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[dave.woodhall]

Been asked to give this a plug by some we've helped out before...
 
"Myself and a colleague are carrying out an anonymous survey on fans' views towards gay players. This is in response to the Premier League dropping a campaign on this issue and Max Clifford claiming that 'football is steeped in homophobia'. We want to assess how fans feel about this. Our pilot data was published in The Observer on Sunday and discussed again on The Nolan show on Radio 5Live on Sunday evening. The address is: www.topfan.co.uk and the site is being managed by Staffordshire University (where I am employed).
 
Thanks."

[kipeye]

Done. Straightforward questions-only took a couple of minutes.

[Legion]

Duly completed.

[Colhint]

done

[Lizz]

Completed. Interesting survey, will the next results be published in The Observer?

[Comrade Blitz]

Completed.

[Mike Jeffries]

Done, it really is very quick and easy.  I'm really glad they are doing the survey as well.

[villajk]

Done.

[villa1]

Done also. An interesting survey.

[mattjpa]

Done. although i did used to sing upson takes it up the ar**. sorry. now i feel bad.

[Dave Cooper please]

Done.
It's a great debate as well, for my part I reckon society has moved on since Justin Fashanu and after a short period of pisstaking the first openly gay footballers would be accepted. Or at least I hope they would, it would be a big step though.
The first openly gay professional rugby player came out recently, he seems to be doing okay although I do realise that football fans are generally worse than rugby fans of course.

[villa1]

I put something along the lines of: most football fans would be accepting of it, although there will be a small minority who won't initially. It probably needs a 'big name' to come out to have any real impact. I can understand why said 'big name' wouldn't want to though.

[usav]

Completed. Interesting survey, will the next results be published in The Observer?

I would think the FT would be more appropiate.

[cdbearsfan]

Done it.

Sadly, it would take a very brave footballer to come out. More likely it will be someone near the end of the career who has boozed / gambled / just wasted all his money and is persuaded to sell his story.... a bit like Justin Fashanu.

Like Dave Cooper, I think fans would get used to it fairly quickly. Fans have evolved since the days of throwing bananas at black players, to such an extent that England fans now take a deserved pride in defending their multi-racial team / support against the attacks of countries where such attitudes are still acceptable. I hope British fans in general would, likewise, take pride in being mature enough not to abuse gay players.

God help the first Iranian / Nigerian / Jamaican to come out though.

[German James]

Also filled it out- interesting questions.

Of course everybody's sexuality should be irrelevant to anyone outside of his/her private life. Sad if football is really lagging so far behind in this.