‘Gay footballers are not out, but they’re they’re at the World Cup’

There are gay footballers playing in this year’s World Cup. Andy Dolan finds it impossible to believe otherwise. The manager of Millwall Romans, the LGBT+ team affiliated with Millwall FC, says the absence of an openly gay male player at the tournament remains one of football’s uncomfortable truths.

“The tragic part is there are more than 1,000 footballers there and not a single one is out,” he says. “It’s unfortunately a reflection of how embedded the homophobia still is in those environments.”

For Dolan, the issue is not confined to the elite game. Football has undoubtedly come a long way over the years, but homophobia has not disappeared entirely – whether heard from the stands, directed at players online or seen in protests against LGBT+ inclusion. He believes many LGBT+ players, even at grassroots level, still experience the same sense of isolation he felt as a young man.

Growing up in Manchester, football was woven into family life. Weekends revolved around trips to Maine Road with his dad and brothers. When he came out, his dad’s response was supportive, if not entirely without conditions. Dolan could do whatever made him happy, his dad told him – “just don’t support Manchester United”. But after moving to London, Dolan found himself searching for something football had once provided in abundance: community.

“I had a couple of gay mates, but I was a bit isolated,” he says. “What I really needed was a group of friends that could be a foundation for me.”

Fifteen years after joining Millwall Romans, Dolan now manages the club and credits it with providing exactly that. It is as much a support network as it is a football team. 

“People have been able to lean on me when they’ve had hard times and I’ve been able to lean on them,” he says. 

This sense of belonging lies behind a new campaign launched by the club this month. Backed by Millwall FC and sponsor The Romans, the team has unveiled a Pride Playbook designed to help Premier League and EFL clubs establish and support affiliated LGBT+ teams of their own.

In many ways, Millwall is the last club you might expect to be leading a conversation about LGBT+ inclusion. Its reputation was forged during English football’s darkest years, when organised hooligan firms and crowd disorder made the club notorious far beyond South London. Yet Dolan believes the reality bears little resemblance to the image many people still hold of the club. 

“I’ve got to say, the welcome we’ve had from everybody at the club, everybody in the Community Trust, has been universally and overwhelmingly warm,” he says. “There is obviously the historic stereotypical idea of what Millwall is. But the reality on the ground that I’ve found has been powerfully different.”

Millwall FC became the first professional club in England to formally integrate an LGBT+ team into its Community Trust structure in 2019. Today, Romans fields two teams (there’s also Millwall Pride) and has become a model its members hope others will follow.

Support, he says, has extended far beyond symbolic gestures. Romans players attend the club’s end-of-season awards alongside the men’s and women’s first teams, while former Millwall star striker Tom Bradshaw has worked directly with the side after approaching the club looking for ways to support its LGBT+ players. The result was an interview between Bradshaw and Romans player Dan Jenkins, a lifelong Millwall supporter and season ticket holder. What happened after took Dolan by surprise. “Dan used that interview and that experience to come out to his family,” he says.

Read more:

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• As progress marches on, young LGBT+ people need help to avoid being left behind
• The pop culture milestones that helped shape LGBTQ+ history

Research commissioned as part of the Pride Playbook campaign found 83% of LGBT+ football fans want clubs to launch dedicated LGBT+ teams, while 81% reported having experienced or witnessed homophobic behaviour in or around a stadium. The challenge, Dolan says, is getting clubs to see inclusion as something that lasts all year. “What’s most exciting for me isn’t whether people can replicate exactly what we’ve done here. It’s what it would look like in different environments.”

Not every club, he argues, needs two 11-a-side teams playing in a dedicated league. For some communities it might mean a five-a-side team, casual training sessions or a different model entirely. What matters is creating a space where people feel like they fit in

For now, Dolan’s focus is on helping more clubs build those spaces. Because while football may still be waiting for its first openly gay male World Cup player, he remains convinced those players already exist. “They’re not out,” he says. “But they’re there.”

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