Football learning the wrong lessons from Jordan Henderson
Give Chelsea players credit for keeping so many of their youthful indiscretions out of the public eye.
Don't hate Jordan Henderson for selling out the cause, don't scorn him for being a hypocrite, don't slander him for siding with tyrants against a marginalized community, don't mock him for his youthful idealism nor tar him as avaricious, and don't waste your time or moral bandwidth trying to walk a mile in his boots before passing judgment. As fun or as gratifying as any of those might be for propa Chels or right-on allies alike, they all further inhibit learning the right lessons of Jordan "Ally" Henderson's transfer to Al Ettifaq in the Saudi Premier League.
If there's anything we should mock and scorn him for, it's thinking that he'd get an Oprah-atic sympathetic interview and receptive audience via The Athletic, a paywalled auto-immune disease of The New York Times. Better to have just sat down with the lads on TalkSport and taken a few mildly homophobic questions from a few mildly homophobic cobbers before the conversation shifted fully to why Liverpool didn't win the treble.
The lesson for which we are foregoing our own moral tut-tutting is that eventually every person, footballers included, has to choose between making the right decision for themselves and making the right decision in the eyes of some group that they affiliated with during the years when the self had not fully formed and tribal identification was easy and advantageous.
That's not verbosity. That's just evolutionary neuropsychology.
Professional athletes meet two key desires of activist causes. First, they come with a built in, high affinity platform. People are already listening to what they have to say and are inclined to follow them. Second, because they are young people living in a bubble, they offer the "from the mouths of babes" innocence so prized by groups looking to short circuit reason and debate.
In short, they see Premier League academies (and Division I colleges, and Olympic Development Centers, and....) as gestation pods for an army of Greta Thunbergs.
To whatever extent Henderson had genuinely thought through gender and sexual identity and the ideology that has sprung up around it (believe it or not, that clause - including this parenthetical - is shorter than the current acronym), or Saudi Arabia's recent and current human rights record, he did so within the controlled safety of Premier League life. He could stay detached from both because neither were going to intersect with his career in a zero sum way. Until they both did.
Give Chelsea players credit, then. Whether it's coincidence, team culture or in-house guidance, Chelsea players rarely adopt a cause to put alongside club and country as their priorities.
If they engage in charitable causes, they do so without Pharasaic preening. Many times, their interests are very personal, such as development in their home countries or neighborhoods, or a disease or condition that affected a family member. As such, they keep their involvement accordingly personal. Additionally, the Chelsea FC Foundation gives them an outlet for their philanthrophic leanings, keeping them away from Tinder-but-for-activism, swiping until they find a casual cause hook up.
Of the two somewhat recent times a Chelsea player weighed in on the issue of the day, one said "no mas!" to a stale gesture. The other made an unsolicited entry into a contentious debate, prompting my former colleague to write a headline that made me realize I had joined the right site and would enjoy working with him: "Cesc Fabregas wades into Brexit debate because reasons."
Because reasons. Precisely.
It's understandable that we'd like to think that our heroes will put principle over paycheck, the little guy over the regime; club, country and cause over sovereign wealth funds. But given that pro athletes are the only people in Henderson's country and my own who get an emptier education than the average citizen, we're expecting all that from people who can barely put a numerator over a denominator.
Despite my bottomless contempt for all aspects of the Saudi sportswashing industrial complex, including those who facilitate it, I can only bring a limited amount of that contempt to the athletes who go there. Most of my contempt towards the athletes is on competitive and sports grounds: scoring goals and winning trophies in the Saudi Premier League is about as prestigious as doing so in Major League Soccer and the Chinese Super League (I still don't understand Oscar). In terms of looking back on one's career and saying "I won the most that I could at the highest levels possible," leagues that start with "Vanarama" command more sporting gravitas than leagues that start with "Saudi," regardless of who jumps to the latter.
But I understand the inevitability of having to reckon with the hills we take and defend in the ignorance of youth - sadly deemed "idealism" - even if that reckoning is fully personal and introspective. The road to rational self interest has a few tolls of regret. But you pay those tolls, maybe have a laugh about it, and move on.
The danger is being too loud, too public and too frequent with those early statements, because until you're able to navigate the road ahead, the regret forced upon you will be just as loud, public and frequent. That's unfortunate, because it is an absolutely vital and rewarding journey. But it's self-inflicted, which means it's not unfair.
Jordan Henderson doesn't deserve the "morality officers" coming after him, to use Brendan Rodgers' term. The fact that the morality officers are training their fire on Henderson rather than the Saudis highlights the fact that they are but morality rent-a-cops.
The lesson for young sportspeople and those of us who help develop them is that we all have to answer for our decisions, even those that we think are good. Until you can see a few steps down your road, minimize the future discomfort by not seeking maximum stature.
Otherwise, you'll be justifying people doing all those things I listed at the outset.
Photo credit: cfcunofficial / Flickr, under CC BY-SA 2.0.
