Coming out in Australian football
Adelaide United Football Club’s young midfielder Joshua Cavallo (21) has publicly come out, through a video on Instagram.
”I’m a footballer, and I’m gay. All I want to do is play football and be treated the same. Trying to perform to the best of your ability and living this double life, it’s exhausting, it’s something I don’t want anyone to experience”
Adelaide United Football Club is an Australian club that plays in the A-League Men – the top football league in Australia and New Zealand – and Joshua Cavallo is the first Australian footballer, still active, to come out publicly as gay.
Coming out in football, especially for active players, is very rare. The first footballer to come out as gay was Justin Fashanu – as Cavallo himself recalls – in England in the 1990s.
I remember reading about Justin Fashanu becoming the first male professional footballer to come out in the 1990s and then eight years later he took his own life, which worried me. It’s OK to be gay and play football, I want to show that to all the other people who are struggling and are scared”.