EVERY male footballer in the country enjoys physical contact with men. You can’t play football if you don’t. You have to enjoy the uninhibited rough-and-tumble of a contact sport, the shoving, pulling, biffing and banging. If you don’t have a relish for contact with the bodies of other men, then you simply can’t play football.

You must also, if you play football at any serious level at all, have a deep liking for the company of men. You must be able to enjoy the society of men, both clothed and naked, and to relish (or at least tolerate) the conversations associated with such goings-on. If you don’t have a taste for these intimacies, then once again, you can’t play football.

Hardly surprising, then, that football remains an intensely homophobic society. We live in a society in which respected public figures (in so far as Members of Parliament can be so designated) and entertainers are stand-up-and-be-counted gays, but football remains a world almost untouched by the seismic advances in tolerance that have shaken society across the past four decades.

Rio Ferdinand, that inescapably seedy figure, reminded us all of the way of the footballing world when he called Chris Moyles, a Radio 1 DJ, a faggot live on air. Ferdinand had the wit to apologise immediately, but the word couldn’t be withdrawn.

Inevitably, there has been a lot of synthetic outrage at this. (The real problem is the practice of producing radio programmes on the principle that brains are an unnecessary affectation, but that’s just my view.) But the fact is that Ferdinand — despite his explicit denial — demonstrated football’s instinctive, soul-deep homophobia. This was made more vivid by the recent incident of Paul Scholes, who called the referee a poof during Manchester United’s match away to Benfica. Now if you held a massive inquiry every time any footballer insulted an opponent, there would be several hundred inquiries required after every single match.

Mind you, I have never received — or returned — as much abuse in an afternoon in my life as I did on the one time I played polo. But no one called me a poof. Scholes was demonstrating football’s kneejerk homophobia. Poof, faggot, shirt-lifter: these are the worst things you can call a footballer. This is despite — or as psychologists would doubtless say, because of — all that male intimacy, the liking for physical contact, the acceptance of shared nakedness, etc, etc.

Football is a male society and it actively defines itself by means of homophobia. This is mirrored by the groups of men who follow the game, tightly bonded male gangs who hug each other tight in drink and embrace when goals are scored. Here’s a little hint: if they jostle you in mid-celebration, don’t say: “Ooh, you old flirt, you and your band of saucy boys would do anything to get acquainted, wouldn’t you?” A relish of physical contact is essential to many sports and there seems to be a deep need to point out with extreme emphasis that this contact, this relish, has nothing to do with sex.

The ancient tradition in rugby union is to grapple each other in the mud all afternoon, shower all together, get into the bar, sling arms around each other’s shoulders and sing songs about monstrous sexual adventures with unlikely items of equipment. It is a strange kind of male intimacy: we’re well bonded, but it’s got nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with sex.

In football, the principle behind homophobia is much the same thing. Well — why should it have anything to do with sex? Playing football, physical contact and all, is not an erotic adventure, it’s a mock battle. Many people relish physical contact with dogs and cats, but feel no need to emphasise that this relish is not motivated by bestiality.

Nor is a conventional heterosexual nature essential in competitive sports. Ice skating and dressage — not exactly haunts of machismo, it must be said — have both been enriched by openly gay and bisexual men. The urge to win is not restricted to men with a taste for women. John Curry led the way, a skater of glorious grace and courage who won Olympic gold in 1976 after he had come out. (If you don’t think a skater needs to be brave, then you have never tried to skate.)

In women’s sports, homosexuality is commonplace and these days, scarcely worthy of remark. The great Martina Navratilova was the first big name to come out. Her father said he would rather she was a prostitute, but we move on, we move on. Amélie Mauresmo won Wimbledon this year and was greeted with nothing but admiration and affection. Her homosexuality was not considered a big deal.

Most male sports, though, are homophobic. Rumours that an athlete is gay can be destructive; Carl Lewis was hounded by such tales and was nicknamed “the Flying Faggot”. He wasn’t, isn’t gay, but he was also rightly keen to say, so what if he was?

Very few males have come out in any sports. The sole British footballer to have done so was Justin Fashanu, whose desperate, short and tragic life ended in suicide. This is not the sort of story that makes a modern footballer think, “Well, what’s to lose by coming out?”

So much so that Ashley Cole won damages from tabloid newspapers over implications that he was involved in a “gay orgy”. Clearly, to be considered gay in football is not only deemed insulting but actively defamatory.

Alan Smith, the former manager, once said: “I’ve had players over the years who were single and read books and so people said they must be gay.” Gay rumours pursue certain players and cause occasional dramatic flare-ups because being called homosexual is a gibe that always causes fury. Footballers can’t be gay and yet it is impossible, among so many men, that there are not footballers among all that number who are homosexually inclined.

“I know at least three footballers who have had same-sex encounters,” one voice claimed on the internet. “Sadly, neither is Beckham or Ljungberg.” Beckham had no problems being a gay icon — so long as he was some kind of icon, he didn’t mind. And he was a mould-breaker for football in that he was happy to be portrayed as a gentle man of domestic tastes and a nature not untouched by femininity. The result of this, of course, was that we got the world clamouring for John Terry to replace him as England captain.

Football remains one of the last bastions of the old order. The changes in society have been immense; in the 1960s, active homosexuals were committing a criminal offence. Since legalisation in the Sixties, homosexuality has become in most fields a thing accepted almost everywhere. Football remains a world in which to be thought gay is potentially ruinous. Football is homophobic and homocentric: a world of caricatured masculinity.

Which brings us to rugby league, and Ian Roberts. Roberts played for Australia. In 1994, he came out. He then played as an openly gay figure for the next six years. But they’ve always been tougher in rugby league. And braver.

The Meaning of Sport
Readers can join Simon Barnes as he discusses his brilliant new book, The Meaning of Sport, with celebrated Times writers Lynne Truss and Sir Matthew Pinsent, on October 31 at 6.30pm at the Hong Kong Theatre in Aldwych, London

Tickets available from: www.foyles.co.uk or by calling 0870 4202777