“In years gone by I think I might have struggled to get the information I wanted over to people because they probably wouldn’t have accepted me,” Luke Tuffs says. “They would have thought: ‘Why is a gay person telling me what to do on a football pitch?’ I genuinely think that would have been a thing 20, even 10 years ago. Now, certainly not.”
Tuffs is an openly gay man who is also a football manager. This is something still so uncommon in the British game that Tuffs, whose Leatherhead team are bottom of the Isthmian Premier League in England’s seventh tier, is the most prominent example. This is not a good situation and the challenges men face to be open about their sexuality in elite football remain stubbornly difficult to overcome. Fortunately for Tuffs, he is happy to take on the mantle of role model. He also has enough charisma and passion to power a set of floodlights.
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“It means a lot to me to be out there because I know it’s showing young people that you can be gay, be good at sport and still be a success,” he says. “Or in my case you can be gay, terrible at sport and still be a success. I’m very proud of the visibility I give even if I’m at the lower end of the game. Hopefully, more people higher up will soon follow in my footsteps – be that players, managers, secretaries, coaches or referees, because the more visibility there is the more we normalise something that is normal, in my opinion.”
Tuffs has spoken about suffering abuse, being spat on and receiving death threats from the stands when he was a player a decade ago. But in his time as a coach and a manager he says he has had “nothing but positive experiences”. Tuffs’s experience deserves to be amplified as football attempts to change the long-standing stigma around homosexuality within the game. But Tuffs still faces challenges, he says, in being able to be who he is as a person and who he needs to be as a coach.
A man who can’t stop cracking jokes and introduces himself as a “massive gayer in non-league football” says he uses and encourages banter in the dressing room to address the fact of his sexuality. “It’s very simple in my head,” he says. “If something comes from love and it’s from my friends and people I trust they can say what they want. I don’t care. I’ll probably say worse things myself. I wouldn’t want to put those boundaries – you can or can’t say that – because suddenly people will be walking on eggshells. You’re in the trenches together here so a bit of dark humour is actually a really good thing.”
View image in fullscreenLuke Tuffs regards this generation as ‘a lot more open and … a lot less judgmental’. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Observer
Tuffs acknowledges that what works for him might not work for others. He recalls an incident where one young player he was working with “said they couldn’t have coped with” the jokes Tuffs was the butt of. “So just because I’m OK with it doesn’t mean others are.”
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It could be that Tuffs, 35, finds himself in the middle of a changing of the guard: raised in a culture that was toxic but bringing through a generation he says are “a lot more open and … a lot less judgmental”. Some who work for change in the game say you can’t wait for it, you need to make it happen now. Tuffs is sceptical. “The people at the top are older males, predominantly white males, 50-plus years old. However much education there is, they will still harbour the views they do, even if they don’t see it. It’s how they lived over the past 30-40 years; you’re not going to change that with a couple of workshops.”
To give the impression that Tuffs is fatalistic would be wrong. This is a man who is making change, and whose career to this point has seen nothing but upward mobility. From his work as first-team coach at Hartley Wintney, to his first managerial job at Knaphill in 2019, then on to Ashford Town during the pandemic and now at Leatherhead he has taken scalps, broken records and progressed from step five to step three in the National League System. He talks at length about the project to keep Leatherhead, “a great football club, amazing supporters and wonderful people”, in the division and his hands-on approach to everything from transfers to supporter liaison.
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At the heart of it all, however, is culture: that thorny, complicated thing which requires bringing together dozens of individuals and their different histories, personalities and perspectives in pursuit of a common goal. It’s culture that Tuffs says he prioritises and that will determine whether his team succeed or fail. When he talks about it, it’s difficult not to hear echoes of his approach to his own life too.
“We’ve got so many different people all with different football experiences and they’ve all got different understanding of how to play,” Tuffs says. “They’re all bright people, there’s no right and no wrong, but you might have an experienced player who’s got [certain] habits, and a young player from the academy who’s only taught one way. They’re both right but they both think different things. It’s my job to get them on the same wavelength.”
