Jordan Henderson is set to become the latest high-profile veteran to join the rapidly burgeoning Saudi Arabian Professional league. The 33-year-old Liverpool and England player is reportedly close to inking a deal to join Al-Ettifaq, where he would rejoin his one-time teammate Steven Gerrard, who is coaching the club. The wages are mind boggling, even by the standards of professional football: a reported £700,000 a week, quadruple his current salary.
Hopefully, Henderson’s move would hasten the return of football to some sort of sanity
Henderson is still a top player, if not in then surely not far off his prime and he would be one the most significant catches yet in the Saudi’s global talent trawl. He’d also surely be the wokest. Henderson is an LGTBTQ ally and is believed to have been one of the most supportive members of the knee-taking, rainbow laces and one-love armbands of the England squad. A sort of virtue-signaler in chief for Gareth Southgate’s woke warriors, he was even nominated for a special ‘football ally’ honour at the British LGBT+ awards in 2021. A lavishly remunerated move to a county where homosexuality is illegal seems questionable, to say the least.
Henderson hasn’t signed yet, but he’s already come under fire for just considering the offer. Another former teammate Jamie Carragher has commented that Henderson would be opening himself up to criticism (meaning, surely, deserved criticism) by making the move. And LGBT Liverpool fan group Kop Outs has tweeted:
We are appalled and concerned that anyone might consider working for a sports washing operation for a regime where women and LGBT+ people are oppressed and that regularly tops the world death sentence table?
They may have a point. Those who live, or profit, by the progressive sword, surely deserve to be skewered by it if or when their hypocrisy manifests itself. This seems to be a particularly British phenomenon, starting with Don Revie who walked out of the England manager’s job during a World Cup qualifying campaign in 1977 for mega money in the UAE (and sold the story of the deal to a tabloid). In recent times, along with Gerrard and potentially Henderson, we have had David Beckham and Gary Neville, whose association with LGBT causes and women’s rights didn’t seem to trouble them from pocketing Qatar coin before and during the World Cup.
A defence would be that footballers, like anyone else, are entitled to maximise their earnings while they can, and playing in the Saudi league or commentating on a World Cup is not the same as endorsing every aspect of that country’s culture. And, no doubt, if Henderson does go, we’ll hear much from him about how engagement and awareness raising are more effective than ostracism and condemnation.
Neither argument is especially convincing, though. Henderson, Gerrard et al are in the super strata of ultra-high earning footballers who surely can’t need yet more noughts on their bank balances. They could just say no, as 32-year old Welsh star Aaron Ramsey, a notch or two below Henderson in the wage table, appears to have done. Ramsey is reportedly about to re-sign for his boyhood club Cardiff City in preference to a huge offer from the Saudi League. He is said to want to be closer to his family in south Wales.
It remains to be seen if Henderson will be packing his rainbow laces before getting on the flight to Riyadh, or whether he will suddenly rediscover the simple joy of being primarily a footballer who keeps his political and moral opinions to himself.
As for the fans, those who wish players would just stick to kicking a ball and leave the moral lectures and politicking to others may be hoping that Henderson does go. For them, it will serve as a useful example of how hollow the principles of progressive sportsmen and women often appear to be.
One of the good outcomes of the Qatar World Cup was that the resolve of those countries who claimed to want to take a stand on the political issues was revealed to be so feeble when it came up against the reality of sporting sanctions. Harry Kane’s unauthorised OneLove armband was swiftly removed when Fifa notified England that their captain would be sent off if he wore it. And Germany’s token protest against censorship – covering their mouths with their hands – was swiftly brought to an end in the face of criticism and potential sanctions from the sporting body.
Jordan Henderson is no doubt sincere in his beliefs and he’s said to be an unusually decent and down to earth character in the flashy, narcissistic world of the Premier League. But if he does make the move to Al-Ettifaq, it will indicate what many people already believe: that progressive gestures from highly paid footballers are largely self-serving and not grounded in any deep-rooted principle. Hopefully, it would hasten the demise of this corrosive modern phenomenon and return football to some sort of sanity.
Now, can a job be found for Gareth Southgate?
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