duckman273

Well homophobia is still alive and well in a lot of places. In football there's been a lot of problems with racism as well, a player coming out as gay would just be putting a target on their back for opposition fans to attack them about. We have campaigns like "kick racism out of football" and have big name players fronting these campaigns, but we don't have these for homophobia because no footballer wants to be the face of the campaign, there would be homophobic chants about this player, regardless of his sexuality. An example of this is Sol Campbell, there was a rumour he was gay and along with racist chants fans made fun of him being gay.

To answer your other question I know of two players who have outed themselves. Anton Hysen has, but he's really not high profile, he's a part time footballer who plays in the Swedish third division. There was also Justin Fashnau, what happened to him due to his coming out isn't the most encouraging story for other gay footballers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Fashanu

To be fair we're just getting one account, the tackle may have been a bad one or the referee might not have seen it well enough.