‘We’d all take the Saudi money’ like Henderson, right? Well here’s exactly why I wouldn’t | OneFootball

Jordan Henderson has left Liverpool for Saudi Arabia

Those who keep defending players moving to Saudi Arabia by saying ‘we’d all take the money’ really ought to consider the thoughts of John Nicholson.

For most of its existence, big money and football have had an uneasy cohabitation. Ever since Middlesbrough paid Sunderland £1,000 (just £96,000 in today’s money) for Alf Common in 1910 – a fee thought absurd for a mere footballer – it has often outraged its public.

It was the same when Trevor Francis cost Forest a million pounds, when players began being paid £100,000 per week and now again when Middle Eastern oppressive autocracies are throwing ludicrous amounts of money around.

Apparently someone in the mailbox, for some reason, wanted to know if I’d become a Saudi Arabian football correspondent for ‘a life-changing sum of money’. As though such a thing were possible.

Of course not. I don’t want a life-changing sum of money because I don’t want my life changed. I’m happy as it is and beyond paying the bills and buying records, don’t have any need for a life-changing amount of money, let alone from a vicious autocratic state. I’ve reached a point in life where I know what makes me happy and it isn’t acquiring money just for the sake of it.

Obviously, the regime Jordan Henderson is being paid by – a regime that is already editing footage of him to erase his previous advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community – is abhorrent to someone with my values, but I realise that pretty much everyone’s work is compromised in some way and no-one is morally pure, and that in the black and white judgemental world we live in, if you’re not an angel you must be another devil. However, I couldn’t sell working for such a regime to myself and I’m not alone in that. It’s hard enough paying tax that helps the Westminster government buy the nuclear weapon-carrying submarines that I see most days from my living room.

But I would understand someone working for an oppressive autocracy if it lifted them out of poverty. It’s not ideal but you do what you’ve got to do sometimes in life. Obviously, that’s not the case with Henderson or any former Premier League player taking their money.

Jordan Henderson and Allan Saint-Maximin are headed for Saudi Arabia

I do realise that footballers can and do invest their wealth in their home countries and some are suggesting Henderson will be doing that. But does any charity or organisation want such blood-stained money from an oppressive regime? I doubt it. But regardless, such a thing is just a symptom of a broken economic system and indeed perpetuates it. No-one should have to rely on the random charitable munificence of a footballer to have a decent school or hospital. Footballers shouldn’t be expected to bail the poor out of deprivation. That is the job of the state.

But beyond that and maybe more profoundly, I’m not bothered about money the way some seem to be. I’m just not. I only want enough to pay my way with a bit leftover for a rainy day. I don’t want any more than that. That’s why the tired ‘we’d all take the money’ arguments seem so ridiculous. No – many of us simply wouldn’t. To put it in hippie vernacular, many of us are not bread heads. Plenty of people do not take well-paid jobs because they object to the values of those who would be paying them. It happens. Not everyone is hypnotised by or worships wealth. Many work for low wages, not because they have to but because they feel their job is rewarding and useful.

To my way of thinking, to have time is the real wealth. Time to play B-sides. Time to listen to football on the radio. Life has taught me that simple pleasures are the most satisfying. We’re busy with a long-term project turning our garden into a bio-diverse habitat for flora and fauna. Seeing a gang of goldfinch fledglings feeding on the seed of wild grasses that we’ve let grow gives me more happiness than buying expensive cars or watches or whatever rich people buy. I favour love over gold.

As some footballers pile up their money in ever greater amounts, it has been clinically proven that ever more money doesn’t deliver ever more happiness. I think it’s about £80k per year that the uptick in contentment stops working. So what’s the point in earning vastly more than that? Of course almost no-one does earn £80,000; if you do, you’re in the top 5% of earners in the country. I’ve no real objection if you do. Being well-off by normal standards isn’t the issue here. This is wealth on a different scale altogether.

The excuse made by some for footballers taking the seriously big money, despite already being incredibly rich, is that they’re making life ‘secure’ for future generations. It won’t. The world is littered with dysfunctional kids of the super wealthy.

And there are rich people who understand that not having to work for a living because your granddad Jordan handed down £100m is simply not a positive thing. Consequently some are not leaving their wealth to their children. Saying instead, go and make your own way. Setting people up for life is a negative for the person and for society. This isn’t to say you can’t leave your kids money, just that leaving them insane wealth is destructive for everyone. Inherited wealth just entrenches inequality and that benefits no-one.

So let’s not pretend a footballer hoovering up millions from a dubious source is somehow a noble insulating of his grandkids’ lives from hardship and dispensing happiness down the Henderson generations, or is to be in any way lauded.

I took about 10 kilos of our homegrown organic courgettes to my local food bank last week. Apart from giving out bags of food, they were cooking rice and curry out of donations. The people who came to eat were almost all working but were not paid enough money to feed themselves and their kids every day. That’s your failed economic system right there. These people were not scroungers or wasters, they were the working poor.

All they wanted was to have enough to pay their way through life and I can’t separate them and their lives from the multi-millionaire footballer. One is not better than the other, not more deserving. But the vast inequality of wealth between them just seems morally unjustifiable. I don’t think we should be shy of saying we have a moral objection to uber wealth – add in an oppressive autocratic state and a hypocritical footballer and it all feels quite dystopian for something which had good reason to call itself the people’s game. The fact it’s normalised shouldn’t blind us to how extreme it actually is.

I don’t expect footballers to turn lucrative contracts down, because they’ve been indoctrinated into the same extremist economic model and that model tells them to take what they can get. And after all, what is going on with the Saudi league is just what went on with the Premier League over the last 30 years but faster and with added mega wealth. It’s all a march to the same beat and it is leading football at this level away from the rest of football, and at pace. The fracture will be profound. Football and money have always been awkward bedfellows but where we are now takes the tension to a whole new level.