I'm not sure how many thousands of Scottish professional footballers there have been over the years...at least 5000-plus? What is known, though, is that not one has been openly gay.

The statistics just don't add up. British society, we are told, is roughly 2% gay. Yet in football there remains only whispers, "dark rumours" and all the rest of the disparaging talk around this subject.

Football, just as it does with so many other liberal subjects, remains in a bad place when it comes to same-sex relationships.

These days politicians, musicians, authors and singers can be openly gay with, I wouldn't say next to no hostility, but certainly with far more ease and acceptability than before.

But not in football. This last bastion of the hard man in British society, here in 2013, remains a fraught place for a gay man to "come out".

Campaign groups like Stonewall and the Gay Football Supporters Network attest to it. They say that, for one thing, too many of the dolts in the stands might have a field day in abusing such players.

In British football today, we have not a single, openly gay player. In some ways it is a tragic statistic, given that we must have gays playing professional football, but it is perfectly understandable.

For this reason, this week Stonewall has launched its Right Behind Gay Footballers campaign. Their choice of slogan, I have to admit, seems a tad eccentric to me, but Stonewall still hope that as many footballers as possible across Britain will wear rainbow-coloured laces this weekend in support of the campaign.

In this context, I can only relate my sorrowful experience of covering Scottish football for 25 years, and the way this subject was addressed. It hasn't been pretty.

Things are certainly changing, but there has been a general trend among the media, fans, players and managers to be either abusive or mean-spirited or even downright cruel about homosexuality. It is a subject that has sat very uncomfortably with the football mainstream.

In my own time I'd heard suggestions of gay footballers at one club or another, but nothing was ever confirmed, and for good reason. Who would have wanted the abuse? Thus, you were left in a twilight world of "rumours" and "whispers", as if this was some nasty disease we were talking about.

What football in Britain could do with is a Gareth Thomas figure. It would liberate the game in so many ways.

Thomas, a giant of rugby union, the third most capped player in Wales' history, finally came out as gay in 2009 after years of personal misery.

He has been at pains ever since to point out that he doesn't actually want to be a poster-boy for "a gay man", and merely wants to get on with his life, but his openness four years ago lifted quite a weight off the gay community in sport.

In football, it has been claimed that Clarke Carlisle, the chair of the PFA in England, knows of gay players among his members, all of them wishing to remain anonymous due to the outdated values still prevalent across the sport.

If this is true - and there surely has to be gay footballers currently playing in Britain - it is quite a condemnation of the game.

Jim Duffy, a Scottish football manager, believes that attitudes are changing, and that an openly gay man in a football dressing-room today would receive the overwhelming support of his team-mates, and would not be subject to taunts. Andy Walker, the former Celtic player, has also said as much.

I hope they are right. More and more I might agree with Duffy and Walker, given the merciful trends in most areas of society to be more liberal and tolerant. But such acceptance has been sorely lacking.

In Scottish football, the player who finally comes out and admits to his homosexuality is going to have to be pretty brave. I look forward to that day. But I'm not holding my breath.