‘I just wanted to be who I am’: the extraordinary story of Tony Powell, the secretly gay footballer

2026-03-17 - 07:12

Former Norwich defender lived for years in an LA motel, cut ties with his family for more than three decades and is now the subject of a documentary “I hated it,” Tony Powell says on a spring afternoon in Los Angeles of his past as a secretly gay professional footballer for Bournemouth and Norwich in the 1970s. Powell is 78 and now lives in a very different world compared with when he was a husband, the father of two young daughters and Norwich’s player of the season in 1979. Powell is not a demonstrative man and, having been forced to bury his true self for decades, does not make a fuss about the pain he endured. But there is an ache in his English accent, which remains intact after 45 years in America. “I just wanted to be who I am, but at that time it was not a good idea to come out.” Continue reading...