Stonewall FC, where being a gay soccer player is possible

This story isn’t about soccer. Or, at least, not just about soccer. Joseph Prestwich, 32, loves playing this sport and likes doing it without worrying about anything other than defending, playing the ball… and maybe trying to score a goal.

The world isn’t the same as it was three decades ago, when — on more than one occasion — Aslie Pitter, 65, had to play amid insults and the occasional gob of spit from the stands. During his career, he endured many, many elbows on the pitch.

Joseph loves having a place where he can play in a carefree manner, just being himself. This is a world away from his teens, when he felt compelled to act differently — “perhaps more manly” — to fit in. In fact, one of the reasons Tony Cornforth, 29, has been playing for Stonewall FC — arguably the oldest LGBTQ+ sporting club in the world — for the past four years is precisely because there’s no hint of “toxic masculinity” there.

“I stopped playing football, in part, because the atmosphere of the teams I [played] with until I was 19 didn’t suit me. I’m not saying they’re all like that, but that was my experience,” Tony shrugs. He doesn’t belong to the LGBTQ+ community, but he’s one of Stonewall’s allies.

It’s Thursday night, a day for five-a-side matches on the rooftop pitches of the Powerleague Battersea sports center. The structure is located on the south bank of the River Thames, which flows through London. While Cornforth passes around the hat (now in the form of a phone) to pay the rental fee for the field, the rest of his teammates, up to 20 of them, divide up into four teams to start two simultaneous games. Several of them say they found the club by searching the internet for LGBTQ+ soccer teams in the city.

Founded in 1991, with two men’s teams in the Middlesex County Football League, two in the London Unity League (a space for “LGBTQ+ football players and allies of all abilities to play football in a friendly and inclusive atmosphere”), as well as two for women and non-binary people, Stonewall FC usually appears at the top of the search engine’s list. Each team has its own training sessions and official matches, but the club also offers more open, informal sessions, like the ones held on Thursdays.

For Joseph Prestwich, an actor and university researcher, it’s a highlight of his week. “It’s always a fun night. It’s nice to see friends and catch up. The group is very diverse in terms of professions and I love that.” Members included everyone from security guards to software engineers.

“No one really wants to talk about work here,” he continues. “We want to talk about soccer and gay things happening in London. It’s really nice to have a space where you can forget about everything else.”

The club’s interior is the safe space, the fortress. The activist work radiates outwards, from the small — “every time you speak to someone and talk them out of their absurd ideas about what an LGBTQ+ club is… some people think it’s about having sex in the showers and stupid stuff like that!” — to the more ambitious, via participation in events and awareness campaigns. Stonewall FC is helped along the way by Premier League-level sponsors: Adidas and EA Sports.

In fact, this is how it all began, back in 1991: “We just wanted to play soccer together, without thinking about being the best in the world. We just thought about playing, having fun and going for a drink at the pub. But then, almost without realizing it, the club grew,” Aslie Pitter recalls. He tells EL PAÍS that he attended the first meetings, along with a group of people who responded to an advertisement in the press.

“There was a lot of homophobia,” he remembers. “There still is, but back then, there was a lot more. We had the AIDS epidemic and gay people were blamed for everything. We were coming off many years of [Margaret] Thatcher’s governments (1979-1990), she didn’t like us much…” Still, in London, even in 1991, they managed to gather enough players to participate in a league. Because while games between friends are all well and good, true soccer fans love competition, with the referee blowing the whistle and sending off anyone who crosses the line.

“There were no gay leagues back then. The only options were heterosexual ones. And the other teams treated us terribly. They brought their families to make fun of us…” Pitter sighs. He had always played for clubs where he hid his sexual identity. In fact, for a time, he played for these clubs while also playing for Stonewall. “In 1994, I told my friends from the heterosexual club that I was going to participate with another team in a competition in New York. One of them put [the pieces] together and asked me, in front of everyone: ‘But that competition is gay, right? Are you gay?’ I replied that I was… and everything changed. I played a couple more games, but then they dropped me from the first team.”

As Pitter recounts this, it still seems to pain him. But a smile quickly appears when he recalls that they won the silver medal in that 1994 Gay Games competition in New York. His club is, in fact, one of the most successful LGBTQ+ sporting clubs in the world. They’ve won the Gay Games five times, the European Championships eight times and the International Gay and Lesbian Football Association World Cup nine times. In 2001, Stonewall FC also won the Middlesex County Championship Division Two, a popular Greater London league in which the club currently has two teams, one in the Second Division and one in the First Division.

Eric Najib is the manager of Stonewall FC. “The point is to leave stereotypes behind once and for all. Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you only like musicals and ballet; you can like sports, you can play them and, in fact, you can be very good at them. We play at a very high level,” he explains, from the stands of the London Marathon Community Track, a field at the foot of West Ham’s stadium. It’s an important match: Stonewall FC and the opposing team are both among the top five teams in the league.

While Najib speaks with EL PAÍS, the starting 11 warm up on a pitch that looks immaculate.

One of the center backs is Pablo Ortiz Rodríguez, a 29-year-old computer engineer from Madrid. He’s another one of the club’s allies. He’s lived in London for seven years and, four years ago, a friend told him about Stonewall. “I love playing for the [First Division] team, but above all, [I love] the sense of community and the atmosphere. [With Stonewall], you don’t hear the comments I’ve heard so many times [while playing with] other teams… I want to support those who weren’t able to play soccer peacefully as teenagers.”

Many at the club still harbor wounds from their adolescence, because they were made to feel strange and uncomfortable, or under attack. “From a very young age, I learned that it wasn’t safe to come out,” says Ioanna Kokkinopliti, a 34-year-old Greek woman who plays on the women’s and non-binary team. “I was always surrounded by homophobic jokes, which is common in Greece. The coaches made it clear — directly or indirectly — that homosexuality had no place there. And that experience stays with you for years; it teaches you to hide, to conceal parts of yourself, so that you can continue playing the sport you love. [That’s] really unfair.”

Things have changed. Nowadays, when there’s homophobic behavior on the field or in the stands, it’s reported and the perpetrators are punished. However, it continues to occur. “The problems are occasional, but they’re still around and they won’t go away, at least not for the time being. That’s why I think the existence of clubs like ours is still very important,” Joseph adds. First team captain Jay Catalano emphasizes this: “We must move forward, because our trans sisters and many LGBTQ+ people still face struggles and challenges every day.”

This issue is currently at the forefront of Stonewall’s agenda. Following the British Supreme Court’s decision limiting the legal definition of a woman to biological sex, the country’s Football Association (FA) has banned trans women from participating in women’s sports competitions run by the FA. “We will continue to campaign for a game where everyone belongs. Football is stronger, richer and more meaningful when it includes all of us. To our trans community: you are not alone. We see you. We will keep fighting for you. And you will always have a home at Stonewall FC,” reads a statement from the club that was published on May 1, 2025.

“My coach is a trans woman and a very dear friend, like many other Stonewall players,” Kokkinopliti declares. “She’s resilient and supportive, and her presence has been transformative for the team, creating a wonderful environment of inclusion and empowerment. This decision saddens me deeply; it’s as if it doesn’t matter how hard she’s worked and how much she loves this sport.”

This controversy has opened a new front in women’s soccer, which has traditionally been much more open than men’s soccer. Researchers Rory Magrath, a sociologist at Southampton Solent University (UK), and Joaquín Piedra, from the University of Seville (Spain), insist on differentiating between the two when we talk about hostile environments. They point out, for example, that on professional women’s teams, there are many openly LGBTQ+ players — on Spain women’s national football team, for example — while on men’s teams, cases of this are very rare and outside the top level of the game.

In Spain, Piedra explains, there are some inclusive leagues and LGBTQ+ teams, often in the form of associations that offer a wide range of sports. For instance, in 1994, Panteres Grogues was founded in Barcelona. Fan groups such as the Nenas Cadistas club have also been set up in Spain. And, in 2023, a group of fans attempted to establish a federated LGBTQ+ soccer club in Granada under the name Rinos FC. It ultimately failed, however, because the promises of support and sponsorship never materialized.

“It’s true that there are more and more safe spaces for football around the world,” Magrath notes. But he also points out that there’s been “an increase in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in some countries. And that’s quite alarming.” For all these reasons, he adds, initiatives like Stonewall FC remain necessary and serve a clear purpose. “At this club, I can be queer, sensitive and political; [I can] make friends and play [soccer] with trans people, non-binary people, with all kinds of people… and also be taken seriously as a player. That’s also why I’m here: to play good soccer,” Kokkinopliti emphasizes.

This story is about soccer… but it’s also more than that. For many people, it’s a hobby that transcends the mere enjoyment of playing a sport or watching a match; it’s a way of understanding life. And perhaps even more so in the United Kingdom, where soccer is almost one of the sources of national identity. At least, it certainly is for Alec Rawcliff, 54, who came to London this past spring from the coast to film the match between Stonewall’s first team and Camden United.

Having had to move away from London to care for his father, he no longer plays for the club, as he had been doing since 1997. “Stonewall has always been my refuge,” he says. However, he occasionally pursues another way of being involved with the team, by acting as a documentary filmmaker.

While shooting footage, he cheers on his team in the stands with the few fellow supporters of Stonewall. The loudest fans are two relatives of the home team.

The Stonewall supporters don’t give up, despite how bad things look with 10 minutes left: they’re down 2-1, with the visitors intentionally wasting time. So, when there’s an equalizer, Rawcliff cheers. And there’s even more to celebrate when Stonewall takes the lead with the game practically over. And, with the opponents already completely demoralized, there’s still time for another goal. Final score: 4-2.

Rawcliff goes wild, jumping for joy, expressing with his whole body the idea that his father used to repeat, quoting legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly: “Some people think football is a matter of life or death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition