Ex-footballer Hitzlsperger announces he is gay



A former top German soccer player - who once wore the captain’s armband for his country as well as playing for premier league clubs in the UK - has outed himself in a move he says is aimed at making it easier for other gay players to do the same.

Thomas Hitzlsperger says in an interview to be published on Thursday:
“I admit my homosexuality because I want to promote its discussion among professional athletes.”

The German FA has long pushed for closet gays to come out to take the pressure off themselves while individual players have said it would be “impossible” to perform with all the barracking they would draw from the terraces.

Hitzlsperger - a former Aston Villa, West Ham and Everton midfielder
- is the first top soccer player to out himself, albeit at the end of his career.

“The awareness of being gay was a lengthy and difficult process,” said the 31-year-old who, between 2004 and 2010, played a total of 52 games for the German national team. Hitzlsperger added that it dawned on him “only in the last few years that I want to live a better life with another man.” Homosexuality in football, he says, is still “simply ignored.”

“In England, Germany or Italy, homosexuality is not a serious topic, not in the changing rooms at least,”

He said he got irritated again and again about the contradictions which built up in the football world in dealing with homosexuality. He said professional sport is a tough competitive sport where “passion and the will to win are inextricably linked. This does not fit in with the stereotype that many people have of homosexuals, namely that ‘gays are wimps.’”