X is for ex-players

Loyalty is football is a funny thing. Fans can adore individual players at their club, and then turn on them overnight once they leave. There’s nothing more galling than an ex-player returning with his new side and scoring against you, particularly if the circumstances of the leaving were less than cordial.

At professional level, fans can be savage in how quickly they turn. The initial backlash from Liverpool fans when Trent Alexander-Arnold’s much anticipated move to Real Madrid was announced was shocking for a local lad who had played more than 250 games for the club and helped them to win two league titles and one European Champions League. Even now, some Liverpool fans compare Trent unfavourably with one-club man Steven Gerrard, conveniently forgetting that Gerrard at one point was actively pursuing a move to Chelsea before deciding against it after allegedly receiving death threats against himself and his young family from his own supporters.

If this seems I’m getting at Liverpool, I’m not, it’s just that Trent provides most recent high profile case. Spurs fans still regard Sol Cambell as a traitor for joining local rivals Arsenal in 2001, while I know of at least one Arsenal fan who still can’t forgive Robin van Persie for transferring to Manchester United in 2012. My own team, Fulham, often gives genuinely affectionate receptions to returning ex-players, but that’s not always the case. One recent example – who gets a brief mention in Foul and Fair – is Harvey Elliot, a home-grown talent (I saw him playing for our under 18 team as a 15-year-old, and he was the best player on the pitch) who chose to leave the club at 17 to join Liverpool. Like Trent, he was absolutely within his rights to do so, although his case wasn’t helped by him making some ill-considered comments online about the relative merits of the two teams. Whenever he has since returned to play at Fulham, the fans have let him know they haven’t forgotten the nature of his leaving. In 2022 another of Fulham’s young starlets, Fabio Carvalho, also made the move to Liverpool, but he always got a genuinely warm welcome from his old fans. At least, he did until he moved on again and joined our local rivals Brentford, whereupon the boos became a regular occurrence, albeit without the same rancour that was unleashed on Elliot.

Tribalism in football is part of its appeal – the sense of belonging to something bigger than yourself – but as the stories above make clear, there’s a negative side to it to. Neither Trent nor Gerrard, Campbell nor Van Persie, was doing anything ‘wrong’ in looking elsewhere, but fans always expect players to share their undying loyalty to the club, to adopt the same sense of ‘my team for life’. That’s unrealistic. How many of us would be willing to pledge ourselves for life to a single employer come what may? How many of us wouldn’t consider a move to a new job that offered more money, more security, or an exciting new challenge? Equally, if a player or a manager signs a five-year contract and turns out not to be as good as the club expected, I’ve yet to meet a football fan who would say, ‘Yeah, he’s rubbish, but fair’s fair, we’ve given him a contract so we should stick with him.’ Players who hang around and refuse to move elsewhere in those circumstances are generally reviled as money-grabbing mercenaries. If loyalty means so much, it should go both ways.

One of my favourite descriptions of football is that of all the things that ultimately don’t matter, it’s the most important. Sometimes us fans need to remember the first half of that equation and recognise that it isn’t important enough to absolve us from treating  other human beings with a bit of compassion and empathy.