Patrice Evra has claimed that a number of West Ham players said that they would refuse to shower with a gay team-mate during his brief time at the club in 2018.
The former France left back, who recently opened up on his difficult upbringing, spent four months in East London and made five appearances.
Speaking to the Mid Point podcast, hosted by Gabby Logan, Evra said that a Football Association official came to the club to give a talk focused on inclusion and several players at the club were far from accepting.
"It's like you can't be gay in football [as] a player, people will go mad," he said. "I give the example, when I was playing for West Ham, someone from the English federation came and he said 'we need to accept everyone' and [the] amount of players that were like 'no, if some of my team mates are gay they have to leave now, I won't do any shower [with them]'.
"I stand up and I say 'shut up, shut up everyone, can you hear yourselves?' We were in [2018] at the time and we still don't accept everyone. In the football world they are not open minded enough and it's a shame.”
Evra, 40, previously said that he thinks there are at least two gay players in every dressing room but would not go public about their sexuality because of fears of a backlash. The former Manchester United star, who retired as a free agent a year after leaving West Ham, has also said that gay players have opened up to him privately.
He added: "I understand because even myself when the [gay] players they were coming to me I was like, be careful because if you say [it] loud you see the reaction of all the players but I will support you and because I had such a power in the dressing room I will protect [you], I will support you."
West Ham United have no knowledge of an incident taking place or of Evra flagging any comments at the time. The club was last year awarded with the Premier League's Equality Standard Advanced level accolade.
Australian player Josh Cavallo is the only openly gay player currently playing in a top flight in the world. The 22-year-old came out in October to widespread praise but two months later he was abused by supporters when playing for Adelaide United away to Melbourne Victory.
“I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t see or hear the homophobic abuse at the game last night,” Cavallo wrote on Instagram. “There are no words to tell you how disappointed I was. As a society this shows we still face these problems in 2022.
“This shouldn’t be acceptable and we need to do more to hold this [sic] people accountable. Hate never will win. I will never apologise for living my truth and most recently who I am outside of football.”
