Sheffield Wednesday have announced the signing of Ashley Fletcher on a season-long loan from Watford. The player has worked under Xisco Munoz before and he praised him back in 2021.
Fletcher has signed for the Owls to bolster the team’s attacking ranks. He becomes the second player to sign for the club
after Reece James and Juan Delgado penned terms at Hillsborough.
The 27-year-old was on loan with Wigan last season. He scored just two goals in 28 appearances in all competitions and he will be hoping to get his career back on track with Wednesday.
Fletcher has played under Munoz previously and clearly, that is the catalyst behind this move. During the 2021/22 campaign, Fletcher scored twice in the Carabao Cup and after a goal against Crystal Palace, Munoz praised him.
He told Watford’s official website: “I’m very happy with Flether because he has worked very hard in pre-season and also scored many goals.
“I think he’s improving every day. This is very good news for us and I’m always happy with the players. He has a very good attitude.”
Wednesday land Fletcher on loan
The Owls have moved to sign another striker and this might not be a bad deal. He will certainly provide an injection of pace to go alongside the experience of Lee Gregory and Michael Smith.
Fletcher will have to prove himself to the Wednesday faithful. He’s only scored 59 goals in 245 games as a professional player; with a large number of those coming from academy games.
Still, it’s clearly a signing that Munoz has pushed for that does bode well. The player will want to do well for the manager who has placed his faith in him and perhaps he can hit the goal trail.
Wednesday will certainly hope that Fletcher can hit the ground running. Their season gets underway a week on Friday and more new faces will be required before the big kick-off.
RAED MORE:
“I’ve heard racist abuse while at games, and I’ve also been accidentally whacked in the face by drunk fans, which were both intimidating enough to put me off attending Wednesday matches for almost a decade.”
These are the words of Chris Ledger, a lifelong Sheffield Wednesday fan and founder of Rainbow Owls, the club’s brand-new LGBTQ+ supporters group.
It’s fair to say football has not always been known for its progressive values. In the 80s and 90s, Black players were frequently subject to monkey chants in English grounds (something that still sometimes happens today), while more recently social media has offered a safe space for bigots to direct racist abuse at players while minimising the likelihood of getting banned from match-days.
With football’s traditionally macho culture, and with the lack of openly gay players in the professional game until recently (thanks to Adelaide’s Josh Cavallo and Blackpool’s Jake Daniels), the prevalence of homophobia, transphobia and other forms of anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice has arguably been even worse. A survey conducted last year found that half of all football fans felt that homophobia was a serious problem in the sport – and of course racism, homophobia and transphobia often go hand-in-hand.
“While there has been progress, you only have to look at the comments under any post when a club celebrates [LGBTQ+ initiative] Rainbow Laces for example, or posts something in support of pride month,” says Lewis Parker, a committee member at Rainbow Owls’ Sheffield United counterpart, Rainbow Blades. “There is still a lot of hatred out there.”
Ledger describes anti-LGBTQ+ abuse as a “huge problem” in world football, citing incidents ranging from “top-flight French footballers refusing to take part in anti-homophobia campaigns to UK fans being banned for chanting such abuse.”
“The likes of Josh Cavallo and Jake Daniels have made a huge difference to LGBTQ+ inclusivity and visibility in the game, but the media, in particular, still seems keener to curate the perfect coming out headline and LGBTQ+ icon than looking at the bigger picture.”
Those ‘coming out’ headlines haven’t always been to players’ benefit. In 1990, Norwich City striker Justin Fashanu became the first professional footballer in the world to come out as gay. But the dozens of other LGBTQ+ players who must surely have existed at the same time did not join him – he remained the sole example in English football until Daniels’ announcement in 2022. After a decade of crowd abuse and homophobic headlines in the tabloid press, Fashanu took his own life in 1997.
Ledger believes that rainbow armbands and pro-equality slogans are not enough to support today’s closeted players, who will have seen what happened to Fashanu. “This is the root problem,” he says. “Glib and tokenistic gestures at the expense of building a less fragile infrastructure where LGBTQ+ players, out or not, are comfortable being their authentic and proud selves.”
While footballing bodies like FIFA are happy to pay occasional lip service to equality, their decision to host the last men’s World Cup in the notoriously homophobic and transphobic Gulf state of Qatar felt like a slap in the face for LGBTQ+ supporters. “Heads of certain large footballing organisations will preach equality and acceptance right up until someone writes a cheque big enough to convince them to look the other way,” points out Parker. “This is still an institutional problem, not just on fans.”
Transphobia is sharply on the rise, not just in football stadiums, but in the UK in general. It is now commonplace for very senior politicians to openly make jokes about the existence of trans people in a way that would have felt less acceptable ten years ago, when the Tories were still trying to shed their ‘nasty party’ image and when Labour were actively trying to further LGBTQ+ rights. While progress on gay rights has come to a standstill, queer activists fear that when it comes to trans rights, the UK is going backwards.
“Attitudes to the LGBTQ+ community in football will mirror those of society at large – football fans don’t exist in a vacuum,” says Parker. “While in broader society most people are loving and supportive of the LGBTQ+ community, there are still often noisy pockets who continue to spread hate, particularly towards trans people in the UK at the moment.”
But amid the gloom, some hope. Over the past ten years, dozens of LGBTQ+ supporters groups similar to those in Sheffield have formed at clubs across the UK – both in the Premier League and throughout the football pyramid. Arsenal’s Gay Gooners (the players themselves are the Gunners, their supporters are the Gooners) were the first in 2013, and are now the largest in England. The club’s website proudly states that the group has over a thousand members, both in the UK and around the world.
Set up in March 2020, Rainbow Blades are now one of the more established groups, and boast over 650 members from among the wider United community. The acrimony that usually accompanies intra-club rivalries is refreshingly absent in the queer football fan community – Ledger says the support and mentorship he received from Rainbow Blades was crucial when setting up Rainbow Owls, and he wanted the group’s name to reflect this.
“There aren’t many gay bars in Sheffield or fortnightly social groups, so it’s difficult for LGBTQ+ people in our city to meet new people and build a support network,” he says when asked why he wanted to form the group. “Football is an accessible way of bringing people together when it can be such a universal pastime that so many people enjoy.”
Ledger describes the response from Wednesday as “excellent”, while Parker says United have been “incredibly supportive”. Despite only forming last month, Rainbow Owls have already been promised at least one full-page feature in an upcoming match programme, and have welcomed Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware and openly gay local MP Clive Betts – both staunch Wednesdayites – as ambassadors.
Meanwhile, over at Bramall Lane, the more established Rainbow Blades have been invited to speak to fans from the pitch at half-time, and have had their videos played on the stadium’s big screen. “Even what might seem like a small thing, having a ‘Rainbow Range’ in the club shop with the progress pride flag on a lot of the merchandise, shows visual allyship inside the ground, creating an inclusive experience for LGBTQ+ fans on matchday,” says Parker.
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