“I’m not sure how many will sell,” Jordan Henderson joked as he rifled through the dozens of red and white shirts bearing his name in Ajax’s superstore. He need not have worried – within hours, his was the fastest-selling jersey in the club’s history.
The former Liverpool midfielder was officially unveiled by his new club in Amsterdam on Friday, signing a two and a half year deal and beginning, predictably, with a sorry-you-were-offended apology.
“I said six months ago that if I offended anybody or people felt as though I let them down then I apologise for that, and I apologise again,” he said.
“As I said before, my beliefs have never changed and never will. I can apologise if people feel let down. I haven’t changed as a person and never have. I want to continue to focus on my football and give everything I can for this great football club.”
In the Dutch capital, there is still some hesitancy about how Henderson should be received. When he left Liverpool to join Al-Ettifaq, he knew the LGBT+ community, whom he had once championed, would be “offended”, because they had told him so. Groups like Kop Outs pleaded with him to reconsider swapping morals for millions and he chose to ignore them.
Some Ajax supporters will be delighted at his arrival, not least because they are a club in the midst of a cavernous identity crisis, and because many football fans frankly don’t care.
“We are very happy to have such a great player joining our club, with his experience and attitude, in all sorts of ways,” one supporters group told i.
Yet others were hesitant to engage on the subject of his perceived betrayal of a marginalised people he once spoke up for, before becoming a poster boy for a state hellbent on sportswashing. Saudi Arabia has to do that because of what Amnesty call “violations of human rights”, including the criminalisation of homosexuality.
Whatever Henderson says now, his legacy has been irreparably damaged by his disastrous flirtation with the Pro League. It is hard to call it anything else when it lasted just 19 games, some of which were watched by fewer than 700 people. “Once the damage has been done, you can try to repair it with a bandage but you can’t tape over the cracks,” Pride in Football said. “Jordan Henderson tarnished his legacy in a matter of months, there’s no coming back from this.” Sections of the crowd booed him during one of his most recent England appearances against Australia at Wembley.
Henderson’s personal views should not be conflated with those of his former paymasters; he was once – rightly – nominated for “Football Ally” at the LGBT+ awards. He spoke out publicly in support of a non-binary England fan wearing make-up to a game. The accusation has never been that his personal views changed, but that he had once been an important ambassador who abandoned his post. In the war for LGBT+ rights, he went AWOL and will struggle to find his way back into the trenches.
So now he arrives in Amsterdam, a city synonymous with its history of liberalism and the home of the Homomonument, a piece of architecture commemorating all LGBT+ people who have been persecuted.
Nobody needs to tell him this was all a terrible mistake. His unhappiness in Saudi Arabia was not necessarily inevitable – one agent i spoke to on Friday insisted only “a very small number” of players choose to live across the border in Bahrain as Henderson did, adding that “most of the Saudi players speak English” and suggesting “society respects the customs and traditions” of overseas players. Despite admitting he had left for a “football decision” Henderson refused to criticise Al-Ettifaq or the league itself.
But nor was any of this unforeseeable. A major pay cut has followed – it is understood that rumours he was earning £700,000 a week at Ettifaq were not accurate and his terms were closer to £350,000. At Ajax it is more like £120,000, though he was adamant he had not avoided a return to the UK to swerve a hefty tax bill.
It is also claimed that because he had agreed to “backload” his Saudi wages, he has missed out on a large proportion of the money he was supposed to be earning because he terminated his contract so early.
Henderson has already received messages of support from his former Liverpool teammates, Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold among them. On Friday, Jurgen Klopp added his voice just hours before Henderson spoke to the media for the first time since his move.
“People are really critical of Hendo about the move, first there and now coming back,” Klopp said.
“I don’t know how we dare, always judging these kind of things. We have one life and we have to make decisions and sometimes our decisions are perfect in the first case and sometimes it is different after you made them.”
The fact he is largely being welcomed with open arms perhaps speaks to the crisis in which Ajax find themselves. It has been a turbulent couple of years both on the pitch and off it. Ex-director Marc Overmars resigned after being found to have sent explicit photos and messages to female colleagues. He was later banned from world football by Fifa for his behaviour.
This term, Ajax made their worst ever start to a season, slumped to their lowest ever league position, saw two matches abandoned due to crowd trouble. They have since climbed to fifth in the table but still sit 23 points behind first-placed PSV Eindhoven. Henderson is not just there to sell shirts (or the matching duvet covers and pillow cases also available in the online shop). Ajax were in need of composure in central midfield and manager John van ‘t Schip pointed to his “experience and leadership qualities”, more valuable than ever in the midst of an injury crisis.
From that perspective, it is a match made in desperation heaven and both have an aching need for it to work, as much for the PR assault as for footballing reasons. It is ultimately a move nobody saw coming six months ago. Even his interviewer, as he sat down to Ajax’s in-house TV, could not quite believe it. “How did this happen?” he asked. Henderson admitted: “I’m not sure.”
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