Metaphors: fun, but they can cost you.
On August 23, after a seemingly relentless social media marketing campaign in which shouting/cooking ace Gordon Ramsay trumpeted the “Rolls-Royce of pans”, premium cookware manufacturers HexClad were hit with a lawsuit by… Rolls-Royce.
Ramsay — who is not a defendant in the trademark case in federal court in the U.S. state of New Jersey — is no stranger to some frivolous Rolls-Roycing: at some point on his many TV shows, he has dubbed the fillet as “the Rolls-Royce of beef”, the rack of lamb as “the Rolls-Royce of lamb”, the loin as “the Rolls-Royce of wild boar” and the poulet de Bresse as “the Rolls-Royce of chickens”.
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Despite the belated efforts of Rolls-Royce’s lawyers, the marketing phenomenon of “borrowing” their luxury cars’ prestige has spread like wildfire.
A portrait by 18th-century artist Allan Ramsay (presumably no relation) sold for £18,000 at auction after being listed as “a Rolls-Royce painting”. Grammy-nominated British vocalists VOCES8 have been dubbed “the Rolls-Royce of a capella ensembles”. Various products have been self-hailed as the Rolls-Royce of sofas, turkeys, luggage, pianos, office chairs, Prosecco, pies and chalk (Hagoromo is excellent chalk, to be fair. Mathematicians literally hoard whole boxes of it, in case production is ever ceased).
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As a multi-billion pound industry itself, obsessed with the depiction of elite players as assets to be coveted, moved around and often overpaid for, football is far from immune to the tenuous art of Rolls-Roycing. But the game’s track record here is mixed.
Brian Clough once justifiably called Roy McFarland, a towering centre-back for his Derby County side in the early 1970s, “a Rolls-Royce of a defender” — and you can just hear him saying it — while a young Phil Jones was also Rolls-Royced by his then Blackburn Rovers manager Steve Kean, mere days before being signed by Manchester United.
The Journal, a regional newspaper covering the north east of England, went rogue in 2011, labelling a 30-year-old Titus Bramble as “potentially a Rolls-Royce” after he signed for Sunderland, while Martin Keown — not a Rolls-Royce himself, based on criteria we will clarify shortly — described Brighton winger Kaoru Mitoma this week as “like a Rolls-Royce out there, the way that he just meanders with the ball.”
Absolute Rolls-Royce of a player pic.twitter.com/Um1au2ZoGb
— Bryan’s Gunn (@bryansgunn) February 16, 2023
Evidently, then, the game is a little confused about what constitutes a footballing Rolls-Royce.
The Athletic can offer some immediate baseline clarity.
Rolls-Roycery is not a universally available perception: you can’t have “a Rolls-Royce of a goalkeeper”, despite the reasonable credentials of YouTuber Ben Foster’s retrospective Rolls-Roycing of former Old Trafford colleague Edwin van der Sar on a recent podcast. (Of the current Premier League crop, perhaps only Manchester City’s Ederson could be in the Rolls-Royce goalkeeping conversation, if one were ever opened, but the role still inherently lacks the physical requirements.)
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We can also rule out wingers (too slight, too twitchy, too unpredictable, too inconsistent, too peripheral) and strikers (the act of goalscoring is very rarely — if ever — Rolls-Royce-worthy, although one exception could be made for Thierry Henry’s frequent moving through the gears from deep, carrying the ball at the flat-footed Jamie Carraghers of the time. Dimitar Berbatov, another oft-cited candidate, was simply — to employ an early technical term here — not enough of a unit. Similarly, no player who could be described as a “beanpole” may be eligible for Rolls-Roycing.)
That leaves defenders (but not full-backs, or at least what we understood to be full-backs right up until c.2022, many of whom would be ruled out by the not-at-all arbitrary minimum height requirement of 5ft 10in/177cm) and central midfielders. And this is where we can outline the specific criteria of a footballing Rolls-Royce.
True* on-pitch Rolls-Royces must sit somewhere towards the middle of a carefully-calibrated Venn diagram of 1) physical/biomechanical blessings, 2) efficient and tidy technique, and 3) a tangible air of assuredness.
(*A prolonged period of Rolls-Royce performances should qualify a player for the ultimate label: an absolute Rolls-Royce.)
It is tempting to summarise the physical aspect of a Rolls-Royce player as “you know it when you see it” but, since we are barely 500 words into this project, it is worth thoroughly excavating the logic from the last few decades of British football chatter.
A Rolls-Royce footballer must somehow — and effortlessly — combine muscular power (or, at least, the latent threat of being able to use it if they want to) with graceful movement (often described as “gliding over the turf”) and an impressive top speed… but without being overly defined by any of those things individually. Rolls-Royce-observing co-commentators often manage to condense these carefully balanced attributes into the single state of “purring”.
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Rolls-Royce players are inherently impervious to chaos or panic, able to shrug off a challenge as unfussily as they can shuttle a ball away from danger. And sheer substance is at the very core of it: Rolls-Royce players are deluxe operators but not luxuries (the actual Rolls-Royce company, after all, doesn’t just make cars, but also aircraft engines and submarine nuclear reactors.)
So, we have our generic template for a footballing Rolls-Royce: a colossal frame able to cover ground quickly and dominate opponents — but never overindulging in either — while also possessing a silken skill set (but not showboating) and a temperament set permanently to “unfazed” (without looking like they don’t care — a British footballing crime punishable by up to six months of being booed.)
Let’s begin some case-study analysis with a closer look at the traditionalists’ Rolls-Royce: the centre-backs.
With the cold-blooded, wily and technically sound — but, crucially, 5ft 9in — Lisandro Martinez taken out of the equation, here’s an overview of Premier League centre-backs since the 2018-19 season. In an attempt to capture their defensive lack of fuss, the scatter chart below plots their ‘true tackles’ (that is, tackles won, tackles lost and tackles resulting in a foul) against the success rate of dribbles attempted against them.
Over the past five and a bit seasons, some reassuringly Rolls-Roycey names rise to the top left of the chart (ie, they rarely need to engage in a tackle and are hard to dribble past.)
Virgil van Dijk, the widely accepted Premier League Rolls-Royce-in-chief since a £75million move to Liverpool in 2018, finds himself surrounded by a scattering of potential successors: Manchester City’s John Stones (recently given a software upgrade by Pep Guardiola), William Saliba (whose 2023-24 highlight reel essentially consists of endless clips of him patiently waiting for opposition forwards to take him on down the left-hand side of Arsenal’s penalty area, before shrugging them off, firmly but gently, like they’re crazed David Raya fans trying to get an autograph from David Raya), Sven Botman (who looks like he’s won three Olympic decathlon silver medals in a row after coming up agonisingly short in the 1,500m finale each time) and, of course, Ben Gibson.
Note also the presence of previously-documented lower-league Rolls-Royce Ethan Pinnock and the rather too ungainly Kurt Zouma, who — despite the whole cat business, which wasn’t Rolls-Royce behaviour — weighs 96kg (211lb), precisely the same mass as a Rolls-Royce M250-B17 turboprop engine.
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But employing just two overwhelmingly defensive metrics here is not enough.
In addition to keeping a clean pair of shorts, a Rolls-Royce of a centre-back must also have progressive qualities: namely, the ability to step out of the back line and casually force the issue with a line-breaking pass or two. For this, we turn to Opta’s database, to see which player combined imperious stature with incisive forward passing, while also rewarding a low foul count to ensure that our search eliminates clumsiness and highlights poise.
Using figures per 90 minutes going back to the start of the 2018-19 season, the table below collates the 10 “cleanest” defenders across those four key metrics, by weighting the data to create a score for each category — the best-performing player receiving a score of 100, and the most reckless a zero – before taking an average.
Put simply, since 2018-19, the Premier League centre-back who tops the table in terms of “not going to ground” — but also showing his class on the ball in playing — is Manchester City old boy Aymeric Laporte, with an average score of 81.0.
His former team-mate Stones is just behind on 78.1, with Saliba and Van Dijk (who remains below his pre-injury, 2019-20 performance level) also in the top five, and you would be forgiven for wondering if this data is skewed simply by playing for a team who are forced to defend less than average. But this is far from a flaw in the Rolls-Royce logic: to be a Rolls-Royce defender is to be an ultra-reliable part of an elite machine, not to be dragging a team up off the ground by yourself. Punching-above-your-weight heroism is not fundamental to the Rolls-Royce make-up.
For central midfielders, the ethos remains largely the same, but with a greater emphasis on what they do with the ball at their feet. This time, the scatter chart below combines engine-room durability (their true-tackle success rate) with their ability to cruise up the pitch in possession (progressive carries — defined as moving the ball at least five metres towards the opposition goal.)
Once again, many people’s instinctive hypotheses will be satisfied here: imposing, direct and technically comfortable ball carriers such as Arsenal’s £105million Declan Rice, and Ruben Loftus-Cheek (ex-Chelsea, now of AC Milan) and even a faded Rolls-Royce pretender of yore in Ross Barkley, now with Luton Town.
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Burnley’s Sander Berge may not have come to mind as readily, but his credentials — both data-backed and anecdotal — have been strong since arriving in England with Sheffield United in 2020. Meanwhile, it’s a relief to see Aston Villa’s Jacob Ramsey living up to the pioneering Rolls-Roycing work of his near-namesakes in artist Allan and chef Gordon.
Sander Berge Appreciation Tweet.
What a footballer. Rolls Royce. 🇳🇴 pic.twitter.com/WgFFne0WhT
— Sheffield United (@SheffieldUnited) February 23, 2022
When we introduce further deluxe-level midfield metrics — take-ons per game to foreground that ability to skip away from opposition midfielders in the engine room, alongside turnover rate (touches vs times dispossessed) to filter for an unerring ability to retain the ball – another picture emerges.
Rice, Loftus-Cheek and Berge’s eating up of the yards is now eclipsed by the imposing metronome that is Manchester City’s Rodri (combined score: 78.0) and his distant predecessor in the art of winning Premier League titles while also looking like a big brother treading on somebody’s Subbuteo game, Nemanja Matic.
As this season develops, the new, aspiring Rolls-Royces may well emerge.
The data alone supports the case for Saliba soon assuming Van Dijk’s supremacy — not to mention the efforts of the ever-astonishing sentiment-forming machine that is Arsenal Twitter — while Rice is perhaps yet to spread his pitch-spanning wings in the way he was given licence to do as West Ham United’s talisman.
For now, the cluster of wannabe midfield Rolls-Royces of the Premier League are safe to quietly go about their business. But, one day, Jude Bellingham — potentially the ultimate Rolls-Royce of world football, in every department — could be home from Spain.
And not even the United States District Court for New Jersey will be able to rule against that one.
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(Top photos: Getty Images)