Football's 'coming out': soccer and homophobia in England's tabloid press [Paper in themed section: Sport Media and Journalism. Zion, Lawrie; Spaaij, Ramon and Nicholson, Matthew (eds)]

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.