Patrice Evra claims homophobic West Ham players wanted gay footballers to leave the club

Former France international Patrice Evra has claimed that some of his ex-West Ham United team-mates aired homophobic views about gay footballers, including the accustation that they would call for a gay player to leave the club and would refuse to share a post-match shower room with them.

No player in Premier League history has ever come out as gay while playing in the English top flight, and Evra’s account of the reaction his Irons’ colleagues gave to a visit from a Football Association diversity officer offers an insight into the animosity an LGBT player could experience.

The 40-year-old, who had previously played for clubs including Manchester United, Juventus, and AS Monaco, said that he was shocked by just how many West Ham players said they would want a gay team-mate to leave the club.

‘It’s like you can’t be a gay football player, people will go mad,’ Evra told Gabby Logan on the Mid Point podcast.

‘I give the example, when I was playing for West Ham, someone from the English federation came and he said “we need to accept everyone” and the amount of players that were like “no, if some of my team mates are gay they have to leave now. I won’t do any shower [with them]”.

‘I stand up and I say “shut up, shut up everyone, can you hear yourselves?” We still don’t accept everyone. In the football world they are not open minded enough and it’s a shame.’

A 2017 survey from the BBC and Ipsos Mori found that 34 percent of people aged 16-22 in the United Kingdom did not define as exclusively heterosexual, while an alternative study by Kantar TNS in the same year found that seven percent of British men identified as homosexual, and five percent as bisexual.

The only current top-flight player in world football to publicly