BERLIN — Thomas Hitzlsperger, a midfielder who made 52 appearances for Germany’s national team, helped Stuttgart capture the Bundesliga championship in 2007 and played for prominent teams in Germany, England and Italy, made perhaps the biggest news of his career on Wednesday by coming out as a homosexual.

Hitzlsperger, 31, said he timed his decision to the Winter Olympics in Russia, a country with much-criticized antigay laws, and in doing so became the first prominent soccer player in Germany to come out as gay. He told the weekly Die Zeit that he had summoned its reporters to discuss his homosexuality and the phenomenon in general in soccer in Germany, one of the powerhouses of the world’s most popular sport.

“I think this is a good moment for it,” said Hitzlsperger, who played for Germany at the 2006 World Cup and the 2008 European Championships. “The Olympic Games in Sochi are coming up and I think we need critical voices against the campaigns of several governments against homosexuals.”

In the long interview, a copy of which The New York Times obtained before its publication in the weekly on Thursday, Hitzlsperger said that he grew up in a large family — the youngest of seven children — in rural, conservative, Roman Catholic Bavaria, and that it was not until he was a young adult that he realized he was more attracted to men than women.