeople finding it difficult to come out:

“My theory: folk who don’t care whether a sportsman’s gay don’t realise how rife prejudice is elsewhere,making gay sportsmen’s life difficult.”

She also retweeted a reply from a gay semi-professional player who was too scared to come out due to the homophobia in the dressing room, before succinctly showing the problems a gay player may face by sharing one of the more ignorant replies to her musings on the subject with the world.

And while this may feel to some like a non-story in 2011, the fact is Davies joins a very small list, including Welsh rugby player Gareth Thomas and hurler Donal Og Cusack. In 2011, this is still a minuscule number. And it’s notable that football is very absent from this list.

Not that any gay player should be forced to come out, but for football it feels like a very large elephant in the room. Everybody knows there must be gay players in the game, yet the issue is rarely discussed.

Some, who have chosen to keep their sexuality hidden, probably suffer in the same way as Davies, who recounts retreating to his room on tour because he felt “out of the loop” with the dressing room banter. And cricket, while still a very manly sport, is far less macho than the stories you hear from football dressing rooms.

What’s also striking is that Davies is 24 and has the majority of his cricket career in front of him. Gareth Thomas was nearing the end of his when he came out. It is incredibly unlikely that any professional footballer at the same stage of his career as Davies would want to reveal his sexuality. Max Clifford has already claimed to have advised two Premier League footballers not to come out.

Of course, it’s impossible to mention homosexuality and homophobia without also mentioning Justin Fashanu.

The story by now is well-known. Fashanu remains the only openly gay footballer in the history of the sport, yet when he came out he was disowned by his own brother and subjected to abuse from the terraces and other footballers. He eventually committed suicide after being accused of sexual assault in America (the case was dropped due to lack of evidence).

Nearly 13 years since Fashanu’s death, attitudes may have changed in society, but homophobia is still hugely prevalent in football (think of the common chant “get up you poof” to players perceived to be feigning injury, not to mention chants directed at Sol Campbell).

Professionals in the game are so reluctant to speak out on the subject that not one Premier League footballer was prepared to lend his name to the FA’s anti-homophobia campaign.

There have been notable exceptions. Former Sheffield Wednesday captain Darren Purse is one of the very few footballers in Britain to have spoken out about homophobia in the game, although he has admitted he’d have t “think carefully before I advised a young footballer to come out.”

German goalkeeper Manuel Neuer and Bayern Munich striker Mario Gomez have also urged gay footballers to come out, saying it should “no longer be a taboo topic,” while the Justin Campaign recently held its second annual international Football v Homophobia day aimed at tackling homophobic abuse and celebrating diversity within the game.

These are small steps being taken in a game that is now in danger of lagging behind other sports and looking badly outdated and out-of-touch in comparison.

Football has made great strides in tackling racism over the last twenty years, while the reaction to Richard Keys and Andy Gray’s comments show that sexism is also no longer widely tolerated within the game.

Homophobia, however, still remains an issue the authorities seem unwilling or unable to tackle. This attitude is hardly helped by the head of FIFA Sepp Blatter openly joking that any gay football fans visiting Qatar, the venue for the 2022 World Cup and a state where homosexuality is illegal, should refrain from undertaking any sexual activity during their time in the country.

It is now over twenty years since Justin Fashanu came out. Hopefully the brave decisions of both Steven Davies and Gareth Thomas in other sports  - and the reaction they have received – will make it easier for a footballer to come out, should they want to. It would be a tragedy if we were still writing these words in another ten or twenty years time.

Tags: Gareth Thomas, Gay Footballers, Homosexuality In Sport, Justin Fashanu, Steven Davies