Bill Edgar
speaker
46 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2012
last heard Dec 2014
Bill Edgar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The nearest example would seem to be Anton Hussain, a part-time player in the Swedish third division, whose father, Glenn, once played for Liverpool.
All in all, it's a rather sad commentary on prejudice in the sporting world.
Bill Edgar, from the UK newspaper The Times.
I am Bill Edgar.
I cover statistics in Football for the Times and I'm the author of Back of the Net, 100 Golden Goals.
We're just reaching the 20th anniversary of the last time an openly gay footballer played in the league in England.
That's the top four divisions.
Justin Fashner was the last one, and his career in England ended at Torquay United.
So I wanted to work out what the chances were that no league footballer in that time has been gay, whether openly so or not, assuming there was no reason for the proportion of gay footballers to differ from the proportion of gay people in society as a whole.
Many surveys have tried to decide what proportion of British men are gay.
Answers have ranged wildly from 1.5% to 6%, so I took the lowest figure of 1.5%.
In that 20 years, 13,600 players have appeared in the league.
Now the chance of picking 13,600 men randomly from the whole population, and none of those being gay, is one chance in 5 times 10 to the power of 90.
That's 1 in 5 with 90 noughts.
To make a slightly more understandable number, I then looked at Premier League players, of which there have been 3,200 in the past 20 years.
The chances of there being no gay footballer among those is 1 in 10 to the power of 21, which is 1 and 21 noughts.
Now, to illustrate exactly how unlikely that is, if the entire Earth's surface was covered with drawing pins edge to edge, the chance of you picking up one specific drawing pin at random would be 200 times higher than the chance of there being no gay player in the Premier League over the past 20 years.
No doubt there have been many gay players in the Premier League, but perhaps not as many as proportionately as in the country overall.
We don't really know.
Now, this situation is not confined to England.
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