Football agents advise gay players not to come out publicly in the belief it will damage their financial interests, according to the sport’s first super-agent.
Jon Smith, who once had Diego Maradona and over 400 other players on his books, believes this could be the reason a gay professional player has not made their sexuality public in three decades.
“My job as an agent, our job as an agent, was to maximise my clients’ interests, his financial interests,” Smith tells a new Channel 4 documentary Football’s Coming Out. “Would an agent consider it to be a negative stance in a negotiation to admit his player was gay? Yes. Because there are not quite so many clubs in England but there are places around the world, certainly in Eastern Europe, and certainly in the Middle East, where it borders on criminal activity.
“If you happen to be a football player and an agent doing a deal it’s difficult, it really is difficult. That’s partly why most players who are gay probably haven’t made it apparent publicly.
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However, Georgie Hodge, head of women’s football at multinational agency CAA Base, claims that would be poor advice for a client and that new revenue streams would open to the first modern openly gay men’s professional.
Hodge, whose agency represent an array of professional female players, is confident other revenue streams would be created for gay players who had contracts terminated in territories hostile to homosexuality.
“I think there will be so much interest from everybody across the footballing landscape but also sport in general, creating, if that player wants, whole new revenue streams for them,” Hodge said. “If there’s a player who wants to come out and there’s an agent saying, No you can’t do it, it’s going to be terrible, you’re going to lose out on X, Y, Z, that’s just ill advice.
“It’s an opportunity to be a role model, shape the future, show people you can be gay and play football too, which has certainly been something that’s held people back from doing something they love. Speaking from the women’s game, these players know they have an obligation to inspire the next generation, they know they have a voice and they know that people are listening, and I think they really make the most of that. And that’s where I think the men’s game can really learn from it.”
Liz Callow, a senior director at Adidas, claims the sportswear giant would fully support a player who decided to come out.
“We would come together as much as they would want us to,” Callow said. “We wouldn’t create a marketing strategy about someone coming out unless that’s something they wanted to be part of their story. We want to be careful that we’d never infringe on exploiting someone’s identity and we’ve seen a lot of positive reactions to when players have come out. Of course we know there are ecosystems of digital reaction or negative reaction and we would always support a player or a team and stand in solidarity with them.”
Smith, however, questions whether it is yet the right time for an elite men’s footballer to come out. “Society is in a place where it’s tired of being lectured and rampant in its responses, some of which are sizeably hurtful and abusive and it’s possibly just not the right time,” he said. “Now that’s just me, and who am I to say if a player has a desire to make his sexuality public, let him do it. But just be prepared for the backlash.”
Football’s Coming Out will premiere on All 4 and Channel 4’s YouTube account from 25 January
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3fVMpXQ
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