By Bolt Insight, September 2026
Bolt Insight has published original research tackling one of the most fundamental challenges facing the insights industry, the disconnect between stated opinion and real-world behaviour.
The findings were presented by Hakan Yurdakul, CEO and Co-Founder of Bolt Insight, at Quirk’s New York, one of the most prominent events on the market research calendar, to a full room of insights and research professionals.
The whitepaper, titled The Honesty Gap, is available to download now.
Why football was the lens
The FIFA World Cup is the most watched sporting competition on the planet. The 2022 final alone attracted over 1.4 billion viewers worldwide. Across the tournament, 48 nations competed and 1,248 players took to the pitch. Not one of them was openly LGBTQ+.
Yet when Bolt Insight asked football fans whether they would be comfortable if a player at their club came out, 89% said yes. Asked whether a footballer should feel safe to come out in the modern game, 92% agreed.
A 92% approval rating. A 100-year silence. That contradiction is precisely what the research set out to explain.
How the Honesty Gap study was designed
Uncovering the real gap required a methodology built for it. Standard surveys surface the socially calibrated version of a person’s opinion. The considered, careful answer. That version does not show up in stadium crowds, dressing rooms or the cultural dynamics that have shaped elite male football for generations.
Bolt Insight ran a multi-methodology study across the UK, US and Brazil, combining three distinct approaches. 3,000 quantitative survey respondents provided the stated picture. 89,500 social media mentions tracked across the World Cup period captured the unfiltered public conversation. And 150 AI-moderated qualitative interviews with football fans, professional footballers and LGBTQ+ individuals provided the critical layer in between, where the most revealing insight typically lives.
AI moderation was built into the study by design. By removing the human interviewer from the equation, respondents shared perspectives they told us they would not have disclosed in a traditional research setting.
What the data revealed
The findings do not point to widespread hostility. Instead, they expose five self-reinforcing paradoxes that together explain how a century of silence sustains itself without anyone actively choosing it.
92% of fans believe a footballer should feel safe to come out. Yet only 15% would actively encourage him to do so today. That 77-point gap is not a flaw in the data. It is the finding.
89% of fans would be 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 that tolerance goes unspoken, almost everyone assumes they are the outlier. The classic dynamic of “I don’t mind, but everyone else might.”
Why this reaches well beyond sport
The Honesty Gap is not a football problem. The same pattern emerges wherever stated values diverge from actual behaviour in sustainability, DEI, mental health and financial decision-making. The implications for how organisations measure culture, design research and decide when to act are significant.
The full whitepaper, including all five paradoxes, the complete methodology and practical frameworks for brands and research teams, is available to download now.
