“People have been able to lean on me when they’ve had hard times and I’ve been able to lean on them,” he says.
Manager Andy Dolan with the Pride Playbook. Image: Ron Timehin & The Romans
This sense of belonging lies behind a new campaign launched by the club this month. Backed by Millwall FC and sponsor The Romans, the team has unveiled a Pride Playbook designed to help Premier League and EFL clubs establish and support affiliated LGBT+ teams of their own.
In many ways, Millwall is the last club you might expect to be leading a conversation about LGBT+ inclusion. Its reputation was forged during English football’s darkest years, when organised hooligan firms and crowd disorder made the club notorious far beyond South London. Yet Dolan believes the reality bears little resemblance to the image many people still hold of the club.
“I’ve got to say, the welcome we’ve had from everybody at the club, everybody in the Community Trust, has been universally and overwhelmingly warm,” he says. “There is obviously the historic stereotypical idea of what Millwall is. But the reality on the ground that I’ve found has been powerfully different.”
Millwall FC became the first professional club in England to formally integrate an LGBT+ team into its Community Trust structure in 2019. Today, Romans fields two teams (there’s also Millwall Pride) and has become a model its members hope others will follow.
Support, he says, has extended far beyond symbolic gestures. Romans players attend the club’s end-of-season awards alongside the men’s and women’s first teams, while former Millwall star striker Tom Bradshaw has worked directly with the side after approaching the club looking for ways to support its LGBT+ players. The result was an interview between Bradshaw and Romans player Dan Jenkins, a lifelong Millwall supporter and season ticket holder. What happened after took Dolan by surprise. “Dan used that interview and that experience to come out to his family,” he says.
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Research commissioned as part of the Pride Playbook campaign found 83% of LGBT+ football fans want clubs to launch dedicated LGBT+ teams, while 81% reported having experienced or witnessed homophobic behaviour in or around a stadium. The challenge, Dolan says, is getting clubs to see inclusion as something that lasts all year. “What’s most exciting for me isn’t whether people can replicate exactly what we’ve done here. It’s what it would look like in different environments.”
Not every club, he argues, needs two 11-a-side teams playing in a dedicated league. For some communities it might mean a five-a-side team, casual training sessions or a different model entirely. What matters is creating a space where people feel like they fit in
For now, Dolan’s focus is on helping more clubs build those spaces. Because while football may still be waiting for its first openly gay male World Cup player, he remains convinced those players already exist. “They’re not out,” he says. “But they’re there.”
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