‘Impossible to implement?’: The effectiveness of anti-homophobia policy in English professional football

ABSTRACT

Anti-discrimination initiatives have been part of a significant change in English football over the past three decades. Influential work by organisations such as Kick It Out—particularly for issues of racism—have seen a sharp decline in overt forms of discrimination inside English football stadia. Spectator disorder in football stadia is no longer as commonplace as it was throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Despite overwhelming academic evidence indicating that homophobia in football has declined, great emphasis has also been placed by the game’s governing body, the Football Association (FA), to ensure its culture is unconditionally inclusive. In this article, we adopt institutional analysis of the FA’s most recent anti-homophobia policy, Opening Doors and Joining. We then draw on 53 semi-structured interviews with English football fans’ perceptions on the success of this policy, highlighting that while some progress has been made, there are still numerous shortcomings of the FA’s attempts to implement change on the game. The article concludes with fan recommendations to challenge issues of homophobia more effectively.

KEYWORDS:

• Football
• anti-homophobia
• Football Association
• policy
• discrimination
• policy analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Throughout this article, we predominantly refer to English football, rather than British, as each of the countries in the UK has its own national football governing body. Moreover, the vast majority of academic research focuses on English football.

2. The Football Association, typically referred to as The FA, is English football’s governing body, and is responsible for the governance of all English club football.

3. Recognising that ‘policy’ is an ambiguous concept with numerous inconsistencies in the literature, we understand it as a stated course of action which reflects the intentions and objectives of a particular organisation. In this case, it is achieved through the implementation of specific measures in the FA’s anti-homophobia document.

4. We acknowledge here that Opening Doors and Joining In is policy which addresses homophobia, biphobia and transphobia. However, despite improvements for transgender matters in football (Magrath 2017e), this paper is limited to discussing the homophobia element as it is this which typically accumulates the most media attention.

5. The notion of homosexually themed chanting is borrowed and applied from McCormack’s (2011) detailed model for understanding language related to homosexuality.

6. This referred to Football v Homophobia; Professional Game Match Officials (PGMO); Premier League; Football League (EFL); and the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA). All were consulted in the development of this initiative.

7. Elsewhere, this has been called ‘member checks/checking’ and ‘respondent validation’.

8. This figure is based on accumulative official attendances throughout the 2016–17 season. The overall EPL attendance reached 13.6m fans and the EFL reached 18.1m fans.

9. This figure includes reports of homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia, though we focus primarily on homophobia here.

10. This figure is based on 380 EPL matches and 1656 EFL matches, divided by the official number of homophobic reporting to Kick It Out (43). However, it does not take into account other competitions, such as the FA Cup, League Cup, EFL Trophy, or the EFL play-offs.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rory Magrath

Rory Magrath is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Sport, Health and Social Sciences at Southampton Solent University. His research focuses on decreasing homophobia and the changing nature of contemporary gender, with a specific focus on professional football.

Peter Stott

Peter Stott is an MA Youth Sport and Physical Education student at Southampton Solent University. His work has focused on homophobia in British sport.