“Being Red” vs Taking the Bag

I was at Taggy’s a few hours before City last October when I saw a middle-aged woman carrying a bucket and a stack of handbills. She was struggling to get anyone in the mass of people dressed in red, fully occupied in shouting and draining pints, to listen to her for a few seconds.

I swayed through the undulating sea of people to see what her cause was. She was trying to raise a few pounds and some awareness for the Liverpool dockers, who were going out on strike again in a few days. Their profitable employer had just laid off 15% of the workforce and offered everyone else a “raise” that, with inflation and fuel costs skyrocketing, amounted to a pay cut.

I dropped in a fiver and we chatted for a minute or two. I said it shouldn’t be so difficult for a worker action down at the docks to get LFC fans’ attention. She agreed, but she understood. “More and more of the fans these days aren’t from the city,” she explained. Still and all, “it’s a red club,” I offered. She nodded, and I disappeared into the lager mist again.

“A red club.” I thought about what while eating my hospitality meal over a white tablecloth with other members of the international traveling class, before we all went into Anfield to watch a team owned by an American billionaire side beat Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed’s best XI. “Being Red” meant something in the 1980s, when the city’s unemployment rate was in the double digits (50% for youth, by one account), part of the “managed declined’ Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government put Merseyside. What does it mean now, when a day at the match means an outlay of thousands of dollars, or when buying a new matchday kit means paying money advertise a bank who offered money laundering and sanctions-dodging services to Iran, Syria, and Sudan?

And what does it mean when club legends join the employ of football clubs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, an absolutist surveillance state that routinely and openly abuses women, murders dissenters in routine mass executions, criminalizes LGBT people, and abuses the working classes? Do we even get to care?

Steven Gerrard may have been one of the first Reds to take the kingdom’s shilling, and Jordan Henderson the latest — with a reported $800 million available to lure more high-profile players to the kingdom, it would naive to expect them to be the last — but this phenomenon isn’t new and it isn’t limited to Saudi Arabia.

To scroll through Ian Rush’s Instagram feed during the World Cup was to see a familiar dead-eyed rictus grin and bear through lavish meals in enormous rooms and handheld iPhone videos of stadiums leering through the desert. Rush, mind you, is an official club ambassador as well as a playing legend.

So how do you square whatever he was doing in Qatar with Liverpool FC’s support of LGBTQ+ people, who would have risked harassment or worse had they been invited to join Rush for a meal and dared to wear a rainbow shirt? Simply put, you can’t. It’s a contradiction you are expected to accept, even though you can’t square this circle any more than you could claim to honor the Hillsborough victims 97 while subscribing to a certain tabloid.

You would have every right to question The Anfield Wrap’s integrity and honesty if their writers started appearing in that certain newspaper. And you can believe that if “but Rupert Murdoch is paying them a lot of money,” sympathy would be in short supply.

Watching professional sports requires plenty of compromises, but there must be a line. We can recognize when appallingly corrupt organizations cross it; we don’t need to accept thousands of dead workers and thousands more abused as the state of things. Jordan Henderson saw the line when he spoke out against the Super League. So we can see a line’s been crossed by Ian Rush and Jordan Henderson and Steven Gerrard, filthy rich men who have chosen to do business in a part of the world where some portion of their erstwhile fanbase are criminalized, in order to become obscenely rich men.

Make no mistake: The “oh but they’re setting up their family for life” argument is horseshit. These are not men teetering on the brink between security and precarity. The bag had already been secured: Henderson was already making £800,000 a month; Stevie was already worth nearly $100 million. To try to claim they “needed” more, to frame taking the check as a moral choice, is to use the same logic the dockworkers’ bosses used to justify job and salary cuts for working people while netting record profits for the shareholders.

In that world, more is never enough. Any means can be used to justify that end. Is this where we are — nihilism and influencers?

There must be a line. Steve might have rescued his managerial career by taking a Championship team to promotion or doing decently well with a second-rate Serie A team. (He might have had better luck running training.) He would have been well compensated.

Hendu, too, could have continued on as a role player but also a cherished team leader and, more and more, a respected elder statesman in the league. One assumes the voice he used to support LGBT causes will become muted or disappear.

There is a line. Following Liverpool will be different if FSG sells to a petrostate. Jurgen Klopp, who said he was a left-wing voter, who said Brexit was a foolish calamity, will be looked at differently if he visits a Gulf palace instead of Fenway Park.

Surely there are reasons you follow this team and not another. Surely there are standards to which you hold yourself and your friends. There must be some ethical consumption in sports, just as there is with other consumer choices. Otherwise we all give in to nihilism.