EXCLUSIVE: Thomas Hitzlsperger, still the only Premier League player to be openly gay, on the battles football still has to face up to
- Former Premier League midfielder Hitzlsperger says football has battles to face
- He became the first openly gay Premier League player back in 2014
- The German has been a restauranteur in central London since March this year
There is a straight line, no pun intended, between Thomas Hitzlsperger coming out as gay in 2014 and the former Germany midfielder becoming a restauranteur in central London in March this year.
He now owns a Soho institution, L’Escargot, the oldest French restaurant in the capital, occupy-ing four storeys of a Georgian townhouse on Greek Street. Snails remain a fixture on the menu, as they have been since Frenchman Georges Gaudin opened for business in 1896 and became the first person to sell them in England.
Hitzlsperger, 41, first visited in late 2014 when invited to England to take part in that year’s Rain-bow Laces campaign; he’d been asked having come out that January.
‘I’ve always liked London but hadn’t been here before,’ he says, speaking about his new venture for the first time as we talk in the library bar at the top of the building. ‘For all sorts of reasons it was a really good evening. The atmosphere was good, the food, the service, the company. My best mate from back home was with me. There was a sense of history about the place.’
He became a regular customer, as he splits his time largely between Munich and London. He got to know the people who owned it, and as it faced the post-Covid troubles of many restaurants, was offered the chance to invest last year.
Thomas Hitzlsperger has opened up on the struggles football still faces for gay players
He now owns a Soho institution, L’Escargot, the oldest French restaurant in London
The German sat down with The Daily Mail’s Nick Harris in an exclusive interview
‘It wasn’t something I’d ever considered,’ he says. ‘But I looked at the numbers, spoke to people about the risks associated with restaurants, and decided to take this chance.’
L’Escargot was closed for refurbishment between January and May and the menu was tweaked but still includes the staple of French classics from lobster bisque and pâté en croûte ‘Maison’ to Tournedos Rossini and soufflé.
‘What mattered to me was this was London, a place I love, and the quality of what we sell,’ says Hitzlsperger, an avowed foodie. ‘I saw an opportunity in the brand, and the people who work here. But also I’m interested in what do we need to change in order to be successful in the future. I love new challenges.’
That last sentence is an understatement. In the same week he took over L’Escargot, he and some German business associates took a 20 per cent stake in Danish top-flight club Aalborg, just as the club were on their way to relegation. Hitzlsperger and his partners have already installed key management personnel and will support them with visits as required. ‘Developing talent is at the centre of what we want to do.’
Hitzlsperger also works as a pundit from time to time, is a diversity ambassador for the German FA, makes regular visits to schools to tell his story, and has increasingly become involved in campaigning.
He is also working on an autobiography, due out next year, that will give fresh insights into a career built on his fearsome left foot (hence his nickname ‘The Hammer’) and that saw him play at Aston Villa, Stuttgart (where he won a Bundesliga title), Lazio, West Ham, Wolfsburg and Everton. He was also capped 52 times.
He called time on his career at the end of the 2012-13 season at Everton, who finished sixth in the Premier League that season under David Moyes. He had offers to keep playing but quit anyway ‘because I needed something else’.
The former West Ham player remains the only openly gay player to play in the Premier League
He says: ‘When I retired, I wanted to come out publicly.’ For a long time, he had been convinced of this, and given courage by the ‘It Gets Better’ Project in the US, a website established after a raft of suicides by closeted youngsters.
‘I went on that platform and watched videos of people who said they’d had enough of not being themselves, telling their stories,’ he says. ‘I thought, “How brave!” Every video ended with the message “It Gets Better”.
‘Ending your life with suicide, because you’re gay and feel you don’t fit in, is horrible and must stop.’ He had actually planned to come out while still playing, at Wolfsburg in the 2011-12 season. Three things stopped him. First, he’d heard homophobic sentiments from some team-mates who didn’t know he was gay. Second, he feared coming out might disrupt any dressing room he was part of.
Mainly, however, it was because a friend advised him first to speak to a lawyer who also gave PR advice to many German celebrities, to hear what he should or shouldn’t disclose. ‘I walked into his office convinced I was going to come out soon. And he said don’t do it. The guy’s been looking after celebrities for many years and he had so much experience.
‘He said you will not be strong enough. That’s your private life. Nobody needs to know what goes on in your private life. Play football. Go out, to gay bars or whatever you want. But don’t give an interview saying you’re gay.
‘I was so adamant when I walked into his office that I was going to do it. And I left thinking, “OK, I’m never going to come out publicly”. He told me don’t do it, and the reasons were the pressure, the scrutiny, and the more you say the more you’re effectively inviting people into your private life.
‘I have to admit now that probably he was right. He saw I wasn’t strong enough and he gave me a good piece of advice. I didn’t like him for a while but he was probably right.’
Openly gay professional male footballers remain few and far between, approaching a decade since Hitzlsperger came out
Openly gay professional male footballers remain few and far between, approaching a decade since Hitzlsperger came out.
Jake Daniels, an 18-year-old striker with League One Blackpool is one. Josh Cavallo, 23, who plays for Adelaide United in Australia’s A-League, is another. There is also now one openly gay footballer in a ‘Big 5’ European league, Czech midfielder Jakub Jankto, of Cagliari in Serie A.
‘These are openly gay footballers that maybe a lot of people don’t know about,’ says Hitzlsperger. ‘So things are changing, even if slowly.’
All of which means that, for now, Hitzlsperger remains an important voice in matters of equality and diversity, as the most prominent openly gay male player, past or present.
He says he was ‘sad, not angry’ when Jordan Henderson moved from Liverpool to Al-Ettifaq in Saudi Arabia, where a welcome video had blanked out a rainbow armband from historic footage of the player.
‘Fair play to him, he can play wherever he wants to play,’ Hitzlsperger tweeted. ‘Curious to know though how the new brand JH will look like. The old one is dead! I did believe for a while that his support for the LGBT community would be genuine. Silly me.’
He is keen now to elaborate. He harbours zero ill-will to Henderson, a player he admires. Rather he points to Henderson writing a long and moving article in 2021, advocating for equality and saying there was no place for discrimination.
‘Before I’m a footballer, I’m a parent, a husband, a son, a brother and a friend to the people in my life,’ Henderson wrote. ‘The idea that any of them would feel excluded from playing or attending a match, simply for being and identifying as who they are, blows my mind.’
Former Villa star Hitzlsperger called time on his career at the end of the 2012-13 season
Was this in fact just PR, is what Hitzlsperger now wonders. He doesn’t think so and remains keen to hear Henderson talk about it. Might Henderson even speak in support of the LGBTQ community while in Saudi Arabia?
‘We don’t know if he has signed a contract, for example, limiting what he can say,’ Hitzlsperger says. ‘If he has … I’m not judging him, I’d just like to know his reasoning.’
Hitzlsperger came out in early 2014 via a newspaper interview, and did a full week of follow-up media. ‘It couldn’t have gone better,’ he said. ‘The level of support and acceptance was amazing.’
The German broadcaster ZDF then invited him to be a pundit at the 2014 World Cup. ‘I thought I never want to do that,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t feel comfortable being a pundit. As a player you don’t like them. And then I thought just give it a go. And I did it, and I loved it.’
He had long loved America, specifically California, and the liberal lifestyle of the San Francisco Bay area. He approached Fox Sports, who showed the Bundesliga in the US, and got a pundit’s role. And for the next two years he had a ‘dream life’ switching between California and German TV as a pundit.
His old club Stuttgart then called in 2016 and offered him a job ‘as an adviser to the board, a great position where I offered advice and had no responsibility!’ That soon changed as he took charge of the academy, and 100 staff, and then had a director of football role before two-and-a-half years as CEO, up to 2022.
It was a turbulent period, coping with Covid, and a new club president he didn’t get on with. He wrote an open letter in effect denouncing the president. ‘I thought the fans would support me, because they knew me as a player. But they didn’t! They thought the open letter was the wrong thing to do and the backlash was massive.’ Ultimately Hitzlsperger was backed by the board and offered a new five-year contract but he left anyway.
So to 2023 and new horizons, including the restaurant and Danish club, both run by competent and experienced people. Football still obviously consumes him and it would not be a surprise to see him turn his hand to another club project, somewhere, sometime.
Hitzlsperger will continue to tell his story, to accept offers from teachers to go into classrooms and support young people and challenge homophobia.
‘Often somebody will come up to me in the street and just say “Thank you” and I’ll know what they mean,’ he says. ‘Sometimes they say my story helped a relative or friend. If I have, then I’ve done something worthwhile.’
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