The Henderson Controversy

Woke branding , western exceptionalism, big money and a lad from Sunderland

I was reluctant to write this article. I struggled to decide if it was worth opening that can of worms! Then I read an article by The Post, an online publication for the Merseyside region. This is normally a very good publication that I enjoy reading but, like many other articles about Jordan Henderson’s transfer, I didn’t feel like The Post had properly considered the issue. The transfer of Jordan Henderson from Liverpool FC to the Saudi Arabian team Al-Ettifaq and the uproar that has followed has generated plenty of noisy condemnation but little real analysis. The article in The Post followed this trend in only focusing on the objections of the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall.

As a lifelong Liverpool fan, as you will know if you’ve listened to our football podcast, I have followed Henderson’s career quite closely, especially since he has spent over a decade of it playing at Anfield. Jordan Henderson signed for Liverpool in the 2011/12 season after impressing Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish whilst playing for Sunderland.
Jordan is a born and bred Mackem who rose through the ranks of his hometown club Sunderland FC after joining as a schoolboy. Henderson had only signed his first professional contract 3 years before signing for Liverpool showing his meteoric rise from youth star to premier league player.

The move itself wasn’t a strange one and I doubt it was too difficult as Sunderland isn’t a city too dissimilar to Liverpool. Both being very working-class cities based around the docks and both have suffered greatly from similar levels of deindustrialisation since the 1980s. The two football clubs are large world-renowned teams, they still have fan bases that are strongly rooted in the local working-class population.

Henderson’s start to his Liverpool career wasn’t always smooth sailing. He was often maligned for poor performances with critics often focussing on his woeful shooting ability. Much of this criticism stemmed from the fact he was seen by many fans as a replacement for the Anfield legend Steven Gerrard, who would be a tough act to follow for any player!

As the years went by though, Henderson grew into his own role and even earned the captaincy in his own right through his demeanour both on and off the field. In his time as captain, he won a similar number of trophies to the former captain (Henderson 8 to Gerrards 9) but he did win the Premier League so he could be, arguably, seen as the more successful player. Now he has come to the later years of his career he has joined Al-Ettifaq, for whom Gerrard has recently been appointed as manager, it seems that Henderson’s career trajectory is closely linked to the man he succeeded as captain of LFC.

Throughout his career Jordan Henderson has appeared as the consummate professional. Both on and off the field he has never been a player that invited controversy or the wild speculations of the tabloid press. He was a perfect fit for a club captain with this clean-cut image and as a consequence of this he attracted the interest of charities who wanted him to play an ambassadorial role for them. He was approached by the now infamous Stonewall to be an ambassador for their ‘Rainbows for Laces’ campaign after Henderson made a few statements of support for the LGBTQ community in football.

In this modern era of woke populism footballers are now being held to a new standard. Gone are the days where the likes of Gazza and the England team and the infamous Dentist Chair. The scrutiny of the press has pushed them into having to seem like paragons of virtue. Sports figures management teams have taken advantage of this to enhance the image of their clients.

Marcus Rashford has received great acclaim for his so-called battles with Boris Johnson over free school meals, even receiving an MBE as a result. If you look closer though, you will see his management agency Roc Nation are the designers of this social justice campaign. Rashford may well have perfectly good intentions but Roc Nation, as an artist and athlete management company, are selling a product and that product is their client. The management companies of these sports figures are responsible for creating an image to be sold to the public and thus to potential sponsors, advertisers, and future teams their client may sign for.  Social justice advertising is the latest trend and advertisers see it as a way of generating positive images for their products and so look for spokesmen who carry the same image with them. Thus, the greater amount of positive PR that is generated for a sports figure the greater their value is as an asset to the company.  As we well know these types of companies only exist under capitalism and capitalism only exists to create capital. Hence these companies will seek profit in each and every venture. This can be said the same for Jordan Henderson and Rainbows for Laces. There may be good intentions involved, but essentially Stonewall and Henderson are both profiting from this image of the virtuous athlete. We must see this as a commercial transaction with each side looking to generate more value for themselves by being involved with the other. It carries about as much real meaning as a player endorsing a particular variety of trainers or deodorant, it is branding and nothing more and brands can change depending upon where the money is found.

This being said, the hysteria over Jordan Henderson’s move to a club in Saudi Arabia because of its conservative values and anti-gay laws is ridiculous. Henderson’s motivation for a move to Al-Ettifaq is obvious, he is an ageing player whose career time is reducing and with that so will the value of his contract. He has been offered a longer contract in a lesser league whilst being paid more money. I doubt for a second that ‘Rainbow Laces’ or the objections of Stonewall crossed his mind for a second. Just recall how quickly the rainbow armband was dropped at the recent world cup held in Qatar.

We must also not ignore the glaring hypocrisy and racism in this media storm of false indignation. The lasting impressions that the War on Terror has imprinted on people’s minds has left the many in the west believing that the middle east is a backward civilisation in comparison to our European way of life. We must remember that the middle east is referred to as the cradle of civilisation due to being home to some of the world’s earliest known agricultural work and forms of writing.

Let’s look back to the British media coverage of the 2022 world cup in Qatar. The ignorance of this event was appalling. Having to watch Gary Lineker feign indignation about the rights of workers and against conservative Qatari laws instead of talking about the World Cup ceremony that celebrates Arab culture was insulting. Qatar’s first world cup was thus marred by media driven western exceptionalism from the usual talking heads who routinely bloviated about the belief that our European style “democracy”, and religion, is somehow more progressive than the Arab nations. We must remember though that Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other Gulf states have all been allied to the British government since their creation. Many of them are former British colonies and the Saudi royal family have close ties to King Charles himself. The alliance between Britain and Saudi Arabia goes back a century to the founding of the kingdom and huge fortunes are made via the oil trade with Saudi Arabia to this day. The British government has also been a key backer of the Saudi led war on Yemen, which barely ever gets mentioned in the British press, which has killed hundreds of thousands. If it is not even worthy of mentioning that many fortunes in Britain continue to be made via the oil and arms trade with Saudi Arabia, then why is the press suddenly up in arms about a football transfer? As we’re talking about the Middle East it is also worth remembering which countries have damaged that region and its people the most and those countries are the USA and Britain. If Jordan Henderson had moved to Major League Soccer (MLS), as Lionel Messi has just done, would there have been the same uproar about leaving for a country which has committed so many atrocities across the world? I don’t think so.

Jordan Henderson’s move to Saudi Arabia is purely a financial one for an ageing footballer, as it was for another Liverpool player Fabinho. Any posturing he did before for the ‘Rainbow Laces’ campaign was merely to further his and the charity’s image. This is similar to when Gary Neville publicised the fact that his hotels were shutting their doors to normal punters and housing the homeless. There was no mention of the financial subsidies by the government that easily equal the amount paid by tourists and that this way of boosting profits is something that struggling hotels have done for years. His PR team has now worked this false activism into his image and now he’s (hilariously) joined the Labour Party! It speaks volumes to the working-class quality of that party. Especially when Neville was very outspoken about Qatar, but still took up his pundit seat for it and was happy to take the money he made in doing so. 

The false indignation over holding sporting events, or well thought of sports stars leaving for larger contracts, is ignorant and reminiscent of old colonial mindsets. It ignores the long-term role that the British and American governments have played in allying with (and profiting from) these countries. The false media narratives about the “beliefs” of footballers are there to mask the fact that the “social justice” advertising of today is cynical brand management that evaporates when faced with the reality of a bigger pay day.