The guard of honour: Performative nonsense for the sake of being seen to do the ‘right thing’

Eleven football players (and the officials, don’t forget them) stand in two lines to applaud the Premier League title winners onto the field.

How do you feel about that? What does it mean? Will you enjoy it? Will you hate it? Should it happen? And now it’s happened, how did you feel about it? Did you like it? Should it have happened?

Someone make it stop.

The incessant guard of honour narrative has been in overdrive since the idea was mooted and then enacted by Chelsea as they formed their respective blue lines to clap the champions, Liverpool, at Stamford Bridge. The predictable noise surrounded the 12 seconds of ceremony. Respect! Tradition! Bravo! Booo! All these things were said and heard.

But, this being 2025, the guard of honour discourse was utterly unrelenting, akin to a relatively minor royal wedding.

Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca was asked about it in his sit-down Sky Sports interview before the match, his pre-match press conference, and his flash interview an hour before kick off,

Arne Slot also had it in his interview before kick-off and his post-match press conference. There will have been many more from the endless list of broadcasters given the opportunity to ask questions, but those were the easiest to find.

Questions to both included:

• “Is there a decision yet about a guard of honour for Liverpool this weekend?”
• “You think that’s right? You happy to do that, to pay respects to our champion team in the tradition of this country?”
• “Looking forward to the guard of honour?”
• “You got the guard of honour from Chelsea, but their fans didn’t seem so impressed. There was a bit of booing. Is that disappointing?”

And pretty much every answer mentioned the word tradition and that Liverpool deserved it. Literally, what else is there to say?

Marc Cucurella was asked about it (“If we need to do it, we do it”), while Virgil van Dijk went into cliche mode and spoke about the guard of honour like it was a football match (“Every guard of honour is big”).

One newspaper ran a total of six guard of honour-based stories before and after the match. We ran one at The Athletic, though choose pretty much any football-related website, certainly of the tabloid variety, and you would have found just as many banal, empty articles hamming up a completely meaningless topic with inflammatory headlines and precious little actual content of any consequence whatsoever.

The former Watford and Birmingham City striker Troy Deeney expressed his view in his column in The Sun — for the record, he thinks the concept is “A load of b*******!”.

Peter Crouch also had his say on TNT Sports. “I don’t like it,” he started. “I don’t know… Maybe it shows respect, but I think it’s a bit embarrassing for the team that comes out and it’s highly embarrassing for the team that is clapping them on the field. It’s not for me.”

Rio Ferdinand chimed in. “I didn’t like it,” he said. “I’ve been fortunate enough to receive a guard of honour and be on the receiving end of it, and both are quite awkward. Crouchy is exactly right.”

Well, there you go, Crouchy is exactly right.

And yet here we are at The Athletic, merely adding a dollop of extra content on the steaming pile of guard of honourness.

Why? What is there to comment on other than to point out that we’re already clearly talking about it far too much?

Well, there is a legitimate question about what function it performs, or more importantly, who actually wants it to happen and for what purpose?

Fine, English tradition etc, and yes, maybe on the final day of the season — or the final home match of the newly crowned champions — it’s a nice ceremonial touch. Four Liverpool games just feels like overkill.

And it would be far better, of course, if these things were just done on the spur of the moment by players who decided themselves that they wanted to do it. Then it might actually carry a genuine gesture of meaningful respect rather than a slow clap with slumped shoulders after you’ve been told to do it.

For decisions to be made by the club in advance, the pomp and ceremony, the media discourse… well, it just verges on performative nonsense for the sake of it, in a very 2025 manner of being seen to be doing the right thing.

The most infamous example, other than for championship-winning teams in recent years, was Chelsea versus Sunderland being paused on the final day of the 2016-17 season to allow John Terry a guard of honour off the field from his team-mates.

Terry was substituted in the 26th minute (he wore No 26) and Sunderland and their manager David Moyes agreed in advance to put the ball out and stop the game for Terry’s big moment.

“This isn’t Hollywood,” a bemused Garth Crooks spluttered on the BBC.

It was to absolutely no one’s surprise that the whole thing was Terry’s idea.

Terry is applauded from the field in the 26th minute (Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)

Scotland takes a different view.

It was Rangers versus Celtic on Sunday, and no, the champions Celtic were afforded no such respect by their fierce rivals. Brendan Rodgers was disappointed: “I always look at the traditions of the game in the Isles, where it was always about that humility for the teams that have lost out on the league.

“But I also respect up here, the rivalry between Celtic and Rangers is a very emotional rivalry.”

Rangers boss Barry Ferguson was straight to the point: “It’s never happened in the past. It’s always been that way. Let’s just continue that way.”

It’s different in other sports. In the United States, the play-off system to crown champions doesn’t allow for the current title tour we’re being subjected to with Liverpool.

In a couple of very traditional English sports, cricket and rugby, guards of honour are commonplace — certainly in the latter, where, at the end of a game, the home team will line up first to applaud the away team through their player-based tunnel, and then vice versa. It’s a genuine sign of esteem and recognition for the battle they’ve just endured and you get the impression the players wouldn’t have it any other way.

Cricket tends to have guards of honour for notable retiring players, such as for James Anderson at Lord’s last year.

Anderson bows out at Lord’s (Gareth Copley/Getty Images)

In football, or at least in the English Premier League, where corporate gloss and everything being great always takes precedence over what people actually want to happen, guards of honour are here to stay.

And hey, if you enjoy the topic, you’re in for a treat this week. Here’s not one, not two, not three, but four AFTV videos about Arsenal having to give Liverpool a guard of honour on Sunday.

If you want to hear what Mikel Arteta thinks about whether the guard of honour will give him and his players motivation to win the title next season, just stick around for this weekend.

(Top photo: Liverpool FC/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)

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