Justin Fashanu was the first black footballer to be offered a £1 million transfer fee in 1981. He was also the first professional footballer to openly admit his homosexuality. Fashanu, a talented footballer beloved by many, committed suicide in the United Kingdom on May 2, 1998 after a 17-year-old boy accused him of sexual assault in the United Kingdom.S., where he went and met a man who he said had had consensual sexual relations with him. Born on February 19, 1961, Fashanu, an English footballer of Nigerian descent who played for several clubs between 1978 and 1997, was considered gay in his early clubs, although he managed to avoid media attention. When he revealed that he was gay, he became the first professional footballer to openly admit his homosexuality. A move from Norwich City to Nottingham Forest in 1981 made him the first black footballer to receive a £1 million transfer fee. However, critics claim his post-transfer efforts were unsuccessful, despite him playing at the senior level until 1994. “After moving to the United States, he was questioned by police in 1998 when a seventeen-year-old boy accused him of sexual assault.
On April 3, 1998, he was charged and a warrant was issued for his arrest in Howard County, Maryland, but he had already left the apartment. His suicide note states that, fearing he would not receive a fair trial because of his homosexuality, he fled to England, where he committed suicide in London in May 1998. The suicide note stated that the sexual relations were consensual. “Fashanu began his career as an apprentice at Norwich City and turned professional at the end of December 1978.He made his league debut on 13 January 1979 against West Bromwich Albion and established himself in the Norwich team, scoring regularly and sometimes spectacularly. In 1980 he won the BBC Goal of the Season award for his spectacular goal against Liverpool. In total, he played 103 games for Norwich’s senior team, scoring 40 goals. He was called up by the club six times for the England U21 team, although an early call-up to the senior team ultimately never materialized. Fashanu’s confidence and goals quickly faded when Nottingham Forest manager Brian Clough discovered he was gay and frequented gay nightclubs and bars.As he struggled to adapt to Clough’s playing and lifestyle demands, he was banned from training with the team, forcing him to score just three goals in 32 league games for Forest in the 1981–82 season. In August 1982 he was loaned out to Southampton (where he scored three goals in nine games), where he established himself well and helped the Saints overcome the sudden departure of Kevin Keegan. Without the lack of funds, his transfer would have been permanent. Other teams he played for were Notts County, Brighton & Hove Albion, Los Angeles Heat, Edmonton Brickmen, Hamilton Steelers, Manchester City, West Ham United, Leyton Orient and Toronto Blizzard.
Although Fashanu claimed to have been generally well accepted by his colleagues after he publicly announced his homosexuality in the Sun newspaper in October 1990, becoming the only prominent player in English football to do so, he was nevertheless unsure aware of derogatory jokes about his sexual orientation when he did this, which made him the target of constant mob abuse. Fashanu was assistant manager to Ivan Golac in charge of Torquay in February 1992. “In March 1998, a man told police that he had been sexually assaulted by Fashanu after a night of drinking. At the time, homosexual acts were illegal in the US state of Maryland and young people claimed that they were not consensual but were committed after waking up. The attack reportedly occurred at Fashanu’s apartment in Ellicott City, Maryland, USA.On April 3, Fashanu was questioned by police but not arrested. Police later arrived at his home with an arrest warrant for second-degree sexual assault, first-degree assault and second-degree assault, but Fashanu had already fled to England. On the morning of May 3rd he was found hanging in a locked, abandoned garage he had broken into in Fairchild Place, Shoreditch, London, after visiting Chariots Roman Spa, a local gay sauna. Fashan’s remains were cremated and a small ceremony took place at the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium. Fashanu was ranked 99th on The Pink Paper magazine’s list of the top 500 lesbian and gay heroes. In 2017, Netflix released a kind of film Forbidden Games: The Justin Fashanu Story.
