Robbie Rogers, a former midfielder for the US national team who most recently played in England, retired from soccer on the same day that he came out to the world as a gay man.

He is only 25.

But he told ABC’s Nightline in an interview broadcast Tuesday (16 April) that he is considering a return to his sport – a move that would make him the first active openly gay pro soccer in history.

‘Gay athletes are athletes,’ Rogers said. ‘If I go back to soccer, I want to go back as Robbie. I just want it to be as simple as that.’

It was in February that Rogers casually told his Twitter followers about a link to a blog post he had written. It was a deeply personal and heartfelt letter announcing to the world that he is gay and how he had realized ‘I could only truly enjoy my life once I was honest.’

In the Nightline piece, Rogers is seen traveling back to visit his family in Huntington Beach, California. He had come out to the tight-knit, conservative, Catholic group via Skype before coming out to the rest of the world.

He said that while he was playing and in the closet, ‘you go to work feeling like, "I hope no one finds out that I’m gay." If that happens, you can’t play the sport that you love.’

In locker rooms as far back as high school, Rogers says he heard gay slurs ‘all the time. Everywhere.’

‘That’s what scars you,’ he says. ‘It’s just the atmosphere of sports. It’s that macho man mentality. Sports is a bit behind our society. That atmosphere, it’s hard to change.’