People generally like Philipp Lahm. He’s small, he industriously hares up and down the wing of Germany’s national football team. He’s a little rodenty, to be sure, but it’s a good-looking rodent. He seems so much more modest and sympathetic than his blustering and prickly predecessor, Michael Ballack. German mothers can’t get enough of him.
But now that he’s decided to marshal his thoughts into a book, it turns out that this is a man made of bitterness and ambition. He’s basically a footballing Macbeth, haunted by a mirror full of dead kings like Rudi Völler and Jürgen Klinsmann.
And he’s definitely not gay. This is another theme of his book – his lack of gayness. He is in fact so worried you might not have noticed how ungay he is, he took over the front of Germany’s biggest-selling newspaper on Monday to manfully thrust the point on us.
But, in the same article Lahm also said that gay footballers shouldn’t come out. Which, on one level, seems a little hypocritical – if you’re going to go around explaining in big red letters what kind of hole you prefer to stick your cock into, then surely you should allow others that freedom?
But more importantly Lahm’s hypocrisy also defeats his own big I’m-not-gay demonstration. If he actually were gay, then he apparently wouldn’t tell us. He’d pretend to be straight. So he probably is. Come on Lahm, I’m getting mixed signals.
