The story of Stonewall FC: The LGBT+ club that’s reshaped English football

April is here. The clocks have changed. Spring is upon us. Which, as a football fan or player, means one thing: the season’s end is nigh. For Stonewall FC, it has been another strong one.

With two games left to play, their first XI are fourth in the Middlesex County League Premier Division, which sits atop Step 7 of England’s football pyramid.

Come the full-time whistle of the final game, they will reflect. Not just because this campaign has been successful, but because it has been a landmark for their club. Stonewall FC will have completed 30 seasons since its foundation in 1991-92.

Those thirty seasons, like for any non-league club that reaches that milestone, have been a story of challenges and challenging – for trophies, for promotions, for titles.

But with Stonewall FC, there is something more. It is a club with a greater mission, a purpose. As well as for trophies, Stonewall challenges stereotypes and preconceptions, breaks down barriers and builds hope, deconstructs ignorance and replaces it with understanding.

Stonewall FC, when founded in September 1991, was the first all-LGBT+ football club in the UK. Thirty seasons later, it is the highest-ranking openly LGBT+ club in England’s football structure and the most successful LGBT+ club in history, not just in the UK, but anywhere in the world.

That is quite the title. But the road to acquiring it has been rocky.

It began in October 1990, when Mikko Kuronen put an advert in the weekly newspaper Capital Gay. The note invited readers to come for a kickabout with “like-minded men” in Regent’s Park. Interested flourished and 11 months later, they were entering a team in a league for the 1991-92 season.

The internal debate was about whether the team should be openly gay