Jakub Jankto’s coming out video had been watched a million times on Twitter within four hours of being uploaded. On Instagram it received 100,000 likes in the same period. Every organising body, from the Premier League to Fifa, and clubs across the world issued statements of solidarity. Jankto is a Czech international footballer who has played in La Liga and Serie A and is in the peak years of his career. How much of a transformative moment could his story be for LGBTQ+ representation in men’s football?
“No doubt it will inspire people across the game,” says Jon Holmes, the founder of Sports Media LGBT+, an advocacy group building a network of LGBT+ people and allies within sport in the UK. “As we know, it has such a powerful effect on young people in particular. There will be huge fans of the Czech team or of Sparta Prague who will see him and will see themselves in him, their own stories reflected in what he has done.”
Jankto’s video is short – 44 seconds – and powerfully eloquent. “I am homosexual and I no longer want to hide myself,” he says. The message, Holmes says, is an effective piece of communication and shows that each situation in which an individual feels able to come out is the culmination of a unique story and a combination of personal circumstance.
“Everyone has got so many different components and complications to their own lives, whether it’s to do with family or to do with faith, perhaps to do with the profile they’ve already built in football,” Holmes says.
Jankto is the most prominent active men’s player to come out, by some distance. But anyone hoping before now for a domino effect has yet to have their wishes fulfilled and Jankto’s age and personal history – he was a prodigy who transferred to Udinese before he had played a minute of senior football; he has a three-year-old son from a previous relationship – could be as significant in helping change perceptions as his seniority within the game.
“[Jankto’s statement] is quite significant in the fact he’s 27 years old, he’s already built an image of himself in the mind of the public, in the mind of fans,” Holmes says. “To then break that mould and go against the image that had been created around him is a really significant thing to do. It takes an incredible character to take on that responsibility, to be that representation.”
Holmes is keen to stress however, that expecting the actions of individual players to change an entrenched culture is not helpful and unlikely to succeed. Indeed the final lines of Jankto’s message – “This is not an entertainment, the purpose of this video is to encourage others” – has been interpreted as a reference to Iker Casillas and Carles Puyol making a joke about coming out last year.
“In this space of LGBT representation in sports there are still quite a lot of firsts to be broken and he’s the guy who’s stepped forward to do that today,” Holmes says. “I think it says a lot about the state of your industry and the environments people have created if you have people who feel confident and comfortable enough to share their truth. Of course there’s so much representation in other walks of life, in the arts, culture and politics in particular. But not in men’s football.
“I don’t put the pressure on the players, I put the pressure if it needed to be there on the people who create those environments, those locker-room cultures, those other places where players congregate and discuss things. Whether or not some people are able to be themselves in the dressing-room space we don’t know, but obviously in the public space they obviously haven’t yet felt confident enough to share that.
“So yes, it should be concerning to the Premier League that no one has yet come out. But there’s lots of different aspects to this, including how those in the media talk about this topic. It can put a lot of pressure on players, so it’s not just about the authorities, it’s about everyone in the game working towards a better future.”
