I paid my brother Justin £75,000 to hide sexuality
Former England international John Fashanu has admitted that he paid his late brother Justin £75,000 not to reveal he was gay before his death in 1998.
Fashanu, who played for Norwich and Nottingham Forest in the 1980s and also had spells with Airdrie and Hearts, came out as gay before he committed suicide in May 1998 at the age of 37.
As the 20th anniversary of his death approaches, John admitted he had acted like “a monster” to Justin and now wants the Football Association to do more to support gay footballers as well as tackling racial and homophobic abuse.
“It was a lack of education,” the former Wimbledon and Aston Villa striker told ITV’S Good Morning Britain show yesterday.
“I make it very clear I was a monster to Justin then. I paid him £75,000 not to say that he was gay.
“I was looking at the situation around us and my mother had cancer and was dying, and the rest of the family couldn’t understand the situation. We didn’t know what to do, the best thing I thought to do was to keep it quiet.”
Capped by England at Under-21 level, Justin Fashanu was the first black footballer to command a £1million transfer fee when he moved from Norwich to Forest in 1981.
But his career never hit the heights thereafter. He publicly came out as gay in 1990 and he played for nearly 20 clubs before retiring from football in 1997.
There are currently no openly gay players in the Premier League. But John Fashanu says he knows of several “wellknown
JOHN FASHANU footballers” who are gay, and he wants the FA to do more to support players coming out.
“We have a number of wellknown footballers who are gay and they don’t feel comfortable with the environment,” said Fashanu, who became a television star by appearing in shows like Gladiator and I’ma Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here after his football career.
“They know their empires will be destroyed. It is supporters, administrators, not so much the players because they know who is gay and who is not gay.
“They give each other support, but it is quite gentle support.”
Fashanu said racial and homophobic abuse still existed in English football as he had experienced it at a Premier League game in London three weeks ago.
“A gentleman came up to me and said: ‘You black so-andso and your brother’s this and this’.
“I was surprised, I hadn’t been to a match for a few years and I thought to myself ‘even at this stage’.
“I quietly smiled at him and tried to make a little laugh and a joke of it, but when we say has racism and homophobia moved? Well, yes, it has. It’s moved backwards, that’s where we’re going. We need more support from the FA because it’s a lack of education.
“The FA needs to create an environment where gay footballers are comfortable to come out and say ‘I’m gay’.” Manchester United are set to appoint Collette Roche as their first-ever female chief operating officer.
Roche will leave her position as executive director of the Manchester Airports Group (MAG) to become the highest-placed female the club have ever had and only the seventh woman in an executive position at all 92 Englih league clubs.
Roche, who is also a Northern Powerhouse board member — a group chaired by former chancellor George Osborne — and adviser to the government’s Board of Trade, will oversee everything that falls between the football and corporate management side at United: in charge of facilities, Old Trafford, ticketing and running the day-to-day business of the club.
The highest-ranking management officials at United on the business side are currently executive co-chairmen Avram and Joel Glazer, executive vice chairman Ed Woodward, managing director Richard Arnold and chief financial officer Cliff Baty. The board of directors also includes: Glazer siblings Kevin, Bryan, Darcie and Edward, and independent directors Robert Leitao, Man Sawhney and John Hooks. Darcie is currently the only female director on the Manchester United board, but in a non-executive capacity and is rarely seen around Old Trafford.
It is still extremely rare for women to take up executive positions at clubs in English football. In the Premier League, Karren Brady is currently vice chairman at West Ham United, Marina Granovskaia is a director at Chelsea and Susan Whelan is Leicester City’s chief executive. In the lower leagues, Forest Green Rovers chief executive is Helen Taylor, Katrien Meire is chief executive at Sheffield Wednesday and Carolyn Radford is chief executive at Mansfield.
Roche graduated from Lancaster University with a degree in business management At MAG she has been responsible for more than 26 million passengers annually using Manchester Airport, working with 70 airlines.
“I was looking at the situation around us and my mother had cancer and was dying, and the rest of the family couldn’t understand the situation. The best thing I thought to do was to keep it quiet”