Alas Jordan Henderson, a familiar face caught in a haze of moral contradiction
It has been a big week for learnings, for moralisings, for herd-panic over the private affairs of men who appear regularly on television. In this sense the Huw Edwards shemozzle has at least revealed some vital life lessons.
First, newsreaders are clearly central to the moral life of the nation. Who else will teach us right from wrong, if not people who are paid to read an Autocue and frown? Take my scripture, my certainties, abandon me to an indifferent universe. But leave me the newsreaders.
Second, issues of morality are worthy of comment at prime ministerial level only if they involve celebrity embarrassment, as opposed to, say, corruption and abuse of power. Third, lots of people really do hate the BBC. And most important of all, our shared outrage can only ever focus properly on issues of personality. How much simpler when there’s a heretic with a familiar face.
This is a roundabout way of getting on to Jordan Henderson and the most depressing, illuminating, oddly necessary sports story of the week. At the time of writing Henderson seems likely to sign for Al-Ettifaq FC, one of those top-tier Saudi clubs not owned, as Newcastle United are, by the Saudi Arabia state investment fund (we can only imagine the response from the ultras of Al-Ittihad, Al-Ahli, Al-Nassr and Al-Hilal at seeing a former Sunderland player in the opposition ranks next season).
In the process English football is preparing to say goodbye to not one but two Hendersons. The first is the football version. This Henderson has been a fine player and hugely admirable presence over the past 12 years at Liverpool, during which there were spells on the fringes, near departures, doubts over what this hard-running, unstarry kind of midfielder was actually going to be good at; followed by the steady and tenacious assertion of a very obvious sporting will.
Henderson isn’t a showy talent. Midfielders of more obvious elite class – Luka Modric gliding past him at the 2018 World Cup like a man absentmindedly skirting a stray traffic cone – raised concerns over his merits at this level. We remember Alex Ferguson’s vivid talk of how Henderson “runs from his knees with a straight back”, like a Gerald Scarfe creation in a Beatles cartoon. But Henderson has kept on running, a portable driving presence, able to alter the course of a game through sheer will, verve, vibe reversal.
Throughout this Henderson has also radiated a basic decency, a sense of acting in the way everyone would hope they could given the same talent and platform. Which brings us to the second Henderson, who is also on his way out and set to vanish for good judging by the first-wave response to his proposed move into Saudi sports propaganda.
There have been references in some sympathetic quarters to the Saudi deal as “life-changing” and as such unrefusable, as though only now can Henderson finally afford a car or a family holiday. And to be fair it is transformative. He can go from ludicrously rich to brain-manglingly, obscenely rich in a single stride.
But there is an obvious moral hypocrisy here. The Saudi league is a political project, an attempt to gain influence while distracting from incompatible levels of prejudice and a bloodthirsty human rights record.
Anyone who takes those abovemarket fees to act as the public face of this (essentially a bribe to forget your remaining sporting ambitions) is knowingly taking part in those political aims. Which is entirely your own business if you happen to like that process, or if you want to ignore it and simply act as an economically rational agent.
But Henderson has presented himself as something else. A much-praised advocate for LGBTQ+ rights (who is now planning to promote a state where gay people are criminalised). An advocate against racism (now doing PR for a structurally racist state). A campaigner for women’s rights (giving the thumbs up for a patriarchal dictatorship).
Taking a stand is good. But it only really hits home when it overlaps with your personal interests. At the first whiff of that sweet life-changing cash all the rainbow stuff has simply been swished off the desk.
Plus there is a responsibility to hold the line. Taking stand and then publicly abandoning it undermines the actions of those who really mean it and live it, making everyone seem a little more disposable and easily dismissed. Better to advocate for equality than say nothing at all. But where does it leave those who can’t and won’t move on when you decide, actually, the money is a bit too tempting?
And yet … It is probably time for a record scratch here. Because life is not this simple. Condemning Henderson for possession of a malleable conscience is problematic in itself. What about the competing freedom to take a job, to make your own choices? And why is it only ever footballers, often men and women from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are harangued for their choices in these areas?
Henderson is a recognisable face caught in a moment of moral contradiction. But he is also a million miles from being the root problem here, or indeed from being the UK citizen most spectacularly enriched by the Saudi state (the bomb trade is a far more lucrative, longer-lasting career).
He is, if we can zoom out little further, also doing us all a favour in many ways, an overtly “ethical” footballer holding a mirror to just how compromised and intertwined our worlds are.
Not least the deep and enduring confusion over what English football actually is. Who could forget the ascent into all-out clog-wearing solidarity over the threat of the European Super League, where football became, briefly, the only form of socialism embraced by most English people in any area of their life. Is the Premier League, the acme of hard free-market rightspeddling economic supremacy really in a position to dress itself up as the guardian of Corinthian sporting principle? Ask the European leagues if English football is a force for the collective good, or a Viking raid party here to harvest its expertise and competitive edge in return for an unassailable weekly wage? The fact is the Saudis are simply aping the same process, but doing it without the pretence, the history, the baroque and compensatory checks and balances.
Where does this end? Because once you start to peel this onion you realise how much it stinks. If we really are going to condemn Henderson’s moral shiftiness, we have to condemn also every Newcastle player who professes to care about human rights or the rainbow flag, to condemn the ethics-washing Premier League for allowing this kind of ownership, to ask what internal contortions it requires to make a hear
tening stand against racism in Britain but also promote the Abu Dhabi outreach project. And also to understand the historic role of sport in British society.
What the Saudis are doing is in effect a kind of reverse sporting colonialism. The Victorians knew all about this soft power stuff through sport. Why do they play football to Charterhouse rules across the previously redtinged world? Why does cricket still exist only in the former colonies? Because the British did this best, did it first, did it with the added convenience of actual occupation. We will take your resources back on our ships on the end of a musket. Saudi will simply charge you for their oil, while removing your ability to say no to any of its cultural creep schemes. So yes, Hendo to Al-Ettifaq matters. Perhaps he might even come to change his mind before the deal is done. But let’s not pretend we have identified the lone, shame-faced moral barbarian in the room. This is all of us to some degree. We have the chance to do something about it. But that, of course, is a much bigger conversation, the kind that nobody really wants to have.