New Research by Bolt Insight Released at Quirk's New York

The findings were unveiled by our CEO and Co-Founder Hakan Yurdakul at Quirk's New York, one of the biggest market research events on the calendar (and we’ve been to our fair few this year!) to a packed audience of insight and research professionals.

This is not just a football story. It is a research story, with implications that reach well beyond the sport.

The Honesty Gap, our latest original research whitepaper, is now available to download.

Why football? 

The FIFA World Cup is the most watched sporting event on earth. While the 2026 final stats have not yet been released, the 2022 final alone drew over 1.4 billion viewers from across the globe. Across the competition, 48 nations competed. 1,248 players took the pitch. But not one of them was openly LGBTQ+. 

At the same time, we asked football fans whether they would be comfortable if a player at their club came out and 89% said yes. We then asked whether a footballer should feel safe to come out in the modern game and 92% agreed they should. 

That gap does not make sense on the surface… which is exactly why we decided to study it. 

How we did it 

The Honesty Gap is not something you can overcome in a standard survey. When people answer a direct question about LGBTQ+ inclusion in football, they give you the considered, socially calibrated version of their view. 

That version of them does not stand in the stadium on a Saturday afternoon. It does not sit in the dressing room. It does not shape the decisions that have kept elite male football silent for over a hundred years. 

Closing the real gap required something more layered. 

We ran a multi-methodology study across the UK, US and Brazil combining three research approaches. 3,000 quantitative survey respondents gave us the stated picture. 89,500 social media mentions tracked across the World Cup period gave us the unfiltered public conversation. And 150 AI-moderated qualitative interviews with football fans, professional footballers and LGBTQ+ individuals gave us the layer that sits between them, where the most important insight usually lives. 

AI moderation was central to the design. By removing the human audience that respondents typically perform for, we created conditions where people shared things they told us they would not have said to a human interviewer. 

Our research team then connected the dots, named the patterns and built the framework that explains what is actually happening beneath the surface. 

What we found 

The data does not point to hostility. It revealed five self-reinforcing paradoxes that together explain how a 100-year silence sustains itself without anyone actively choosing it. 

92% of fans agree a footballer should feel safe to come out… yet only 15% would actively encourage him to do so now. That 77 point gap is not a contradiction in the data. It IS the data. 

89% of fans would feel comfortable if a player at their club came out, but only 28% believe other fans feel the same way. The majority is tolerant. But because nobody says it out loud, everybody assumes they are in the minority. The classic “I don’t mind, but my friend might”.  

Why this matters beyond football 

The same pattern shows up wherever stated values diverge from lived behaviour. Think about sustainability, DEI, mental health, or financial decision-making. All of these subjects can fall victim to The Honesty Gap. 

It is not a football problem. It is a research problem. Understanding how to close it has practical implications for how we can measure culture, design research and decide when to act. 

The full whitepaper, including all five paradoxes, the complete methodology and practical frameworks for brands, is available to download now. 

[DOWNLOAD THE WHITEPAPER HERE]