Connor Natella is Assistant Manager of New Milton Town FC. Read Connor’s story of coming out in non-league football in his own words here:
I fell in love with football before I even knew what love was.
My earliest memory of the game was being sat as a six-year old boy in 1999, watching Bayern Munich play Manchester United in the Champions League Final. I did not know then, what effect this game would have on my life. In the dying moments of that game, I remember hearing Clive Tyldesley’s scream of “.. and Solsjkaer has won it!” and feeling completely captured by the drama of it all. Every football fan lives for moments like these, I am no exception.
I began coaching from an early age. I gained my first badge at age fourteen, and started to volunteer at a local youth group. By the age of sixteen I set up and ran an adult men’s team in a local amateur league. By seventeen I left my home town behind in search of my start in the game. I arrived in Bournemouth on my seventeenth birthday, having gained an apprenticeship in AFC Bournemouth’s Community Sports Trust. I rented a bedsit, took an evening job, and worked. I worked and worked, for a year. On the grass every day, racking up hour after hour of sessions.
I was offered a permanent role within the Trust, and began work in the esteemed academy set-up. The opportunity to learn from coaches like Shaun Brooks and Matty Holmes was a dream for me. It took dedication, work ethic and passion.
At the age of just twenty, I’d spent three years working at AFC Bournemouth and I began to come to terms with something that had plagued me for as long as I could remember; my sexuality. Nobody knew I was gay. Not my family, not my friends, certainly not my colleagues. I lived in fear of them finding out. I wondered if I would ever be able to tell anyone.
At this point I would like to point out what a difficult process ‘coming out’ is. It involves telling the people you love most in the world that you are not entirely the person that they thought you were. It involves shaking the foundations of those relationships and simply hoping they don’t break. I have had two people come out to me since. Both times I have offered the same advice. When you feel that you would be ok to be you, if everyone else in your life turned their back on you; that is when you are able to do it. Some people never get there.
I told my family and friends over the Christmas of 2013, and my work colleagues a month later. The response was mostly positive and I gained a great deal of strength and assurance from the support shown to me. Nobody in the football environment took an issue.
The confidence that coming out gave me was enough to see me set out on a new venture in non-league football. I met with Callum Brooks, who I’d met through working at AFC Bournemouth, who was the manager at New Milton Town FC, a local non-league side. The meeting went without a hitch, it was clear we shared the same ambitions and had similar ideas in terms of coaching and management. We discussed everything from players and the direction of the club to our personal goals in the game.
Eventually, Callum asked the question I’d been dreading, “are you gay?”, he asked, for the first time I felt I had nowhere to hide. I responded with a simple, “yes, I am”. I half expected him to leave, but he didn’t. He did the opposite. He asked me whether I was worried if people would react badly and when I said that I was, he told me, “it’s your battle to fight, and you have to stand up to it if it happens, but you’ll do it with myself and the club behind you.”
Fast forward to now, and we’re in the thick of a promotion race, with ten games to play we’re just five points off the promotion spots and still in with a shout of a league/cup double. The players have been nothing but supportive to me. I’ve never felt more comfortable about my sexuality than I do right now and that is largely down to the support given to me by those in the game so far.
I’ve been hugely fortunate in my experiences so far. But I haven’t eluded homophobia altogether. My father and I are no longer in contact, people I counted as friends have now distanced themselves completely, and that’s okay. I’m glad I’m at a place now where I don’t feel upset, or let down, I feel sympathy for them, as I feel we are living in a world which is evolving quicker than they can keep up with. Their narrow minded views have no place in society, let alone the game. I pity them, as it’s a fight they’ll never win.
Whenever people ask me now if I’m glad to have done things how I did, I say yes, but I shouldn’t have had to. I shouldn’t have had to have spent three years in turmoil, living fear of being ‘outed’. I shouldn’t have had to consider my future in the game because of something completely irrelevant to it. I shouldn’t have had to hide my identity for so long. It is a real issue, and it turns people away from the game all the time. If you think that there aren’t LGBT players at every level of the football pyramid, you are frankly kidding yourself.
The football landscape is changing. The game mirrors society and I feel with the examples provided by players such as Rogers, Stoney and Hitzelsperger, homosexuality is increasingly being viewed as an aspect of society and therefore, an aspect of the game. I feel we are waiting for trailblazers, both heterosexual and homosexual, people brave enough to front the stigma and challenge the discrimination which currently blights the game.
I fell in love with football before I knew what love was. Now I understand what it feels to love and be loved, and my passion for the game; that began in 1999, has never shone brighter.
Follow Connor on twitter: @CJNatella
or his his club, New Milton Town FC: @NMTFC2014
New Milton Town FC play Blackfield & Langley FC in the Semi-Final of the Russell Cotes Cup 24th February 2015