EPL TALK: Jordan Henderson deserves no sympathy for his Saudi backtrack, but he’s done football a favour

THOSE Liverpool lads were right. Money can’t buy love, not the kind needed for a European Super League, or VAR technology, or an endorsement to play in a country where homosexuality remains punishable by death. The Beatles also sang about a Nowhere Man, proving yet again that the musical soothsayers really did write a song for everything.

Jordan Henderson is our Nowhere Man, our current whipping boy for a place where gay men can still be whipped. It turns out, the England midfielder couldn’t change the world with a pair of rainbow laces. Nor could he fulfil his noble ambition to learn the truth about Saudi Arabia’s LGBTQ+ rights. (There aren’t any. There you go. Done. He could’ve saved himself six months of family anguish and public vitriol.)

Instead, he’s plucked up the Dutch courage to head to Ajax, a football club that isn’t going to airbrush away the rainbow-coloured armband in old photos from the Henderson scrapbook. Ajax don’t play in a largely empty stadium and aren’t managed by a member of the Golden Generation of English football stumbling towards yet another early exit from the dugout (so it’s all upside really.)

Of course, Henderson will be expected to get by on a paltry £85,000 a week at Ajax, as opposed to the £350,000 a week he supposedly earned at Al-Ettifaq (and now faces a hefty tax bill, apparently.) Oh, the horror.

Henderson was reportedly unhappy. He was unhappy with an average home gate of 7,854 in a 35,000-capacity stadium. He was unhappy with the heat. He was unhappy with Al-Ettifaq’s inability to win any of their last nine games, a team managed by Steven Gerrard, remember. Has he not heard of Google? He needed six months to learn that the Saudi Pro League is a façade, a prop with less substance than the shopfronts in those old black-and-white movies?

The Saudi Pro League is a sportswashing exercise, of sorts, but more cynically, it’s part of an autocratic regime’s grand project to move away from oil-dependent investments and towards something more sustainable and palatable for a human civilisation slowly boiling itself to oblivion.

And while we collectively play the frog in the boiling water fable, Henderson plays the scapegoat, which seems unfair at a superficial level. He wasn’t the first to take the petrodollars. And everyone from Bobby Moore and George Best in North America to Didier Drogba and Carlos Tevez in China spent their autumnal years in a nascent league to top up their pension funds. So what was our problem with Henderson?

It was Henderson. He was our problem. He was our Luke Skywalker during the COVID-19 lockdowns, only to inexplicably morph into Darth Vader as soon the pandemic ended. The character shift was too extreme, too unexpected, almost impossible to swallow on the silver screen, let alone in reality. The best man in the worst of times somehow made a mockery of a great man’s work. His own.

A top person who spoke up for disadvantaged communities

In May 2023, Henderson and comedy legend Michael Palin were invited to celebrate the British National Health Service’s 75th anniversary at a new exhibition called “Love and Charity: A History of Giving in the NHS”. Even the name seems cringy now. But that was the kind of company Henderson was keeping just over a year ago, hanging out with national treasure Palin and well on the way to becoming one himself.

In 2020, he orchestrated the "Players Together" initiative that encouraged professional footballers to donate to the NHS during the coronavirus outbreak. He raised a fortune for the medical industry. He was a humbling hero. The real deal.

He was never going to take the Saudi cash, was he? He was a proud and impressive advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community. He spoke up for equality for all. His rainbow laces and armbands were not empty, performative gestures. He meant them. The Saudi Pro League could never be a final destination for a 33-year-old footballer, a human rights activist and an all-round top bloke.

Until it was.

And then he took on the most thankless role of his career. He burst the bubble. He stripped away the PR bulls**t about taking the game to new territories and bringing diverse football communities together and pulled back the curtain. There was nothing there beyond sacks of cash. His contract signature suggested it. His premature departure confirmed it. The Saudi Pro League exists purely to enhance the geopolitical reputation of a transitioning country by throwing millions at greedy footballers with no questions asked. Just keep quiet, lads, and update those Instagram accounts.

In the end, Henderson could no longer be a part of that ignoble quest, which won’t spare him the smug commentaries raging on about the hypocrisy, the irony and the karma and so on. He knows that. He can only quietly rebuild his reputation at Ajax, a dignified workplace for a footballer who had previously forged an astonishing career with quiet dignity.

And in time, we’ll calm down a bit and look for positive straws to clutch. The first and most invigorating is the football community’s lower threshold for bulls**t. The people came out against the European Super League and the project collapsed. They continue to come out against VAR and it’ll be tweaked at some point. And they also came for Henderson. The booing he received from England supporters hit hard. He called Wembley’s reaction “hurtful”.

But it was fair. This isn’t a call for mob justice, but an acknowledgement that the game’s diverse voices matter. They all deserve to be heard. Henderson’s hypocrisy was hurtful, too, for many fans and they told him so. In the end, he listened. That’s the straw to clutch.

The other concerns the Saudi Pro League itself. The colossal piggy bank has just suffered its first high-profile defection and Henderson will not be the last. Karim Benzema is not overly enthused with life at Al-Ittihad either. It may no longer be one-way traffic to Saudi.

Henderson made a mistake, but his departure may yet make amends. His shortened stay hints at a gloomy, oppressive reality. Take away the obscene sums of money and there’s little else to play for in Saudi Arabia. It’s reassuring to think that, for some elite footballers at least, the game still has to mean something more.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 28 books.

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