“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 o…