London, England (CNN) -- An interview with a Swedish footballer playing in his home country's fourth tier usually only engages the interest of the most parochial of soccer fans, but when Anton Hysen agreed to speak to a local magazine last month, it unexpectedly created headlines from Brazil to China.
The 20-year old midfielder -- a former under-17 Swedish international now playing for Utsiktens BK of Gothenburg, a team that rarely attracts crowds of more than a few hundred -- made history as well as headlines.
I am a footballer and [I am] gay. If I perform as a footballer, then I do not think it matters if I like girls or boys, he told Swedish football magazine Offside.
In a heartbeat Hysen became the world's only current professional footballer to go public on being gay, breaking the game's last taboo.
Homosexuality in professional sport remains a controversial issue. But as attitudes have changed, sportsmen and women like Martina Navratilova, arguably the greatest women's tennis player of all time, to basketball's John Amaechi, have publicly announced their sexuality despite the pressure from both the locker room and the prejudice of fans.
Yet whilst tennis, basketball, cricket and even rugby union have acknowledged the presence of gay players, football has been oddly, and stubbornly, resistant.
Even in the past six months, for every Mario Gomez or Manuel Neur -- two German internationals who have urged gay players to go public -- there's a Vlatko Markovic, the head of the Croatian Football Federation, who told Croat newspaper Vercernji List that: While I'm president of the Croatian Football Federation, there will be no homosexuals playing in the national team ... thankfully only normal people play football.
And FIFA president Sepp Blatter was caught out too when he joked that gay supporters should refrain from having sex at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Homosexuality is illegal in the emirate.
