‘A quick learner’: how Declan Rice went from Chelsea reject to Arsenal’s Rolls-Royce
Crystal Palace's goalkeeper Walter Benitez saves a shot by Arsenal's Declan Rice during the English Football League Cup quarter-final. Pic: AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
Declan Rice likes to call it “clean feedback”, which sounds like a euphemism for a bollocking, though he would probably say that is a misconception. Rather, it is part of the reason why Rice is being discussed as one of the best players in the world.
“You can’t eff and blind, you can’t bully people,” says Terry Westley, the head of West Ham’s academy when Rice was there. “But we should be able to have a conversation and say: ‘Look, that ain’t quite good enough and we want to help you because this is what we need to do.’
“Either they walk out your office and go: ‘Fucking bloke, don’t know what he’s talking about. I’m going to tell my dad or my agent.’ Or you walk out the office and go: ‘Right, what do I need to do? Let’s get on with the work.’”
It is fairly clear which camp Rice fell into.
One Champions League-winning coach recently privately described him as “the best midfielder in the world”, which even when he was a £105m signing for Arsenal two years ago seemed a stretch. To longtime observers, his rise has occurred gradually and then all at once, encapsulated in an astonishing performance against Real Madrid in April when he scored two brilliant goals from free-kicks in a 3-0 win.
If you consider his backstory of rejection and the need to give that clean feedback, it is barely credible Rice should be discussed in the terms he is today. Chelsea ditched him at 14, which is beginning to bear comparison with Decca Records rejecting the Beatles. But even as a 16-year-old at West Ham coaches were divided over whether to offer Rice a scholarship, the pathway to the first team.
By his own admission, Rice had an odd, uncoordinated running style, which is further evidence of his extraordinary development. A Premier League manager describes him as being “like a Rolls-Royce, so graceful in his actions and movements”.
Westley recalls the debate over the gangly teenager and whether he would make the cut.
“There were people who weren’t as forthright as I was,” he says about the decision over offering a scholarship.
“There was no guaranteed pro contract for Declan, but there was no moaning from him. The scholarship came after a game at Fulham when I put him in the under-18 team. I said: ‘You don’t need to be panicking any more. We’re going to give you the scholarship.’ “Declan gave a talk for me last year [to young footballers] and he said: ‘I look back now and I think having had clean feedback [back then], I can’t now accept anything else.’ I told him: ‘That’s really powerful.’
“He said that we didn’t pussyfoot around. [But] you can’t give many people clean feedback any more. [You’re] tiptoeing around. Agents don’t tell their players clean feedback because they’re scared of losing them. Very rarely do I come across a parent who’s going to tell them the truth. They don’t want to hear it either.”
Neither Westley, nor Tony Carr, who rescued Rice from Chelsea at 14 on the recommendation of his scout Dave Hunt, could have predicted this ugly duckling would blossom into quite as elegant a swan.
Carr says: “Dave said: ‘We should take a look at this kid Chelsea have released. I think he’s got a bit more to him,’” a line, 12 years on, that reads like one of the more understated and prescient judgments in recent football history.
Slaven Bilic, who gave Rice his West Ham debut, is characteristically blunt. “We thought he might one day turn out to be West Ham captain as a centre-back, a John Terry type, because he was reliable and had determination. But let’s not bullshit. Did he look like he would go on to be one of the best midfielders in the Premier League? No, I can’t lie.”
Carr brought Rice into West Ham, initially on trial, which meant the teenager had to leave his family home in Kingston, south-west London. He moved into West Ham’s version of Hogwarts, two big Georgian houses joined together in Chadwell Heath, near the old training ground, where academy players live together.
His willingness to embrace the change was notable. “He was very bright, very confident,” Carr says. “Although he was probably nervous, he wanted the ball all the time. He listened and he was a very quick learner.”
The quick-learning component to Rice has been evident in embracing his set- piece role, which puts him at the heart of the latest tactical trend in football and makes him even more important for Arsenal and England.
“He has got one of the most powerful whips I have ever seen,” said his England teammate Jordan Pickford. As Rice has said, it is a skill he may have overlooked were it not for Mikel Arteta and Arsenal’s set-piece coach, Nicolas Jover, encouraging him to embrace it during a midwinter trip to Dubai in 2024.
Then there is the switch from the cautious, defensive No 6 to the marauding No 8. The criticism midfield greats such as Graeme Souness and Roy Keane made about him at the time of his £105m move – that he didn’t score enough goals – is said to have registered with him.
Just as when Chelsea rejected him, confidants say he did not brood on it, but looked for ways to improve that part of his game.
“I’ve done some work on champions in different sports and [the common thread is] that when you give someone information, they’re hungry for it, they’re thirsty for more,” says Westley. “They thrive on wanting to do something different; they don’t sneer. He falls in that bracket. ‘What can I learn now? What do I need to do? How can I do that?’ He was like that when he left Chelsea and joined us.”
It has been intriguing to see Rice, who will be 27 on 14 January, embrace his superstar status this season. Arteta calls him a “lighthouse” on the pitch, apt not just because of his height but also because of his ability to lead through rocky moments of the season.
Off the pitch, he has attended London’s Fashion Awards and doubtless had fresh bouts of clean feedback from teammates when discussing his favourite moisturisers, fragrance and the eye patches he uses as part of his grooming regime. Observers say that even while he was at West Ham there was a hint of Bobby Moore about him.
“He was always slick, looking sharp,” says one West Ham staffer. The Nanushka leather jacket and Savile Row-styled trousers he wore in a recent photoshoot were very much in the vein of England’s World Cup-winning captain.
Emulating Moore’s 1966 heroics is the task Rice will embark on next year, as well as getting Arsenal over the line in the Premier League and going beyond last year’s Champions League semi-final.
“He will certainly be central to all of those teams and performances, so then would be a Ballon d’Or contender. I’m seeing he’s been mentioned in that class in the media,” says Westley, who is old and wise enough to add: “That’s a lot of ifs. A lot needs to drop to the right side for him to win that.” A Premier League manager backs that assessment. “He would certainly be in a group of the best in the world at the moment, but to be named the best he would have to be winning things for Arsenal.”
The only component missing from Rice’s status is major trophies. Doubtless some clean feedback on that gap in his CV will help focus the mind for 2026.
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