Occasionally, at various opportune or triumphant moments in his career – posing for a photograph, say, or receiving a medal or trophy – Steven Gerrard has been called upon to smile. This is a challenge that has almost invariably proven beyond him. Take – by way of illustration – his famous goal against Olympiakos in the Champions League, 20 years ago last Sunday. We all remember what happens: header, ball drops, Gerrard smashes it in from distance and tears off in celebration, fists flying, teammates in pursuit.
But is he smiling? Not really! Something is definitely happening to his face: a sort of simultaneous compression and explosion. And clearly he prefers this state of affairs to any alternative. But you would probably characterise his expression – at one of the most memorable and satisfying moments of his career – as more of a growl, a scream of rage and defiance and exorcism and vindication. Happiness: by and large, this was something Gerrard preferred to leave to others.
Certainly, having spent many hours pausing, rewinding and parsing the Gerrard episode of the new Netflix documentary Saudi Pro League: Kickoff, I can testify that there is little to no footage of Gerrard smiling here either. What we get instead, as his undistinguished Al-Ettifaq team plod their way through an undistinguished debut season, is what we now have to call the classic Gerrard expression. One honed at Ibrox and developed at Villa Park and now perfected on the touchline in Dammam: that crumpled, vacant, vaguely grimacing, hands-in-pockets look, a doomscrolling-at-2am look, the look of a man steeling himself for the third hour of his speed awareness course.
For a player who inspired such cinematic feats on the pitch, Gerrard is a strangely inert presence on camera. Granted, there is a strictly limited amount of jeopardy to be wrung out of a laboured drift to sixth place in a nothing league. But even a sequence inserted to add a little levity – a kickabout with his son on a mid-season training camp – turns into a slightly harrowing hazing of a seven-year-old child. “He thinks he’s a goalie, but he’s not,” Gerrard grumbles to the camera as another shot squirms through his son’s hands. “Put your arms on it! Got wrists like chocolate.”
Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn, then, that since the cameras stopped rolling Gerrard has not been able to inspire Ettifaq to superhuman feats. They sit 11th out of 18 teams in the Pro League, with 11 goals in 13 games. The football, heavily reliant on a half-paced Gini Wijnaldum, has been appalling. Crowds have barely risen above a few thousand. Gerrard’s assistant Dean Holden and sporting director Mark Allen have been fired, and Ettifaq fans are clamouring for Gerrard to go next.
Which is, if you give it even a moment’s thought, quite an achievement. Here you have the world’s richest and most ambitious league: a temple to excess, decadence and star wattage, a playboys’ playground where money is no object and morals have no place. Meanwhile you, Steven Gerrard, are one of the greatest footballers of your generation, a walking time capsule of astonishing goals and treasured memories, who then won the league title in your first managerial job and was basically assumed to be one of the most promising young coaches in Europe. How do you go from that to this?
And to be clear, this is not simply a function of results. Fine coaches such as Nuno Espírito Santo and Marcelo Gallardo have been sacked from the Pro League and bounced straight back into elite management. Rather the issue here is the simple lack of joy, the sense of inertia, the slow slide into irrelevance. Pretty much every player or coach who moves to Saudi has had to wrestle with the same transactional dilemma: you’re giving up visibility, competitive edge, whatever ethical compass you may once have possessed. What are you getting in return?
Perhaps for some, it really is just about the money. For Gerrard, I’m not so sure. If money was his reason for being, he would have left Liverpool and taken one of the numerous lucrative offers that came his way when the world was at his feet. On some level, he really does seem to believe the rehearsed spiel he keeps wheeling out about wanting to get out of his comfort zone, to challenge himself, to improve.
And yet at the same time, his every action betrays a man already half in and half out. There was the decision to locate his family in neighbouring Bahrain. Ettifaq fans were incensed by his comments on a recent podcast about rescheduling training sessions so he could watch Liverpool games. His social media is a stream of Liverpool nostalgia. But the club that once adored him, the game he once bestrode, has essentially left him behind.
Gerrard the player could always manifest greatness. A drab game, a joyless month, a season of suffering, could always be redeemed in an instant with a flash of pure genius, and he knew it, and more importantly so did everybody else. But when you’re standing on the touchline in front of thousands of empty seats watching Abdullah Madu putting the ball out for a throw on an endless loop, what can you offer? More grimly forgettable nuggets about sweat and sacrifice?
Perhaps this was the inevitable consequence of throwing one of English football’s most doom-saddled characters into the world’s most doom-saddled league. A kind of multi-layered suffering: sporting death built on actual death, a place where football goes to curl up and expire. The Saudi Pro League promises its participants many things: riches, luxury, adulation. But – and deep down, you suspect Gerrard knew this from the moment he signed up – happiness was never one of them.
