Leatherhead FC manager Luke Tuffs: ‘I’m showing young people you can be gay and a success’

“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.

“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