Do we like them?

Do we like Thierry Henry?

Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent record on the things we care about, with one clumsy on-air joke he apologised for and nothing nasty found.

Thierry Henry is the Arsenal great turned television pundit, and these days he is a familiar face on World Cup coverage. He was on Fox Sports' broadcast alongside Zlatan Ibrahimovic in June, and he is also described as a shareholder at Como. We couldn't open enough profiles this time to retell the whole backstory, so this is the recent picture rather than a full life story.

The latest stoush was small. On air during the USA's win over Paraguay, he joked about internet personality IShowSpeed wearing Nigerian shorts with a USA jersey, and said it brought bad luck after Paraguay equalised. Plenty of Nigerian fans online called it offensive and disrespectful. He posted a video saying it was a joke about mixing kits, that he would have said the same of French, Italian or Spanish shorts, and that Nigeria was “never bad luck”.

On the harm check, the record is good. In 2015 he told Sky News that an openly gay teammate would be treated the same on the pitch and that coming out would be good for the sport. We found nothing from him against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and nothing about who he keeps working with that raised a flag. To be fair, we also found nothing from him specifically on trans people, so that part of the record is blank.

In August he got the UEFA President's Award in Monaco, and his reaction was modest: he said he could not have received it without his teammates and team. It means he “didn't do bad stuff out there” and “managed to do some good”, in his words. That's about as unbothered by his own legend as a footballer gets.

So where does that leave us? A bloke with a clean harm record, a documented history of backing gay players and speaking out on racism, and one clumsy on-air gag that he apologised for. We couldn't confirm court cases or serious allegations against him in what we could open, so take the court record as unchecked rather than clear.