The only people I ' ve ever seen use this Emoji unironically have been SJWs that were laughing at and dismissing white people trying to do something . Usually about arguing for equal treatment . That and those fucking handclap emoji . <| sep |> And with gay footballers , all else is pretty much even , they won ' t become more marketable , they won ' t get paid more , and all it will cause is problems . They may even become less marketable , no one is going to use a gay footballer to advertise in the middle east . The original question posed was why come out when you know you ' re going to get abuse ? and my answer is it may not help their career but it could possibly help their personal life tremendously . A hypothetically very minor amount of abuse would be a small price to pay for most people to be free and open about an important aspect of their life . As for less marketable , I actually think that ' s debatable . Yes in some areas of the world but in the UK they would get serious publicity for being the first openly gay Premier League player . And they ' d get all the things that would go along with that magazines , newspapers , they ' d probably publish a book , sponsors would want to be seen as proLGBT .