Sport's ugliest taboo is about to be tackled in a most unlikely setting - a trashy TV drama. But can Footballers' Wives really challenge homophobia?

Footballers' Wives, with its menagerie of pretty monsters who hang out in the players' lounge at premiership club, Earls Park, returns in triumph to our screens for a third series tomorrow. Its first two outings were hailed as many things - the new Dallas, a guilty pleasure and even a tabloid editor's wet dream. Hermaphrodite babies, inflammable topless models, child kidnapping, attempted murder, attempted necrophilia (well, almost) and end-to-end sex with an ever-changing starting line-up left little time for showing neat footwork and golden boots on the pitch. But up to now no one has ever accused Footballers' Wives of campaigning.

In series three, however, the programme tackles the beautiful game's greatest - and many say most shameful - taboo. With team captain Jason Turner doing a flamboyant back flip off a stately home roof at the end of the last series, the writers have signed up Conrad Gates as his replacement. As a tribute to Jason's memory, Conrad will be seen shagging his way through a stand-full of female football groupies - including the grieving widow, that blonde Fury, Tanya. But he will also be seen getting off with one of his own team-mates.

"Football today is pretty much like politics was 10 years ago," says 29-year-old classical actor, Ben Price, who plays Gates, "a funny little world where no one is gay. Statistically it can't be true, of course. There should be at least one gay player in every team. But that is the image it projects and even revels in." The one and only footballer who came out publicly, the former Nottingham Forest, Norwich and England Under-21 striker, Justin Fashanu, was verbally abused by his manager, the celebrated Brian Clough, as a "bloody poof" and shunned by all (including his footballer-turned-TV-presenter brother, John). He ended up hanging himself in a garage in Shoreditch in May 1998.

To understand quite what Footballers' Wives is lifting the lid on, you have only to think back to 1999 when Liverpool's Jack-the-lad striker, Robbie Fowler made an obscene gesture with his hands and buttocks on the pitch at Chelsea and England defender, Graeme Le Saux. The image was on every back - and front - page. Le Saux planted an elbow on the back of Fowler's head and was sent off while Fowler's reputation in some quarters was enhanced.

Later Le Saux revealed that his professional career had been dogged by endless taunts of "faggot" from crowds as well as fellow footballers. Le Saux has a wife and family, but the view of him on the terraces and in the dressing room was apparently based on the fact he had two "A-levels, went away on a camping holiday as a teenager with a male friend, collected antiques and read The Guardian. In any other walk of life, it is a list that might make put him near the top of a list of eligible males, but in soccer, straying from the stereotype of the inarticulate, would-be rock star with a fuck-off car and a silly haircut is apparently to invite speculation on your sexuality.

"While we were filming Footballers' Wives," recalls Price, "I spent some time with ex-professional players who were doubling up for us when there were scenes to be shot on the pitch. And when they heard about what Conrad gets up to, several of them asked me if I wasn't worried that people might think I was gay. That is the level of paranoia within football - that they worried that for an actor to play a bisexual footballer might make people 'suspect' you."

It is impossible to find any current player who will break the wall of silence that surrounds the issue. No doubt they fear getting the same treatment as Graeme Le Saux. One retired player who has broken the taboo, however, is the former Ireland international, Tony Cascarino, who was mercilessly pilloried at the start of his professional career because he had once been a hairdresser. "Football is a macho world," he has said, "crowded with male stereotypes and dripping with beautiful women. In that environment, it would be daunting for anyone to say they were different, that they were gay, especially when it had been assumed that they were heterosexual. I find it inconceivable that any player can come out during his career because he will simply not be accepted in the dressing room."

Even if he did pluck up the courage to face down his team-mates, then there are the agents, managers and sponsors to confront. Clough's treatment of Justin Fashanu hardly augers well, while, with so much money riding on sponsorship deals, few agents are going to advise their clients to risk damaging their bank balance to make their point about what is, after all, an entirely private matter.

The example of the tennis player Martina Navratilova, though, might give such agents cause to reconsider. Despite predictions to the contrary, when she came out, her appeal to sponsors, after a brief blip, was undiminished as long as she was winning on court. Tennis, arguably, is a more middle-class sport and hence more accepting than soccer, though the recent upsurge in interest generated by the Premiership has moved the game away from its working-class origins.

Some football fans, of course, weave elaborate theories about why their game in particular doesn't appeal to homosexuals. Most are based on a notion of gay men that owes much to John Inman and Larry Grayson. Moreover, these bar room philosophers are clearly oblivious to the existence since 1989 of a thriving Gay Football Supporters' Network that has also spawned its own amateur league made up of all-gay teams. Members of the network keep up a lively and passionate debate on its web site about the relative merits of their favoured premiership teams - Manchester United is the most popular - but they do also indulge in more personal assessments. Currently topping its "Lust List" is Southampton and England striker, James Beattie, closely followed (of course) by David Beckham, and then Arsenal's Thierry Henry.

In a sport that makes pin-ups of its heroes, and where on and off-pitch camaraderie involves the sort of physical contact in post-goal celebrations and post-match communal baths that in any other circumstances would make men uneasy, there is certainly potential for homoeroticism in football. Indeed, a few commentators - including the broadcaster David Aaronovitch - have put forward the theory, following allegations last October of premiership footballers taking turns to rape or "roast" a 17-year-old girl in a smart London hotel, that what they really wanted to do was have sex each other. "Men sharing a girl is, if you think about it," Aaronovitch wrote, "as gay as kissing on the lips after a goal; it is a way to have sex with your comrades without actually touching them."

Some, however, see definite signs of change in what is the last bastion of a prejudice that has elsewhere been banished. Chris Worth is chairman of non-league club Stonewall FC, set up in 1992 as a place where you could both play football and be openly gay. He feels that in the past 12 years the deep-seated homophobia in football has begun to ease. "When we started out there were lots of jokes about us being Queens of the South and on the pitch other teams we played were often very hostile. Today we find that our opponents [Stonewall play in the Middlesex County League] either don't know or don't care that we're gay. Indeed, we've now got a couple of straight players on our team. There's still abuse during games, but we take it as a compliment. We're outplaying them and their only answer is to call us poofs."

Yet the very existence of designated all- or mainly gay teams, and of a gay league, suggests there is a great deal further to go. "It is a great pity," says Ben Summerskill, of the campaigning organisation Stonewall (no relation), "that there has to be such separatism. It exists not because gay men want to treat football as a place to meet other gay men. That's hardly difficult any more. It is because they feel unwelcome in most ordinary clubs. Since football in this country is a kind of cultural glue and has a major role in shaping attitudes, it is deeply damaging that a section of the population is seen to be treated like this."

The example of how prejudices against the first black footballers - who were once showered by crowds with banana skins - have now abated is held up by some as a hopeful one. And in the upper echelons of soccer a handful of top players have taken their own stand. Beckham, in particular, has given interviews to the gay men's magazine, Attitude, and responds to homophobic taunts from the terraces by blowing kisses at his accusers. The Football Association, too, has launched several public initiatives. "One of the key areas we are working at," says the head of its Football for All scheme, Lucy Faulkner, "is to raise awareness of issues like homophobia through our interactive workshops."

Footballers' Wives, then, it seems, may be pushing at an open door. Indeed, it is doing the FA's work for it is raising awareness on a larger scale. But quite why they are doing it is another matter. There is a certain playfulness about the scriptwriters' creation of the character of the bisexual Conrad Gates. He is also the England captain and the connection with Beckham is reinforced by the haircut Ben Price sports. But then the characters, Kyle and Chardonnay, have already been set up in the audience's mind as the "Posh and Becks" of the series, with their over-the-top home, devotion and lavish, high kitsch wedding.

The idea then seems to be less about being specific and more about playing on an assumption already out there that there are gay footballers in the closet. For all football's overt homophobia, no soccer conversation in the pub after the match, after all, is complete without the rehearsal of tales involving the girlfriend of a friend who once slept with a bloke who'd also been to bed with such and such a player. The combination of sex, gossip and secrecy makes for a classic Footballers' Wives sensational plot line. Yet, unlike TV dramas such as Queer as Folk, which confronted homophobia head-on by showing two men making love, Footballers' Wives, for all its action replays of the sex romps of its heterosexual leading men, is coy about Gates's affair with his team-mate. All you see is a kiss.

Treading carefully - this is going out on ITV not Channel 4, after all - playing with an issue for shock value to pull in audiences (like Brookside with incest), or making a contribution to an important social debate? Perhaps the answer lies in looking at Gates's other character attributes. Overall the impression the scriptwriters are striving to convey is that he is utterly immoral. In which context, his bisexuality in a world where such things are taboo is less of a private agony and more of a damning piece of evidence of his lack of any restraint. So there is pioneering but only up to a point. As with all things to do with Footballers' Wives, the trick is not to take it too seriously.

The new series of 'Footballers' Wives' starts tomorrow on ITV at 9pm