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    When You Can’t Believe What You’re Seeing

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    The story, more than the sport, is what matters.Nobody is quite sure where the term “kayfabe” originated. It may be a bastardized form of pig Latin, something to do with the actual word “fake.” It may have its roots in the culture of wandering 19th-century carnivals, the world inhabited by P.T. Barnum and the confidence men and the salesmen who sold actual snake oil.Its modern usage, though, is sufficiently specific that only a relatively small proportion of people would even have a sense of what it means. Kayfabe is, essentially, the illusory cloak that is doggedly draped over professional wrestling: the maintenance of the pretense that what you see in the ring is unscripted, competitive, what we would consider real.For decades, wrestlers were expected to keep kayfabe even when they were off the clock. The on-screen heroes and villains were not supposed to drive to events together, or to socialize together after them, in case they were seen and the illusion was broken. The omertà had to be upheld at all costs. Breaching it was not just a transgression. It was a betrayal.As Abraham Josephine Riesman delineates in “Ringmaster,” her magisterial biography of Vince McMahon — close personal friend of Donald Trump and longstanding, all-purpose tyrant behind World Wrestling Entertainment — there came a point, sometime around the 1990s, when that all felt just a little anachronistic.For anyone other than perhaps the very young, she posits, by that stage most wrestling fans had long understood the nature of what they were watching. More than that, they had delighted in it. Riesman’s theory is that the fun was not so much in seeing who won, but in trying to decode the why. What did this star’s propulsion mean for behind-the-scenes politics? What did this defeat indicate about the next twist in the never-ending tale?McMahon’s genius — again, in Riesman’s telling — was that he accepted the new reality. Rather than try to cling on to the tradition, to insist on the fantasy, he leaned into the wink and the nudge.Nobody ever said, of course, that the whole thing was a soap opera, a piece of brutal theater. But the sense that the real story could be found in what was happening backstage, that there was a political process behind who rose and who fell — all of that moved front and center. McMahon invented what Riesman calls neokayfabe.In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as McMahon was pioneering this new approach, soccer was changing, too. Delegations of executives from Europe’s major teams looked on jealously at the sporting landscape of the United States, where money flowed freely from television, through glamorous, lucrative leagues, and straight into their counterparts’ pockets.It was the N.F.L., with its cheerleaders and its fireworks and its sense of event, that caught their eyes particularly, and they returned home with whatever ideas they could mimic. Dance troupes appeared at midtable Premier League games. Flashy graphics and portentous music splashed across television screens. Stadiums modernized, attracting more families. That allowed ticket prices to increase and corporate sections to flourish.There is absolutely no evidence that anyone within soccer thought to learn anything from professional wrestling. Nobody, most likely, would have even contemplated it. Soccer, after all, belongs to the world of sports. Even McMahon long ago gave up on the idea that wrestling fit neatly under that umbrella. Instead, with typical euphemism, he refers to it as sports entertainment.And yet, behind differences so glaring they are almost existential, it is possible to make the case that modern soccer — the soccer of the Premier League and the Champions League era, the soccer of social media and saturation coverage, of rolling news channels and cultural hegemony — owes more to professional wrestling than it does to any other industry.As in wrestling, it is increasingly difficult to escape the sense that the action itself is secondary to all of the noise that surrounds it — the transfer rumors, the coaching feuds, the undeniable theater that now attends the weekly news conferences, and the declarations of pride and fury and rage that follow every utterance, no matter how banal.Games exist in a pitch of frenzy, but rather than being seen as the purpose of the whole exercise, they serve simply to feed the sport’s insatiable hunger for a story. The overall sweep of each set of 90 minutes is, frequently, lost in a miasma of exaggerated controversy.Tactics and strategy and individual excellence are acknowledged, of course, but drowned out by an unrelenting focus on the failures — both technical and moral — of the referee, or the defeated manager, or whichever of the players is deemed to have let the team down by trying either too hard to win, or not enough.That, in many ways, is the root of the sport’s success, of course. As the cultural commentator Neal Gabler has written, we live in an era of entertainment; in order to survive, in order to thrive, every aspect of life has to turn itself into entertainment. It is just that soccer has done it better than most.Perhaps that is because, more than anything, what soccer has borrowed from wrestling is Riesman’s concept of neokayfabe. Soccer’s global cultural cachet, its status as the most popular pastime that the world has ever known, is both its strength and its weakness.Its stars are subject to the same sort of intense scrutiny that attends Hollywood’s most famous faces. It is squabbled over by the scions of global capitalism, by nation states, by private equity and public investment funds. It has its heroes, and its villains, and both inspire fierce loyalty and deep-seated loathing. It is an analog product trying to adapt to a modern age. It is among the most valuable forms of content that exist, a saffron for the AppleTV+ age.The trick, though, is that the sport has managed to subsume all of that — all of these things that happen to it, these currents beyond its control — into part of the story. Just as in wrestling, soccer has been able to take its inner workings, its politicking and its power struggles and even its scandal, and fold it into the entertainment.That approach applies even when it brings with it the danger that the sport’s integrity — the thing that competitive sports require in the same way as wrestling needs a willing suspension of disbelief, the thing that makes it real — might be compromised.The principle applies no matter the issue. The suspicion that Manchester City has cheated the sport’s financial rules becomes a chance for Pep Guardiola and his team to hit back at their critics; the arrival of the Saudi state at Newcastle is both a new beginning for a proud, beloved team and a test for the strength of the established order. Even the criticism can be leveraged. Newcastle can be the hero or the villain. Either sells, so either is fine.The engulfing of Juventus’s hierarchy in allegations that it has committed actual financial crimes is presented as a challenge for a fallen giant. Barcelona has mortgaged its future because of colossal mismanagement, but what does that mean for Pedri? A small cabal of clubs greedily claiming every trophy and every glimmer of talent for themselves is presented not as a dangerous economic trend but as testament to their innate greatness.The impression — wrong, perhaps, but as previously stated, damaging nonetheless — that the business links between Chelsea’s owners and Saudi Arabia allowed the club to clear the chaff from its squad with surprising ease becomes a controversy, of course, but not one about the sport’s complex relationship with, and its growing vulnerability to, money and power.Instead, the peril of the accusation is lost in claim and counterclaim over the motivation behind the criticism, lost in soccer’s absolute refusal to understand the world as anything less than unremittingly tribal, the belief that serves as the sport’s underlying assumption, its equivalent of wrestling’s illusion.Everything, eventually, becomes part of the story. And the story, more than the sport, is what matters. That is what is sold by the broadcasters and the news outlets and everyone else who does so much to sustain a mutually beneficial ecosystem. It is the magic trick that lies behind modern soccer.It shows you exactly what it is, pulls you behind the curtain, harnesses your outrage and concern and disgust and fear when you see what lurks there, and sells it straight back to you. It is pure, uncut McMahon, a monument of neokayfabe, straight from the sports entertainment playbook, with the emphasis on the entertainment.Living Your ValuesSteven Gerrard, right, on his first day as Al-Ettifaq soccer minister. Er, coach.Ettifaq Media Office/via ReutersJordan Henderson is, of course, quite entitled to do whatever he wants. Should he decide to accept an eye-wateringly lucrative offer from Al-Ettifaq, the Saudi club now managed by his friend and former teammate Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool captain will stand accused of sacrificing his professional ambitions, and his dignity, for little more than naked greed.The reality is more complex than that. Yes, Henderson has spent more than a decade earning several million dollars a year. (At a rough estimate, his pay, after tax, currently stands at around $6 million.) He is a very rich man. It is true that a soccer player’s career is a short one. But a player of Henderson’s profile does not exactly need to worry about how he will cope.Still, the money reportedly on offer in Saudi Arabia — somewhere north of $30 million a year — can still rightly be described as transformational. Henderson’s primary concern will be his family. If this is his opportunity to provide for them for generations, then it is hardly a sin that he, like several others this summer, might consider it.What makes it unpalatable that Henderson, in particular, might be coaxed to the relentlessly expansionist Saudi Pro League is that he is not just a soccer player. He has, in recent years, emerged as an eloquent advocate for not only his club but for professional players as a whole. More important, he has been a staunch and sincere ally for L.G.B.T.Q. rights.“When you see something that is clearly wrong and makes another human being feel excluded you should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them,” he wrote in 2021. “That’s where my own position on homophobia in football is rooted.“Before I’m a footballer, I’m a parent, a husband, a son, a brother and a friend to the people in my life who matter so much to me. The idea that any of them would feel excluded from playing or attending a football match, simply for being and identifying as who they are, blows my mind.”There is no reason to claim these are not Henderson’s values. He has every right to move to Saudi Arabia, just as Saudi Arabia has every right to want to improve the quality of its domestic league. He has every right to ignore the criticism that he is moving solely for money.There comes a point, though, where if you do not live your values, then it is very difficult to assume they are your values at all. If Henderson decides to effectively endorse the geopolitical power-play of a country where homosexuality remains illegal, then not only will it damage the credibility of soccer players who speak out on social issues, it will make it look a lot as if what he says, and what he does, are very different things.CorrespondenceIt has always been a source of considerable pride that this section of the newsletter can be considered a collaborative learning space. Not in the sense that you, the reader, benefit from my great and beneficent wisdom, but that I get to take all of your ideas and, several months down the line, pass them off as my own.So thanks to all of you who wrote in to explain the origins of the Apertura-Clausura system that prevails in so much of Latin America. “I’d be willing to bet it is an Argentine invention,” Fernando Gama wrote. “The first one in Argentina was 1991-92, whereas Colombia and Mexico were 2002.”His theory on why Argentina adopted the approach is that its teams hoped to “reap a profit if they were available for international friendlies during the European summer.” The benefit, though, may have been different. “It makes sense for each of them to count as a full championship if you take into account how quickly teams get dismantled by the European market. It is very hard to maintain the same base team for an entire year.”Juan Botella, too, believes that Argentina provided the genesis, certainly for Mexico. In the 1990s, “Mexican fútbol’s ruling elite realized they could make more money following Argentina’s approach,” he wrote. “There was much complaint from traditionalists, who prefer a yearlong tournament with no playoffs.”Juan and Gustavo Ortiz are on the same side there. “It delivers short-term satisfaction for team directors who want more national championships in detriment to the climax of one champion at the end of the season,” he wrote. “I prefer the Uruguayan system. They play two championships, Apertura and Clausura. Each has a winner that plays the team with the most points won during both tournaments.”In exchange for educating me, I will endeavor to answer a question from Ken Andrejko. “Do players receive a percentage of the transfer fee when they change clubs?” he asked. No, is the answer, but that’s a bit glib. They do, however, receive a signing-on fee, although that can be both directly and inversely proportional to the size of the transfer fee.And some wonderful — if belatedly published — pedantry from Iain Dunlop. “You referred to the concept of Newcastle pursuing ‘multiclub’ as a noun,” he wrote. “I would argue that Newcastle and others are in fact attempting to multiclub (I multiclub, you multiclub, he/she multiclubs, etc.), and thus it should be classified as a verb.In many ways, Iain, that would be preferable to what is actually happening. The precise quote on Newcastle was that the club is looking into “doing multiclub.” (I do multiclub, you do multiclub, he/she/the Saudi state does multiclub.) Does that make it part of the verb? I’m not enough of a grammarian to know.That’s all for this week. Please keep all of your thoughts coming to askrory@nytimes.com, but do bear in mind that, after next week’s edition, this newsletter will be stepping aside to make room for our World Cup briefing (which you all should sign up for immediately.)Beyond that, unfortunately, there is only shadow and doubt. We’ve had plenty of emails over the last week inquiring about what happens to this newsletter — or the people involved in its production — in light of The Times’s decision to reconsider how it covers sports. Your messages of support and well wishes were much appreciated. I’ll tell you what’s happening to the newsletter as soon as anyone tells me. More

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      Liverpool's Jordan Henderson: The Captain of Everything

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      Liverpool’s Jordan Henderson has not played in months. But the art of being a captain is not limited to soccer, and for Henderson, leading is not limited to his team.LIVERPOOL, England — Jordan Henderson had plenty of things on his mind. First and foremost, there was the wound on his thigh, a legacy of the surgery he had undergone a few weeks earlier, and which was not yet properly healed. Until it had, he could not do much beyond change his bandages, and wait. The problem, he would admit, is that he is not much given to waiting.He needed it to heal so that he could train again, and he needed to train again so that he could play again. This was his next worry. That night, his Liverpool team was hosting Real Madrid in the Champions League quarterfinal. It was the sort of occasion that Henderson relishes, but the wound meant he would be absent, as he had been for about six weeks.Henderson is not much given to absence, either. In the course of several hours of interviews spread over the last three months, as he recuperated from the injury, he acknowledged often that he is a “bad patient.” He finds the stillness difficult, but he finds the lack of agency, the powerlessness, worse.He had been there over the winter as Liverpool’s season imploded. Ravaged by injury and running on empty, the club lost six home games in a row. It slipped from the Premier League summit to fourth and then sixth and then eighth. It felt, to Henderson, like it was his “responsibility” to help restore the course.And he knew that if the wound did not heal and he could not play again for Liverpool that his plans for the summer would be derailed. He had spoken to Gareth Southgate, the England manager, who had assured the 30-year-old Henderson that he would be given all the time he could to prove his fitness for this summer’s European Championship. Henderson knew, though, that there was a deadline, and that he would have to meet it.Henderson has not played since February but hopes to return in time to make England’s roster for this summer’s European Championship.Yet even with all of that on his plate, with all of that waiting and worrying to do, Henderson had taken on something else, too. He had been thinking a lot, recently, about abuse on social media. Like anyone in the public eye, he had firsthand experience of it: not only the constant, low-key droning of the snipers and the trolls, but the barrage of acid he had endured in his early days at Liverpool.He was less concerned about that, though, than about his friends and teammates who had been racially abused, about young players being exposed to it before their skins have thickened, about teenagers and children being bullied online. And so he did something that he is given to do: He found out how he could help.Earlier in the year, he had given testimony to a British government panel on the issue of social media safety. A week earlier, he had handed over control of his accounts to a nonprofit that fights online abuse. And then, as his teammates prepared to face Real Madrid, he held a Zoom meeting with executives at Instagram, peppering them with questions about what measures they were taking to help.They told him about tombstone folders and muting comments. He pressed them for answers on the mechanisms they have for reporting abuse. He learned about their use of artificial intelligence. He told them where he thought their efforts fell short.He did not, really, have to do any of it. He had enough on his plate. But that, as his friend and former teammate Nedum Onuoha said, is not really how Henderson works. “Jordan wants to listen, learn and understand,” he said. “He sees a greater perspective than his own.”Henderson does not put it in quite such glowing terms. He feels a “massive responsibility,” he said, not only to Liverpool, not only to fans, but to anyone who looks up to players. “We have the platform to help,” he said. It comes down, in his mind, to quite a simple equation. “If I can help, why would I not?”Hug It OutOne thing that becomes very clear, very quickly, in the cavernous silence of an empty Premier League stadium is that Jordan Henderson is extremely loud. During a game, he essentially offers play-by-play commentary: chiding and cheerleading, barking orders, directing play. He talks constantly. He stops only to gather breath, and shout.Henderson admits that his in-game monologues can sometimes go too far, and a few have led to apologies to teammates. “In the heat of the moment, you forget.” Pool photo by Carl RecineHe does not quite accept that assessment. He will admit only to being “vocal,” and he is aware that not all of his teammates appreciate it. “Some don’t mind,” he said. “Some don’t like it.” He has gotten better, over the years, at working out who falls into which category. If he calls it wrong, he is quick to make amends. “You hug it out,” he said, “and you move on.”Henderson came of age in an era when English soccer was still dominated by its captains. Roy Keane at Manchester United, John Terry at Chelsea, Steven Gerrard at Liverpool: They were symbols of and synonyms for the clubs they represented, captains in the tradition of Bryan Robson and Roy of the Rovers, figures who dominated games and bent seasons to their will.He became a captain, though, at a time when all that was starting to seem a little antiquated in the age of the supercoach and the system, when instructions come from the sideline and movements are learned by rote, when the rise of data has relegated the great intangibles — character and hunger and desire — to a sort of ancient superstition.To Henderson, though, being a captain matters. It is a responsibility he feels intensely, and personally. He thinks, a lot, about what it is to be a captain, about his own needs and those of his team, about the people management side and the Human Resources side and the psychologist side, about what sort of captain he wants to be.He has wrestled with that balance ever since he was given the job at Liverpool, handed the daunting task of following in Gerrard’s footsteps. In one sense, he was the obvious candidate: He had been a vice captain for a couple of years, and he had Gerrard’s seal of approval. “I always had the confidence that he felt I was the right person,” Henderson said.Steven Gerrard handing the captain’s armband to Henderson during a game in 2015, foreshadowing a change that became permanent.AMA/Corbis, via Getty ImagesIn another sense, though, he was a risk. It is hard to imagine, now, but Henderson became captain only a couple of years after Liverpool tried to trade him for the American forward Clint Dempsey. When Jürgen Klopp arrived as manager not long after Henderson was appointed, there was speculation the coach might wish to demote him.Klopp did the opposite. He offered Henderson his unqualified support. The player had struggled, initially, with the weight of the captaincy. He did not want his teammates to think the honor had changed him, but replacing Gerrard, he said, “probably affected me mentally.”“I was taking responsibility for a lot of things. I’ve always put the team first, but I was taking too much on for everyone else. That can jeopardize your own performances. Jürgen helped a lot with that side of things. He helped me take a bit of the weight off my back. It felt like it got easier.”Henderson has not, by any stretch, abdicated responsibility. He still sees it as his job to help young players and new signings settle in to Liverpool’s dressing room. He still feels it falls on him to maintain morale, to gather the team’s leaders when things are going wrong, to act as a bridge with ownership when necessary. He still takes defeat badly, personally.As he recuperated from his surgery, as he waited for his wound to heal, it was that side of the role he missed most. He wanted to be out on the field, of course, to try to change the rhythm and the course of Liverpool’s season, which can end with the solace of a Champions League place if it wins at home against Crystal Palace on Sunday. But more than that, he wanted to be back in the training facility, urging and exhorting and listening and talking.He knew, though, that he could not. When teammates were injured, he always made a point of checking in on them, offering to help if he could. He did not want them to feel they had to return the favor.“They have enough going on with games and everything,” he said. “They can’t be worrying about me.” All That We Have BuiltWhen fans turned against Liverpool for joining a proposed Super League, its players were caught in the middle.Jon Super/Associated PressHenderson was at home when Liverpool’s team bus pulled up outside Elland Road in Leeds. The injury to his adductor muscle that had forced him out of action for two months was healing nicely; he felt stronger, fitter, better. His mood had improved, too. He had been able to see his teammates a little more. Liverpool’s fortunes were turning, upgraded from disastrous to merely disappointing.That evening he watched on television as fans surrounded the bus carrying his teammates, venting their fury at the proposals — reported the day earlier — for a European Super League.Liverpool’s players had found out about the proposals at the same time as everyone else. Initially, Henderson did not pay them too much heed. Liverpool’s owners, Fenway Sports Group, had been central to the plans, but nobody had informed the players. As he read about the proposal, though, it struck him as inherently “unacceptable.” “Teams not being relegated isn’t right,” he said. “You have to earn your right to be in the Champions League.”When he realized the Super League was not just paper talk, Henderson’s immediate reaction was to protect not just his team. By then, someone on the trip let him know that, when the players got inside the stadium in Leeds, they had found shirts waiting for them in the dressing room that were emblazoned with the Champions League logo and the slogan: “Earn It.”“The T-shirts, I felt, were disrespectful,” Henderson said. “The players hadn’t done anything. It wasn’t something we wanted..”Leeds United players wore T-shirts critical of the Super League before a match against Liverpool. But they also left a set for the visitors, annoying Henderson.Pool photo by Paul EllisBut he worried, too, about his club. He felt loyalty and, to some extent, gratitude to Liverpool’s owners. “If you look at it, they’ve done a good job,” he said. “They’ve grown the club. They’ve put money in. They’ve built a new training ground. They brought the manager in.”His fear, though, was that the Super League might drive a wedge between the club and its fans, that the unity of purpose that had driven Liverpool to the Champions League title in 2019 and the Premier League trophy in 2020 would be irrevocably fractured. “I was worried it would tarnish it,” he said. “We have all built to this point, and I didn’t want a divide.”After the game, Henderson and his teammates discussed their next step. They decided, the next day, to post a message to their social media accounts, drawn from comments midfielder James Milner had made to a television reporter after the game. “We don’t like it, and we don’t want it to happen,” he had said.The idea was to release the statement simultaneously, a synchronized signal that Liverpool’s players were unified in their opposition, and done in a way that nobody would have to risk public wrath alone. But someone had to go first. The rest of Liverpool’s squad did not post the message until Henderson had pressed the button.A Captain for the CaptainsMost of the time, the WhatsApp group containing all 20 current Premier League captains lies dormant. It is updated occasionally, adding or removing members as teams are promoted and relegated, but for the most part, it is silent. Its members might, in some cases, be friends, but in the thick of the season, they are principally rivals.As soccer grasped at the significance of the Super League proposals, though, it buzzed into life. What had happened at Leeds had convinced Henderson that it was important the players presented a united front. Divisions along tribal lines, he knew, would only undercut the message.So on the same day as he was coordinating the Liverpool’s players’ response to the idea, he was suggesting a Zoom meeting of all the league’s captains to discuss a broader statement. In the end, it was not required: The Super League collapsed the day before it was scheduled to take place.But the effort was emblematic of how, over the last year or so, Henderson’s role as a captain has extended beyond Liverpool. Onuoha, only half-joking, calls him the de facto “captain of captains.”Onuoha, second from left, and Henderson, center, in 2010, when they played for Sunderland.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesIt is not a position Henderson has sought, but there is something about him that draws his peers and fellow professionals to him. The existence of the captains’ WhatsApp group at all, in fact, owes something to him.Last year, as soccer tried to pick its way back from the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, Henderson fielded calls from friends at several other clubs. They were all unsolicited, unexpected, and they were all broadly the same: the players wanted to help, but none of them knew how to do it. Instinctively, they called Henderson.“There were players doing it privately and players doing it with their clubs, but it struck me that we were more powerful together,” he said. He did his research, and corralled the captains to throw their — and their team’s — efforts behind an organization called N.H.S. Charities Together, which works to support staff members and patients of Britain’s National Health Service. The initiative was only made public because the players wanted staff to know they appreciated their work.Henderson was similarly engaged as the captains — through the same WhatsApp group — workshopped ideas for how to show support for the Black Lives Matter protests as the Premier League prepared to return to the field. It was Henderson’s idea to affix a Black Lives Matter badge to every player’s sleeve, but he proposed it only after reaching out to Black colleagues.The Black Lives Matter patch that all players wore on their jerseys to start the Premier League season.Pool photo by Cath Ivill“He called me during the protests to talk,” said the Nigeria-born, Manchester-reared Onuoha. “He asked me to tell him about my experiences. I love him for that. He didn’t have to make that call, but he wanted to learn, and to understand.”A New FightIn the aftermath of the Super League debacle, Henderson still had plenty of things on his mind. His training was ramping up. He would not, most likely, be able to play for Liverpool again this season, as his team sought to salvage a Champions League place, but he hoped to recover to earn his spot for England. This week, Southgate sent two physiotherapists to Liverpool’s training facility to check on his progress.And he was still thinking about protecting his teammates, still thinking about protecting his club, still thinking about making sure all of the players at all of the other clubs remained united. But he was also thinking, more broadly, about what happens next.“The Super League wasn’t right,” he said. “But the new Champions League isn’t right, either. There has been no consideration for player welfare. I know it is hard to hear players moaning when people are working nine-to-five, but we are giving everything when we play. You are exhausted when you come off after a game, and then you have no time to recover. It’s unacceptable. It’s screaming for injury.”Henderson trains alone at Liverpool, kept at a distance from his teammates by his injury and coronavirus rules. He has seen that firsthand. The injury that cost him the last three months of the season, he believes, was a result of soccer’s compressed, overloaded schedule. And he has “no doubt” that the ruptured patellar tendon that ended the season of Joe Gomez, his teammate with Liverpool and England, “was a consequence of what we have been asked to do.”It has all led him to the conclusion that something has to change. He does not know what that change might look like, not yet. All he knows is that he has a voice, one that carries way beyond the confines of an empty stadium, and that it is his duty to use it: on the N.H.S., on equality, on social media abuse, on whatever he feels strongly about.He does not do it because he thinks anyone should feel compelled to listen to him, just because he is a soccer player, just because he is a captain. He does it because he feels that status gives him a responsibility to speak, whenever he feels he can help. In his mind, it is quite simple. “If you feel strongly about something,” he said, “then it would be a bit of a sin not to.” More