A furore has erupted in Germany over comments by a top football agent that the national team includes a “bunch of gays”.
Michael Becker, who is the agent for the German team captain Michael Ballack, is reported to have told a journalist that he knows which members of the team are gay.
The claim was included in an article by Aleksander Osang in the news magazine Der Spiegel.
Becker reportedly claimed that a former national player was poised to disclose who the “bunch of gays” in the German team are and also described one particular player as “half gay”.
Osang says that Becker believes that the German team’s recent more elegant and less aggressive style of play, under coach Joachim Löw’, was due to the fact that so many of the players are gay.
“All sports journalists seemed to already know the alleged homosexual conspiracies enveloping Löw’s team. The rumours accompanied our team to South Africa and evidently belong to the team,” wrote Osang. The German team came third in the World Cup.
Homosexuality remains a significant taboo in professional football and has been blamed for the fact that there is currently no openly-gay player in the sport.
