Before going to social networks and revealing his gay status, Jake Daniels (17) has been thinking about Justin Fashanu, wondering if all this is worth it.
The reader will have to be reminded what became of Fashanu.
In the eighties, Fashanu was a superhero of English football. He was scoring unlikely goals for Nottingham Forest and he looked forward to a bright future. And everything was going well for him until his trainer, the clumsy Brian Clough, told him:
"Why do you keep going to that damn fagot club?"
Couldn't be more unlucky.
The question was going to put Fashanu in the spotlight: teammates mocked him, rivals mocked him, the man began a traumatic transfer process that saw him parade through thirteen locker rooms in England, the United States and Canada until that in 1990, already fed up with the systematic harassment to which he was subjected everywhere, he had decided to come out of the closet.
¿Error?
Those were other times: more than thirty years have passed.
The fact is that, far from vindicating him, his revelation would make his life hell. No one supported him, he himself lost his oremus and became cliché press fodder. Baffled, he took his own life by hanging himself from the beam of a garage outside London.
I was 37 years old.
(...)
Yesterday, Jake Daniels, just a teenager who has already signed a professional contract with Blackpool, of the English Football League Championship (second category of English football), told Sky News:
"I think this was the time to do it, to come out of the closet."
And he confessed.
“For a long time I thought I would have to hide the truth because I wanted to be, and in fact now I am, a professional footballer. I was wondering if I shouldn't wait until I retire to come out, because no other professional footballer here has done it."
"However, I knew that it meant lying for a long time and not being able to be myself or live the life I want," he added.
And that's it.
What's next?
We won't know many things. We will know what Jake Daniels denounces, what he reveals.
These are not the eighties or the nineties, but the world of football is still a space closed to minorities, an open secret:
“Of course, I am aware that there will be a reaction to this and that it will be partly homophobic, perhaps in some stadium or on social networks. I'm going to be an easy target. I look at it this way: I'm going to be playing football and they're going to be yelling, but they're the ones paying to watch me and I'm going to be living my life and making money off of it. So they can scream as much as they want."
His reflections tell us many things: Jake Daniels is still a teenager. But of course, he is not brainless.
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