There are special ingredients that coaches tend to identify in Jordan Henderson, who has nearly always backed himself while performing with a sense that he has everything to prove.
The trait runs all the way back to his earliest days as a footballer, perhaps best illustrated by a story that led to a first-team opportunity at Sunderland.
It is almost 18 years to the day since Henderson and the rest of the club’s under-21 players were hauled back to the training ground by the first team manager, Roy Keane, after losing a pre-season game at non-League Gateshead.
Keane had not attended the match, but he was furious with the result. Neil Bailey, Keane’s appointment as a youth coach, remembers Keane locking the dressing room door and asking each one of the players whether they thought they were good enough to have a career in the game.
“A lot of them shied away from the confrontation,” Bailey told The Athletic in 2020. “But Jordan went: ‘Yeah, I do…,’ which impressed Roy.”
The following afternoon, Keane rewarded Henderson for standing up for himself with a first team debut against Ajax in another friendly at the Stadium of Light. Three months later, he was involved in a competitive match, introduced as a half-time substitute by Keane with Sunderland already three goals behind and well on their way to a 5-0 drubbing at Chelsea.
Even someone as driven as Henderson would surely not have imagined on that November afternoon that he would be returning to Stamford Bridge, aged 36, to sign for a club now managed by Xabi Alonso.
Back in 2008, Alonso was in the middle of his last season at Liverpool, where Henderson later played for 12 seasons, captaining the team for seven. Upon his own departure from Liverpool, Jurgen Klopp tried to replace him with a record transfer for Moises Caicedo, and when he did not get him, he went for Romeo Lavia but missed out again to Chelsea.
Now, Henderson will compete with both players for a berth in the same midfield.
Henderson playing for Sunderland in 2009 (Matthew Lewis/Getty Images)
Football can be a strange old business. Yet there is clearly something high-level coaches still admire about Henderson, three years after he found out Klopp, Liverpool’s former manager, did not rate him quite as highly as he used to after a discussion about a lucrative offer suddenly coming his way.
This reckoning resulted in Henderson convincing himself it was a good idea to follow the money to Saudi Arabia’s Al Ettifaq. It was a move he quickly regretted for different reasons, not least the reputational damage that followed him to a country where same-sex activity and non-gender conformity are criminalised. This also came after he’d highlighted LGBTQ+ rights during his time at Liverpool.
By the end of 2023, he was angling for a move back to Europe. He signed for Ajax, where he was appointed captain. Last summer, he returned to England, helping Brentford to ninth place — their highest finish in five Premier League campaigns, but he was not always in the starting XI. After 22 starts and 10 substitute appearances, he became the first English player to be selected for seven major international tournaments at the 2026 World Cup, where Thomas Tuchel spoke enthusiastically about his leadership and standard-setting away from matches.
Having barely played, Henderson was mocked for injuring himself in the celebrations after England’s round-of-16 victory over Mexico in the Azteca Stadium. However, his team-mates openly spoke about how important it was for him to stick around. Morgan Rogers said: “To have him back as quickly in camp, and back to normal him, will be the best for the group.”
Competition in the squad raises questions over how much game time Henderson will have at Chelsea, but he does fit into their drive for more experience and maturity. Henderson’s story is underpinned by patience, perseverance and endurance, and it should act as a lesson to any young footballer. Chelsea’s squad is stacked with plenty of those.
Before Sunderland, Henderson played for Fulwell Juniors, one of the best amateur youth set-ups in Tyne and Wear. His coach there was Shaun Turnbull, who acknowledged to The Athletic in 2020 that Henderson was not the best player in the team, but “what set him apart was his willingness to track back and win the ball”.
Henderson had a natural enthusiasm, and at Sunderland, his youth coach Elliott Dickman suggested that although he was “good at running forward, but even better at running backwards”, his willingness to do the hard yards kept him at the club, especially when others grew at a faster rate.
“Eight or nine boys got signed on as a scholar ahead of Jordan because we didn’t know whether his body would catch up,” remembered Ged McNamee, the club’s academy manager. “We waited for as long as possible before offering him a deal.”
The uncertainty turned out to be useful for Henderson, who spoke years later about the impact this period had on his mentality.
“It taught me you are never really done,” he said during a roundtable interview in 2018, as Liverpool prepared for the first of three Champions League finals during his time as captain, winning one in 2019. That he also became a Premier League winner a year after that means he remains the only Liverpool captain since Graeme Souness to lift the most prestigious European and domestic trophies in successive seasons.
Yet at Liverpool, there was a long struggle for acceptance, with doubts about his ability spreading across all levels, from the supporters to the club’s owners, managers, and his team-mates.
Though Luis Suarez came to realise he could rely on Henderson, there was one training session where Liverpool’s best player indicated how he really felt. “Luis was waving his arms about all over the place after I didn’t pass to him quickly enough,” Henderson told The Greatest Game with Jamie Carragher in 2019. For Henderson, it felt like a scalding that meant something.
After leaving Sunderland in 2011, Henderson became a lightning rod for criticism at Anfield, especially under Kenny Dalglish. When Dalglish’s short second reign came to an end, Fenway Sports Group were willing to sell Henderson. Even though Brendan Rodgers, the club’s new manager, agreed with them, Henderson decided to stay and fight for his place.
Henderson playing against Bolton in 2012 (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
In the meantime, he was written off by Manchester United’s Sir Alex Ferguson, who suggested in his autobiography that his running gait would end up holding him back. Though he became a key component in Rodgers’ midfield during the 2013-14 season, as Liverpool went closer to ending their title wait than at any point since 1990, the next few seasons were undermined by a heel injury that left him in agony.
With Steven Gerrard gone, Henderson became Liverpool’s captain, but he would miss so many games that he did not always feel like the team’s leader, even under Rodgers’ successor, Klopp, who offered no guarantees about the player’s future upon his own appointment.
Henderson was the squad’s shop steward, and when team-mates complained about the late timing of training sessions to fall in line with kick-offs, he famously approached the manager on their behalf to try to schedule them earlier. Henderson reassured Klopp there were “plenty” of players who felt the same way, only for Klopp to insist each one of them came to see him directly. “No one ever went up,” Henderson recalled in the High Performance Podcast in 2023.
The five-week period from the start of May 2019 probably best sums up Henderson’s time at Liverpool because it started with him, as captain, on the bench in their crushing Champions League semi-final first leg defeat at Barcelona. A week later, he somehow soldiered on until the final whistle despite clearly being injured in the opening exchanges of a famous return match at Anfield, where Liverpool went through with a 4-0 victory. Then, at the start of June in Madrid, he was in tears as he celebrated winning the final, embracing with his father, Brian, who was battling with cancer.
These were hugely emotional scenes, so it will be strange for Liverpool supporters seeing Henderson in a Chelsea shirt. Perhaps the idea that he was no longer wanted by Liverpool in 2023 will help Henderson in those conversations, though it should be stressed Liverpool’s directors were willing to cut him loose in 2021, only for Klopp to intervene with a new contract.
The period in Saudi Arabia, which amounted to just 19 appearances, was surely more harmful. Judging by the positive reception he received upon his return to Anfield for the first time as an opposition player on the final day of last season, at least some attitudes have softened since 2023 when, as Mohamed Salah told TNT Sports, Henderson, “didn’t get the send-off or farewell he deserved because he left immediately”.
In the same interview with Gerrard earlier this year, Salah, Henderson’s team-mate of six seasons, suggested he had been: “One of the best players at this club… without him being there in the dressing room, we wouldn’t have achieved what we achieved.”
One of the reasons why Klopp eventually decided that a parting of the ways might be a good idea was because he envisaged Henderson playing less, and during these periods, he was difficult to keep happy.
Henderson lifts the Champions League trophy in 2019 (Matthias Hangst/Getty Images)
For England, he seems to have accepted a role that isn’t defined by what he does on the pitch, perhaps because he cares so much about representing his country. Yet he has never explicitly been in that position in club football, certainly one he has no affiliation with.
After Henderson’s year on the sidelines internationally, Tuchel introduced himself by video call because he wanted to gauge Henderson’s reactions. The player’s club coach at Ajax at that time, Francesco Farioli, suggested that Henderson’s “mentality and professionalism” were not in decline, as reported by Sky Sports.
Tuchel described him as a “serial winner”. He also told ITV, as reported by Sky Sports, that Henderson was “the glue in every team where he has played”.
And that is the key question from here: How much will he play for Chelsea, and will it be enough to appeal to his instincts?
