Meet the Nottingham Lions, the LGBT+ Football Club Aiming to Make the Sport a Safe Space for All

Tell us a bit about the Nottingham Lions. Why were they founded and who can get involved? 
It all started sixteen years ago with a group of friends who just wanted to have fun playing football, without having to deal with crunching challenges and getting injured for work. So they ended up forming their own club, originally called the Nottingham Ball Bois, and joined a nationwide gay league which has taken us to all corners of the UK. We now compete in European tournaments, too, which take place across multiple countries. The last one we attended was in Rome, and we're hoping to visit Berlin next year, which should be fun now we're actually able to travel properly again. 

What have been some of the club’s greatest achievements both on and off the pitch? 
In terms of football, it has to be the Rome trip, for me. That was absolutely amazing. We also had a pre-season friendly in Dublin in my second season, and that was incredible too. Off the pitch, the thing that I really love about this club is that we're always there to do charity work. We recently did a fundraiser for Notts LGBT+ Network, for example, because the Government cut their funding by 24%, and we’ve actually won a Rainbow Heritage Award for our work in the community. What all of the players do to help vulnerable people is ultimately what makes the club a place I want to be part of for a long, long time. 

It seems like you have a real range of ages and abilities in the club - is this openness to everyone a core focus of the Lions? 
Absolutely. That’s our main ethos, and it’s actually in our constitution as well - that football is for everybody. So it doesn't matter if you’ve been playing since you were a kid or if you're literally only just starting out - as long as you're completely open-minded, you have no homophobic beliefs or anything like that, then you're more than welcome to join the club. I keep saying club, but it's more of a family. It's such a tight-knit group of people where everybody gets along, so there is definitely a family feel to things.

The footballing world is sometimes spoiled by people who aren’t open-minded, with intolerance towards homosexuality continuing to plague the sport. How can things improve? 
I think the best thing we can do to iron that out is actually starting to happen now. Thankfully, there are a lot of schools that are doing education around homosexuality, which is really nice to see because I didn't have that growing up. If I did have, I might not have felt like there were issues with coming out - I could just be me. A lot of it comes back to educating children to let them know there's nothing wrong with homosexuality. You are who you are. And if you have a friend who's homosexual, they are who they are, they're not going to change just because they've come out. It's nice to see that message being delivered more often.

Blackpool player Jake Daniels recently became the country’s first actively gay footballer. How did you find the reaction to that news, and do you think it will lead to an improvement in tolerance levels? 
It was such an important moment when Jack came out, especially at such a young age. I think the reaction to it was really good. There were lots of professional footballers that showed their support on Twitter, including Harry Kane, the England captain, and my personal footballing hero, David De Gea. For these really high-profile footballers to back this seventeen-year-old from Blackpool, who's made one appearance in the first team, is great. 

I'm hoping that Jake taking that step will encourage more players to come out, but I do think that some are going to see what happens early next season. Because Jake came out when the season was over, I believe players are going to see how the reaction is from fans in stadiums. As we said earlier, there are going to be people who give abuse for no reason whatsoever, but I am hopeful that it will all be fine. And I’m also hoping that one day it’s not going to be front page news when somebody comes out - people can just be open about who they are, and everyone’s fine with it. If that does happen, then Jake will always be remembered as the trailblazer who was true to himself and paved the way for people to be themselves no matter what job they're doing, whether it’s playing professional football or working in an office.

How has the reaction been to the Lions and their work over the years? 
I’ve been at the club for over half a decade now. Since then, I haven't noticed any homophobic abuse being hurled at us, apart from on our Facebook page. Anybody can comment on that, so we've had people - mostly those who live in countries where homosexuality isn’t accepted as much - saying things like, ‘Your whole club is wrong. It's all against God. You should not be able to do this kind of thing.’ But we just brush it off and tell them to educate themselves, then come back so we can have an adult conversation. 

We haven’t really experienced any homophobia around Nottingham, at least in my time here. There may have been some when the club first formed, but at the same time it clearly didn’t get to us because, sixteen years later, we're still going strong. We've got a brilliant membership, with sixty members at the club, which I believe is the most we’ve ever had. And we're always trying to encourage more people to come along if they want a safe space to just have fun playing football.

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