“I’m gay and I don’t want to hide any longer.” With this forceful message, the Czech soccer player Jakub Jankto announced yesterday that he is gay. The Getafe player, on loan at Sparta Prague, immediately received a barrage of messages of support from clubs, leagues and federations around the world, but the truth is that homosexuality in men’s football is lived, most of the time , in secret. No Spanish footballer has openly declared himself gay, and Jankto is the first belonging to a La Liga club to do so. “I want to live my life in freedom, without fear, without prejudice, without violence,” he claims.
International with the Czech team 45 times, Getafe signed Jankto in 2021 paying about six million euros to Sampdoria. He played his first game as a starter at the Camp Nou against Barcelona, ??but an injury prevented him from having the desired continuity and, after participating in 14 League games and one Cup game, he was loaned this summer to Sparta Prague.
The Czech club showed its support for the footballer yesterday and explained that the player “spoke openly about his sexual orientation with the board of directors, the coach and his teammates at the club some time ago.” “Everything else refers to his personal life. No more comments. No more questions. You have our support. Live your life, Jakub. Nothing else matters,” said Sparta.
Jankto is the first player linked to the Spanish League to openly declare himself gay, but in 2021 Australian Josh Cavallo became one of the first professional footballers to publicly announce his homosexuality. At 21, the Adelaide United player also chose a video on his social networks as a channel to break the news: “I was ashamed of my situation because I thought I would never be able to do what I loved as long as I was gay. I have lived assuming that this was a subject that I could never talk about ”, lamented the footballer.
Cavallo and Jankto are not the only examples of soccer players who have spoken about their sexual orientation. In 2014, the German Thomas Hitzlsperger came out of the closet a year after retiring from the playing fields. Player of teams of the stature of West Ham, Everton, Aston Villa, Lazio and Stuttgart, his case was one of the most mediatic in recent years.
In Spain, no LaLiga Santander player has taken the step, although it is estimated that some 142 professional footballers would be gay –according to an estimate by the Socialist Party in 2021–. And beyond that, practically no League player has publicly shown their support for Jankto, one more argument for how far the men’s league is from normalizing homosexuality. Something that in women’s football is experienced much more naturally. In fact, there are many international players who have congratulated Jankto for taking a step forward: Pernile Harder, Hedvig Lindahl or the Atlético de Madrid player Merel van Dongen, among others.
Although soccer is not the only sport afflicted by homophobia. Without going any further, the Real Canoe water polo player Víctor Gutiérrez denounced in 2021 having received racist insults from a rival player, the Serbian Nemanja Ubovic, who was punished with four games in the first sanction for homophobia in professional Spanish sport. Gutiérrez came out of the closet in 2016 on the cover of Shangay, a magazine aimed at the LGTBQ community. “That went around the world,” he acknowledged in an interview in La Vanguardia. “Suddenly, many were turning to me on social networks to tell me about their experiences. I understood that I don’t help anyone if I keep quiet. At this point, it is not normal that you cannot come out of the closet, ”he denounced.
