Ex-Ireland U-21 who was saved by football in Bulgaria
Henderson left Arsenal to enjoy the best years of his career in Balkans
Like any young footballer, he had a plan but also had an awareness that implementing that plan would not be easy. When a teenage Conor Henderson made his first-team debut for Arsenal in March 2011 the road ahead looked clear. The Ireland underage cap was the same age and seemed to have the same prospects as fellow Gunners midfielder Jack Wilshire in that FA Cup tie.
He did not envisage his path leading to Bulgaria, where he would spend the four most productive years of his career, which was ended at the age of 31 due to a persistent knee injury.
Right now Henderson – capped four times at U-21 level by Ireland having qualified through a grandparent – is back where it all began as he’s on the coaching staff at Arsenal’s academy, assistant with their U-14 side.
But with the Nations League on the calendar this week and Ireland facing Bulgaria, his mind turns to that Balkan country where his flagging career was saved in two spells with Pirin Blagoevgrad between 2017 and 2022.
Great
“Bulgaria was great for me,” says Henderson, who has recently moved onto the coaching staff at Arsenal’s U-14s after a spell with the U-12s.
“I enjoyed playing there, I learned so much, the inspiration I had to go on to coaching came from working under the first manager I had there, it opened my eyes to football in a way that hadn’t happened to me before. I am grateful for the experience I had there and that feeds into the work I do now at Arsenal, I am glad I did it.
“It was the most football I played in my career. There were still challenges that will come with playing in eastern Europe but the big thing for me was that it was full focus on football, and when the football was going well, everything else was fine.
“So we had challenges, but looking back it’s something I am glad I did, I am grateful for the years I had in Bulgaria as I developed as a person as well as a footballer and that stands to me now in terms of being a coach, helping players develop, learning resilience and inner strength.”
His career was barely even at a crossroads when he took the call from Pirin in 2017 as things were just petering out. After that impressive debut under Arsene Wenger in a 5-0 FA Cup win over Orient in 2011, he was unable to build on that as a knee injury saw him sidelined and within two years he was released.
What followed was a slide down the divisions; spells at Hull, Crawley, Stevenage, then a drop into the non-league scene, with the likes of Grimsby and Eastbourne Borough.
Henderson has spoken of how he struggled to cope with life at that level, far removed from the elite stage at Arsenal. He once said how his decade with the Gunners left him “unprepared” for life outside that bubble.
“When I left at 22, I knew nothing else.
“It could be really hostile but really enjoyable at the same time” Conor Henderson
You drop down the league and it couldn’t be more different so I found it hard to adjust, having to dismiss the principles I had learned, that had made me a good player, and I found that hard,” he told this newspaper just after he moved to Pirin in 2017.
Speaking now, he accepts what happened. “I don’t blame the club for that, Arsenal are what they are, one of the best teams around and few teams played the way they did back then, the same now where we try and play in a way that replicates the first team,” he told the Irish Independent.
“It was more on me and my naivety at the time, not having any knowledge whatsoever of what football looked like outside of Arsenal and the Premier League .”
He knew little about Bulgaria, even less about Blagoevgrad – a small town near the border with Macedonia – when he landed there in October 2017.
One point from the first four games was a sign that this could be a struggle, but things started to look up when he scored his first goal – the only goal of the game away to Cherno More and fans took to the Irishman.
The team were relegated at the end of his first season there and he made the decision to move away, joining Romanian outfit Dunarea Calarasi but that was an unhappy spell. A year in Romania he was back at Pirin for two seasons in the second tier, though Henderson helped the team get back into the top flight at the end of the 2020/2021 season – promotion a legacy he’s proud of.
“Leaving Arsenal I had a plan. The plan was to have a couple of good seasons and make my way back up to that level but that goes back to my naivete, where I was at what that plan involved.
“I don’t think I could get my head around it and maybe I was a bit stubborn, in terms of doing or not the things that would have got me back there, doing the uglier side of the game. I was maybe not switched on at that time.
“So Bulgaria got me playing well again. Where I was at in my career then, I purely went for the football, it didn’t matter where I went. When the football is going well, other stuff around that falls into place and you are happier, other stuff seems less important. I was happy there, met good people, made good connections but I was enjoying my football.”
Blagoevgrad, a city the size of Galway, didn’t pull in big crowds but that wasn’t an issue.
“The attendances differed, you could play at home to a team from the other
side of the country who don’t bring away fans but someone like CSKA could bring a crowd.
“And even if there wasn’t too many fans there, they made it an occasion with the flares and the flags, the smoke, it was all a bit crazy, it could be hostile but really enjoyable to play in at the same time.”
Henderson was an outlier then, an English-born Irish international in a local side. When he made his debut, at home to Slavia Sofia, he was the only non-Bulgarian in the Pirin team though opponents like Slav ia and C SKA were recruiting more and more imports. Investment and the arrival of former Northern Ireland international Warren Feeney as coach in 2019 led to more imports.
“The Bulgarian players we had tended to be local as there’s a good tradition in that area of Bulgaria and they were proud of that. Having people like Dimitar Berbatov, he started at Pirin but moved to CSKA in Sofia,” he says.
Henderson was enjoying his second spell in March 2020 when Covid hit. His partner and their new-born daughter, Kaya, had only arrived in Bulgaria before the borders were closed and football stopped. They made the most of it but being on their own, far from family in the UK, became too much of a test.
“It was tougher on my partner than it was on me, Covid hit and that changed things. My partner was far from home away from family and friends. I was sacrificing a lot for my career. It got to a point where for the sake of my partner and daughter we needed to be around family, and by that stage in terms of football I was really struggling with my knees so I planned to move into coaching,” he says.
“We speak to our daughter about it sometimes, she will come up with a memory of being there. If people ask where she lived when she was younger she’s proud to say Bulgaria.”
Link
Henderson will keep an eye on the Ireland-Bulgaria ties this week. Oddly, even though he played for the Ireland U-21s alongside players like Matt Doherty, Shane Duffy and John Egan, he has more of a link to the Bulgarian squad.
“I don’t really keep up with the lads I knew in my time with the Irish teams, you move on in life and go in different directions,” he says.
The third-choice ’keeper in the Bulgarian squad, Dimitar Sheytanov, was a teammate at Pirin. “I know many of the others from playing against them. I played with Radoslav Kirilov as well, a winger, he’s a really good player,” he says.
“The politics in Bulgarian football is huge, I saw that in my time, I am not up to date in what’s going on now with the manager. I do remember the national team manager they have now as he was in charge of Chero More when I played in Bulgaria, his teams were always well organised, hard to beat. I have played in Plovdiv but in the old stadium, the new one looks good so I am sure the Irish players will enjoy their surroundings. I loved it in Bulgaria.”