Sometimes sliding into the DMs leads to more than just a one night stand!
During an appearance on Rylan Clarke’s BBC Radio 4 podcast How to Be a Man, openly gay footballer Jake Daniels got candid about how he met his partner in the aftermath of coming out to the public.
The Blackpool FC player came out last year when he was 17, making him the first British men’s football player to come out since Justin Fashanu in 1990. He talked openly about his sexuality for the first time in an interview with Sky News, saying that he wanted ‘people to know the real me.’
One year later, Daniels, 18, is finally opening up about how he met his partner Mark, who is 28 years his senior, just days after coming out.
In the wake of his announcement he disengaged from social media and went on vacation, but he came back to a deluge of messages from fans congratulating him.
“I came out and had my Instagram, my Twitter taken off me, so I didn’t see anything,” he recalled on the podcast. “I think when I got my Instagram back I had 20,000 message requests or something ridiculous like that. I’d never seen that in my life.”
Mark was one of the people who messaged the footballer which led to Daniels taking a peak at his Instagram.
“Obviously, I had a sneaky look on his Instagram and I was like, ‘Alright!’ Dropped a message back and said ‘Thank you so much’ – and at the end asked something like ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’ Just to try and... I knew what my motive was,” he said.
“We just got chatting from there, I think we FaceTimed that night and then met up a few days later in Blackpool and then, you know, we’ve been together ever since.”
Daniels described his partner as “‘definitely my soulmate,” and told the podcast host he “couldn’t be any more happy.”
The age gap in their relationship sparked comments from the public, with some people defending the couple and others being skeptical given that they first started talking when Daniels was 17.
Despite the criticism of his relationship Daniels is happy and the history-making footballer said he was only attracted to older men, “For me, 30 is too young,” he told The Times earlier this year. “Over 40 is better.”
We often don’t consider just how much just being who we are can have such a positive impact on the world around us.
— TheThreeHijabis (@THijabis) May 17, 2022
We send our love and solidarity to Jake Daniel’s as the first pro-footballer to come out in over 30 years.
Let that sink in. #JakeDaniels https://t.co/g6vYGYLq6N
Age gaps are less important when the younger party is out of their teens and into their mid 20s. My partner is 10 years older then I am, but we met when I was 28. A 46 year old sliding into a 17 year olds dms is just creepy as hell. #jakedaniels #agegaps
— Luigi 🍄🌈🍒 (@discobiskwit) May 19, 2023
i’m happy for jake daniels but the fact his partner is 3 times older than him is just flat out weird
— seb (@acaibcwl) May 18, 2023
I don’t necessarily disagree with the discourse on Jake Daniels’ relationship, but let’s just remember there’s a baby gay in the middle of this all who is navigating his sexuality under a microscope, with every word being amplified across social and press
— Aidan (@aidanrdick) May 19, 2023
Jake Daniels came out on Sky News in 2022 when he was 17.
Jake Daniels is 18. He was born on January 8, 2005.
