Mailbox: LGBT+ community are the real hypocrites in the Jordan Henderson Saudi saga

The Mailbox brings a scorching-hot take over the reaction to Jordan Henderson’s move to Saudi. Also: praying for Qatar; and why Manchester United owned up…

Get your thoughts in to theeditor@football365.com…

The real hypocrites
So it looks like Jordan Henderson is going to bite the golden bullet and leave for the riches and “new challenge” in Saudi Arabia.

And who can blame him ? 109m quid !?! Beyond belief.

Heck of a coup for The Saudi League. Heck of a loss to Liverpool and, more importantly, Jurgen Klopp.

I totally understand how disappointed the LGBT community will feel, but this also makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable.

For an organisation of people who don’t like – quite rightly – being told what they can and can’t do with their lives, it seems very hypocritical for them to tell Henderson what to do with his.

Just an extra thought.
Saigon Adam, (that’s basically 1m a game), Villa Fan, Saigon

Big Foot (In The Mouth) & The Hendersons
My initial reaction to the reaction that Jordan Henderson’s then potential move to Saudi Arabia was to shake my head at him and at people who want to see sport stars as role models. I mean Britain trades with Saudi Arabia, throwing more arms their way than Andy Carroll at a corner kick. Graduate teachers take up lucrative posts there, they’ve bought a golf tour, one of the previously most likeable clubs in the Premier League and we all need their oil. So why hang the cloak of eternal shame on one footballer?

And then it hit me; Henderson made a deliberate choice to be a role-model, to reach out and preach inclusion of marginalised groups and people and while I don’t believe it was in any way self-serving at the time, it certainly did his image no harm. This wasn’t a role that was foisted upon him where he could say “I’m just a footballer lads….” he actively and openly embraced the status of spokesperson and ally. Then he bins that and makes a decision based purely on money, I mean it certainly wasn’t to progress his career nor is it to move up a level under Gerrard’s coaching.

to paraphrase Groucho Marx; I have principles and if you don’t like them and have 700k a week, I have others….

(I will get back to posting mindless, weakly comedic letters now)
Rob, Kilkenny

…Just a quick one to say sorry to Sarah Winterburn for my questioning of the Jordan Henderson transfer rumours. Sorry!

I’m sure people with a deeper understanding of the issues at stake will continue to write far more eloquently than I could, so I’ll leave the debating to them.

But for my thoughts, it’s just really disappointing.

Cheers,
Marc (who’s next, eh??)

Read more: Over the rainbow? Will Jordan Henderson really sell his soul for Saudi Arabia gold?

Ruthless ETH and praying for Qatar
I’m really quite shocked at this narrative going on about how “ruthless” ETH has been with the squad.

Let’s reflect:

Ronaldo’s position was untenable after the Piers interview

De Gea, regardless of his service to United, could in noway warrant £375k a week with his performances

Maguire, Fred, Mctominay, Jones, Bailly, DVB, Telles, Martial, Sancho…let’s face it, are all sh*t. All these players are stealing a living and making over £150k a week for doing f*ck all.

Let’s just cut to the chase, Man Utd have been rewarding mediocrity for over a decade now just to keep these “assets” on the balance sheet as they find it more lucrative than buying new players and it enables them to keep the price of the club inflated.

It completely sums up how the club doesn’t have a “big club mentality.” I’d be shocked if any of the above mentioned players would have lasted so long at a club like Real Madrid or Bayern.

For f*ck sake, even City know when to cut their losses (ie Mangala)

Let’s just call a spade a spade and admit when a player is crap or not. And enough of this “oh let’s keep him because he’s got passion and love for the club (ie he’s British).

If he’s sh*t, he’s sh*t. Now dump him and cut the losses and get some actually quality in.

ETH isn’t being ruthless, he’s merely being logical. How in the world does Sancho or Jones etc deserve to stay in the club. Martial is on £250k a week!!!! For doing what?! Sulking around the club for seven seasons.

For goodness sake Phil Jones is eligible for a bloody testimonial. Just evident of how far the club has fallen.

Praying for the Qataris to come in and rejuvenate the club after these parasite glazers have been running it for two decades.

Best,
Wes (London)
PS. No need for any hypocrisy about Qatar and oil money as oil money doesn’t mean dirty money. It’s a business and commodity just like any other business.

United didn’t miss Onana chance
Micki is right that Onana was available on free transfer last year however he conveniently left out the fact that in January 2022 Onana signed a pre-contract agreement with Inter Milan. You remember Jan of 22 right? United were a hot Ragnick lead mess and Ten Hag was still a twinkle in the Ajax eye. Would have been incredibly prescient of the club to sign the goalkeeper their manager wanted before they even knew who that manager would be. The fee is high for a goalkeeper despite the even larger fees paid by United’s rivals in recent years, though looking back the club have spent less than £20m on goalkeeper transfer fees over the past 20 years so its probably been due.

I’m excited to see how this changes the team. United have been unable to dominate possession for so many years mainly due to a keeper who wouldn’t move off his line and couldn’t pass for love nor money, combined with slow immobile central defenders. With both of those issues now resolved it should allow Ten Hag to push his team higher up the pitch compressing the opposition and making it much harder for them to break out. It will also make the team more press resistant and lead to fewer stupid goals conceded which in turn helps maintain confidence and build better performances.

Hopefully they don’t piss about too much getting a striker in so Eric has enough pre-season with the full squad to get them ready for the league start. Not losing the first two games will immediately be an improvement on last season though seeing how Ange’s is setting his team up that GW2 fixture away at Spurs could be very feisty.
Dave, Manchester

…Micki Attridge raises a good point concerning Onana. But he missed out an important piece of information (either deliberately or because he didn’t check). Onana actually agreed to sign for Inter on a free in January 2022, which (checks notes) was long before Erik ten Hag had agreed to become the Man Utd manager and a time when the club weren’t looking to replace their long serving goalkeeper. There has been a lot to criticise the club in recent years, but it seems a bit harsh that they should have looked in to the crystal ball to know not only who they would get as a manager, but what that manager would specifically require from his goalkeeper.
John (wondering how long it will be before former players in the media tell everyone you can’t have a goalkeeper like that in OUR league) Morgan, South Derbyshire.

Onana and Owen
I have two points to discuss.

Firstly, Micki Attridge, you describe Man United signing Onana for £47m this season when he left Ajax for free last season as “Classic Utd transfer master class”. Now, I suspect I won’t be the only to point this out, but just in case, here goes.

Eric ten Hag was announced as the new Man United manager on 21 April 2022. At that point in time, it is true that he was still Onana’s manager. However, Onana hadn’t actually played all that much for Ajax that season. In fact, in the entire 2021/22 season, due to his doping ban, injuries, international games, and plain just not getting picked, Onana only played 10 games for Ajax.

Of course, I suppose there was nothing stopping Ten Hag telling the Man United hierarchy that Onana was available on a free if they moved quickly and that he wanted him. Oh, except for the fact that Onana had, apparently, already agreed to move to Inter three months earlier.

There are plenty of transfer issues to mock Man United for but not signing a player who’d already agreed to sign for another club probably isn’t one of them.

The second thing I want to mention came to mind after reading Ian Watson’s ranking of Man United strikers since Van Nistelrooy left, namely number 10 on that list, Michael Owen. At the end of the piece on him, Watson says: “neither United nor Liverpool [are] keen to claim him as one of their own. Newcastle and Stoke weren’t interested either.”

It’s astounding when you really think about it. He retired as a Ballon d’Or winner. When he played his last game for England, he held the record for the most competitive goals and was 5th overall on the goalscorer list. When he left Liverpool, he was 7th on their all-time goalscorers list. He’s played for three of the biggest clubs in the world. He’s won the Premier League, the FA Cup, the League Cup, the UEFA Cup, and the Intertoto Cup. He played 571 senior games for club and country, scoring 262 goals (a record of one goal every 2.2 games).

Despite all of that, any mention of his name is met with apathy, at best, by most supporters at the clubs he’s played with. The strongest feeling I’ve seen any supporter have towards him is anger. There surely can’t be any other player who has a record which suggests he should be loved by the fans of at least one club long after he retires, whose name is regularly met with a response of “meh”?

It’s almost impressive how he’s managed to do that.
Jerry

Slight relief
Just wanted to say thank you to Mr Dave Tickner for his Aussie Warlock gag in the Like A New Signing article. It genuinely gave me a giggle!

Anyway.. back to the depressing world of who’s the biggest misogynist/racist/misandrist that is the mailbox at the moment.

Ta
Dave PVFC

Another day for you and me in middle eastern paradise
Hello fellow work procrastinators. I’m writing in response to Aman’s email about how the UK/US is no better than Saudi Arabia. I felt inclined to write in for the first time in 10 years as I was born and raised in the Middle-East and lived out there for 2 decades (as a British immigrant).

As you have a wife Aman, I am guessing you are heterosexual. Maybe Saudi Arabia wouldn’t have been so wonderful if you weren’t? Maybe if you were born slightly differently and had a husband at this time, you might not be espousing the wonders of this particular Arabian nation?

Years after leaving the Middle-East, I came to realise that I was bisexual. Whilst living there, I had to bat away any homosexual thoughts or feelings as I made keenly aware that it was against the law to be like that. People were (and still are) imprisoned for being born a certain way. Something they cannot control. I remember there being many occasions where I would fiercely pray that I would be 100% straight (literally trying to pray the gay away). God knows what it must be like for gay Saudis, because there sure as shit is not a lot of them who are able to openly discuss it.

I think we should absolutely question whether a country that has such laws in place should be able to ‘take over football’.

Yes, there is homophobia in ‘Western’ society – but the majority (*fingers crossed* vast majority) see that form of behaviour as unacceptable. There are (now) no laws banning it. I know Aman made a few other points but I wanted to focus on this aspect as it struck a chord in me how it wasn’t mentioned in his email. I do appreciate the different perspective he offered but wanted to throw mine in too.
Matt

It’s not unusual
Another dimension to the recent Forest Green Rovers caretaker manager situation is that it is not unheard of for a club to appoint an academy head coach (or head coach of the top age group team) as a caretaker manager. Off the top of my head, this applies to Paddy McCarthy at Crystal Palace, David Unsworth at Everton and Gary Brazil at Nottingham Forest. With the help of Google, we can add Richard Cooper (Mansfield Town), Mark Lillis (Huddersfield Town) and John Pemberton (Chesterfield) to that list in the past decade. As Mediawatch said, it wasn’t as though FGR picked someone at random, they chose the best qualified coach at the club at that time to be seconded over to a different role. For a club in the lower professional divisions, it also made sense to use someone already on the payroll instead of incurring extra costs bringing someone else in for a short period.
Ed Quoththeraven

Men365
I totally agree with Conor in the mailbox. If F365 wrote articles on women’s football, I would read them. Then maybe I’d know they players a bit better when and if I watched the game.

Sure I could wiki them, but then why am I reading F365 if that’s the response? Why do I read the mailbox when I watched the game?

I don’t give a sh*t about TalkSport nonsense so bin that off and put the women’s ladder and match previews on there. Seriously, stop telling me the news of what Agbonlahor said on an antagonising phone in.

I’d suggest that JN does it but I’m not convinced he actually watches or likes football anymore.

The quality of the matches isn’t why people don’t watch women’s football. That’s an easy excuse. We would have lapped up the ESL if that was the point. It’s that there is no skin the game. I would rather watch my local non league team than Ipswich Town.

It’s time for F365 to either start treating men’s and women’s too flight and international football the same, or to shut up and say that this is Men’s Football 365.
Alex, South London

Blue moaning
The Universe: “Hey Levenshulme Blue, Manchester 19, could you please define ridiculous whatabouttery for us all, without using the word ‘whatabouttery’?”

Levenshulme Blue, Manchester 19: “[Levenshulme Blue’s Mailbox entry from Wednesday morning]”

I read the CFC conclusion and note that there are 20 clubs mentioned as being found guilty of various FFP breaches. When you read their conclusion, it sounds like each club was likely guilty of 1 offense each. Which makes the score Manchester City 115-20 The Rest Of Club Football. Even if you assume that clubs were guilty of an average of 3 offenses each, the score would still be Manchester City 115-60 The Rest Of Club Football.

But yes, good point, Levenshulme Blue! You really showed everyone… something?
Oliver (hoping he used single and double quotations to F365/Mediawatch’s liking) Dziggel, Geneva Switzerland

…There were a couple of letters asking for a response in the mailbox.

First, Levenshulme Blue, some of us are enjoying our summer and waiting for the real footie to start and not rabidly trying to defend their club’s sportswashing. But now that you called me out, besides being away enjoying summer, the Utd story didn’t warrant a comment. Did Utd aggressively go after UEFA for fining them for their breach or accept the fine with a polite statement? Utd explained the cause was a change in FFP rules regarding handling the Covid losses and accepted their punishment. No threat to have 50 lawyers sue UEFA or placing horse heads in beds. In the case of City, the leak showed a systemic and systematic attempt to get around UEFA FFP rules whereas Utd was a one time error. What got most people’s goat was the belligerence of City’s owner. Of course, it isn’t just that Utd may be more honest but as a publicly traded company will be held to higher accounting standards as well.

The other topic that is worth discussing is the topic of watching the Women’s World Cup – and whether it should or should not be watched based on a comparison to the men’s game. This argument misses a couple of larger points. One, the women’s game needs more women to get out and support and not have it depend on men watching it. In the long run, with women controlling a larger portion of household spending it could get a lot more sponsorship if they showed a larger number of women ‘eyeballs.’ Two, the bigger impact is to do with the overall market. Years ago, grocery stores woke up to the fact they weren’t just competing against other grocery stores for your ‘food’ budget but restaurants and take outs. They started offering a whole range of ready to eat or take out food, as well as the ‘raw’ materials to cook your own food. The same is true of sports. Women’s football isn’t just ‘competing’ with men’s football for eyeballs but the many, many sports on offer. Sports events are expanding as we now talk about American football and even baseball games in the UK. We already have golf, cricket, rugby, darts, etc, all taking up male ‘eyeball’ time. Getting more women watching would be fabulous for the game. And yes, the FA have a lot to answer for by putting that women’s game on ice for so long.
Paul McDevitt

Stewie’s hat
“To be clear: if Arsenal finish within even 10 points of Citeh, I’ll eat my hat. Live on the mailbox with a side of Arteta sauce.” – Stewie Griffin, October 2022.

Seems it’s not just Arsenal fans who have low expectations. A man whose knickers were perpetually twisted over imaginary Arsenal fans saying they’ll win the league is now getting them twisted again about imaginary Arsenal fans saying they’ll not win the league. He’s never been one to have a consistent opinion has he? I eagerly await the mail in a couple of weeks where he pontificates about how Arsenal aren’t going to win anything thus setting us up for a preseason mail next year about how he was right all along (if you ignore all the times where he was wrong that is).

Quick list of Stewie’s valuable opinions from last year –

Spurs will be City’s closest challengers – Spurs finished 8th.
Conte will show Arteta how it’s done – Conte was out by the end of March.
Dortmund will show Arsenal how it’s done – Dortmund finished 2nd (can you imagine the jizmic fervour Stewie would have worked himself into if that had been Arsenal?)

So before we all go off the deep end trying to convince Stewie that he’s wrong about Arsenal, just remember that Stewie doesn’t know a lot about football.
SC, Belfast (Still waiting for the hat eating)

…Whenever I read a mail from Stewie Griffin, I’m left with the sense that he would probably be a much happier person supporting any team other than Arsenal. I am aware that everyone’s understanding of what constitutes success is different, but ignoring genuine, tangible progress to stick with a doom and gloom narrative is a bit closed-minded, don’t you think?

Being happy about the progress the club has made recently is not the same as pretending we were hugely successful last season, and I think you’ll find that most Arsenal fans see last season as a progressive season, but one of failure, nonetheless. Painting all Arsenal fans who are not aligned to your view with the same brush is as ridiculous as your last email.

It’s easy to see that Stewie has latched onto the fact that Arsenal have already spent 200m in the transfer window as a new area to moan about, presumably because other areas of the club are starting to improve. But the cherry on the cake has to be the use of Leicester’s title win to support his narrative that a club can compete without money in the same season they were relegated, and in the same season that Citeh win the treble. Yes, Pep’s net spend is low, but let’s not pretend Citeh’s team was created with the coins from the couch for the sake of our argument. I mean it is possible to win without spending money, but it’s not a sustainable winning model, and Citeh’s dominance only goes on to prove the contrary.

All of that being said, I do agree with him that the excuses are done. Arteta has been shown real support by the club and it is time that Arsenal win something big. Citeh being bloody brilliant is also not an excuse as the club have invested in the squad with the purpose of being competitive with Citeh and I hope that it is enough.

Cheer up Stewie, it finally feels pretty great to be an Arsenal fan, despite the failures of last season. We have a young, promising team filled with talent and a manager that seems to know what he needs to do to win. Who knows, this may prove to be a special season for the club, or it may not, either way, if the season is anything like the last one, it’s going to be one awesome ride.
Pherain, AFC
P.S. Maybe go easy on the other Arsenal fans, their “delusions” might just be a positive attitude. I mean finding something to be happy about, even in failure can’t be all that bad right?

…I really don’t understand Stewie’s ramblings.

He starts the season with ‘Arsenal fans’ expectations are too low’.

Halfway through if Arsenal are doing well, he’ll tell us all not to get carried away.

And he’ll end the season telling us he was right all along.

So which is it? Are you predicting Arsenal have everything in place to win the league? or is it Arsenal aren’t good enough to win the league?
Graham Simons, Gooner, Norf London