FC Copenhagen defender Mathias "Zanka" Joergensen, the son of a Danish mother and a Gambian father, told Reuters he had long campaigned against racism in football, and now it was time to deal with homophobia.
With overt racism having all but disappeared from the terraces there, Denmark's international soccer players are shifting focus as they dig deep into their own pockets to fund a campaign to combat homophobia in the game.
FC Copenhagen defender Mathias "Zanka" Joergensen, the son of a Danish mother and a Gambian father, told Reuters he had long campaigned against racism in football, and now it was time to deal with homophobia.
"There's so much focus on racism, but I do not understand how we can have a stadium of 25,000 people screaming homophobic or sexist slurs, and everyone just shakes their head," he said ahead of FC Copenhagen's Europa League last 32 tie against Ludogorets.
Joergensen said he helped write an article on the subject for the Danish Football Player's Association, and the idea took off from there.
"It just blew up. We had a lot of talks with the LGBT community in Copenhagen in Denmark, and we thought it was a problem," he explained.
"We had this money, we got a settlement agreement with the Danish Football Association and we thought, you know what? Why don't we players put that money in? We wanted to put that into a great cause."
Instead of the money being distributed among the internationals, the 667,000 Danish crowns ($94,380) will now be used to fund the campaign and visit schools to talk about the problem of homophobia.
"We need to get the youth, to get the kids involved in this. It's such an in-grown problem, such a cultural problem that it is not something we are going to change overnight," the 26-year-old explained.
"If we can reach the youth and teach them about these things, then that's where we can actually make a big difference and change the opinion for the future.
"It's basically going to be used for school visits, that's what we did a lot with the racism campaign."
Aside from school visits, team captains in Denmark's Superligaen will also wear rainbow-coloured armbands during the season.
Fans are being encouraged to create rainbow-themed tifos for games and there are also plans for similar displays at the upcoming international between Denmark and Germany in Copenhagen on June 6.
Joergensen, who spent two years at Dutch club PSV Eindhoven in between two stints with FC Copenhagen, says that casual homophobia is still a problem, even in the dressing room.
"It's still there and that's the thing - I think a lot of people are using these words and not actually thinking about how great an amount of society they are hurting by saying these things.
"We are excluding a lot of people from football because they don't feel accepted in football, and that's a shame. Football is supposed to be for everybody, it doesn't matter what colour or religion or race," he said.
Even if Joergensen says gay players are more than welcome at the club, it might be a while before one has the courage to come out in Denmark.
"A lot of people would welcome it, but there are those that would use it in a negative way," he said. "He would receive a lot of comments on the Internet because of who he chooses to love, and that is very wrong." ($1 = 7.0673 Danish crowns)
(This article has not been edited by DNA's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)
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