Jason Collins dominated the news when he announced that he was gay to become the first open athlete in the major American sports and now Robbie Rogers, the former US soccer team player who announced he was gay in February, could be making a comeback to professional soccer for the MLS in the United States.
According to ESPN.com, Rogers spoke to ESPN Radio in Dallas on the "Soccer Today" show and said that there is a "really good chance" that he will play this season in the MLS, saying that he has been welcomed well by the Los Angeles Galaxy while training this week with the team. Rogers said that he did not have previous plans of returning to the MLS, where he played for Columbus, and said he had time to rethink his options and that he could get back into action this season.
Rogers said that ABC and CNN had some video of him training that he was able to look at and after getting some inspiration from watching it, he felt the same competitive fire he had while he was playing. It was a pure coincidence that the news of him coming back came during the same week that Collins came out as gay. Rogers previously played for Leeds United and left the team in January after dealing with injuries, including a concussion.
In February he came out as gay with a blog post on his website and said that he would step away from soccer for a while. Rogers said on the radio that he has been speaking with Galaxy head coach Bruce Arena about coming in as a special guest during training sessions with the team, which he also did before playing for Leeds. Rogers's rights are currently held by the Chicago Fire, who obtained them after a trade from the Crew in February, but he said that he would rather not play for the Fire.
Rogers said that he would like to remain close to home and Galaxy forward Landon Donovan also threw his support for Rogers, saying that the team should try to get his rights from the Fire to bring him in for the season. The Fire allowed Rogers to train with the Galaxy, but so far has said they may want to keep the rights to Rogers. Rogers spoke about the comparisons to NBA star Jason Collins and his coming out, saying:
"To be honest, it's not a contest, and when I heard people [in soccer] kind of complain about, 'Robbie came out earlier' ... I kind of just laugh at those people," Rogers said. "What are you worried about?
"The point of all this is, we need to get over, I guess, how homophobic a lot of sports are and the sports culture. And I think things are really changing. It's great that Jason did what he did and hopefully more athletes will follow, but when people were saying Jason Collins was the first [active] athlete to come out, I didn't really care. I'm just happy for him -- even though I don't know him that well -- and I'm happy that our society gave him such a positive response, because I think that's more important."
