“HOW OLD IS THAT TORTOISE?” Declan Rice may be the most expensive British footballer of all time these days, but he’s lost none of his curiosity about the age of domesticated reptiles. Arsenal’s £105m club-record signing is back on familiar turf this afternoon, meeting FourFourTwo at our base for the day – a location in leafy Cobham, complete with a pet tortoise wandering around quietly in the background. It’s 15, thanks for asking.
Coincidentally, we’re just a few hundred yards from Chelsea’s training ground, where the Kingston-born midfielder learned his trade between the ages of seven and 14. “I spent the first part of my career coming to this area, every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday,” he explains to FFT. Today, our location has nothing to do with the Blues and everything to do with convenience – Rice is popping in to see us on his way home from his new training base at London Colney.
FFT have sat down with the 24-year-old twice before, in August 2019 and November 2021. Despite a significant increase in fame and status over the last four years, he’s still the same down-to-earth personality as he ever was, happily chatting to everyone after arriving for his photoshoot, making small talk about the household pet and instantly cracking a smile for the camera when we’re ready to get started. Soon, he’s donning Arsenal’s cult classic bruised banana away shirt from the early 1990s and chuckling self-deprecatingly, having almost toppled over when asked to lean forward for one particular photograph.
That friendliness and approachability is something he places great emphasis upon – on his first day at Arsenal in July, he made sure he was exactly the same, saying hello to as many people as he could, eager to make a good impression and waste no time in beginning to build relationships. He even made sure to quickly befriend the training ground dog: a chocolate labrador called Win, both named and introduced to the club this year by Gunners manager Mikel Arteta, in a bid to further boost the family atmosphere around the place.
“New signings are sometimes a bit quiet when they arrive at a club, and they take time to be integrated,” says Rice. “But with me, I wanted to speak to everybody, to all the staff, the physios, the chefs. I’ve always been outspoken at the training ground – as a character I’ve just always been like that.”
That willingness to put himself out there is part of the reason why he’s long been regarded as a natural leader, and why he was chosen to succeed mentor Mark Noble as skipper during his spell at West Ham. In time, no one will be surprised if he becomes England captain – current armband-wearer Harry Kane is unlikely to be hanging up his boots for a while, but once a vacancy does open up, Rice appears the most obvious of obvious choices.
“I DIDN’T SLEEP WITH THE TROPHY!”
As the years have gone by, various people have remarked that there’s almost a comic book hero quality about Rice. “It was a Roy of the Rovers goal,” West Ham gaffer David Moyes declared in April, after the midfielder ran from his own half to net a stunning goal against Gent and help the Hammers to reach the Europa Conference League semi-finals.
Rice was to West Ham what Roy Race was toultras for good measure. He was the man who stepped up when no one else could, to score the last-gasp leveller at Kidderminster and prevent FA Cup humiliation in February 2022. Two months later, he was also the man who struck a crucial goal at Lyon to send the Hammers to the Europa League semi-finals, leaving their fans partying on the streets of France. All that, from a defensive midfielder.
