Rice and Nketiah return to Chelsea, where rejection helped shape them (2024)

Harry Watling remembers the first time he saw Declan Rice play.

“It was my first day at Cobham and Dec was an under-10,” says Watling. “They were playing against Liverpool in half-term. It was a seven-a-side game and there was this lad in the middle of the pitch who looked so mature. He looked like an older lad playing down a few age groups, even though he wasn’t much physically bigger than anyone else.

“I just remember asking, ‘Who’s that?!’”

Watling spent five years as an academy coach at Chelsea’s base in Cobham, south of London, during which time he worked with a generation of astonishing talent. He was part of the coaching group that oversaw the early development of the likes of Mason Mount, Reece James and Tammy Abraham.

For Chelsea, however, Rice is the one that got away.

He was released at age 14, on the very same day the club also let go a promising forward who was a little behind on the growth curve: his now Arsenal and England team-mate Eddie Nketiah. “My memories of Eddie are his jumper being too big for him, running around with his sleeves over his hands,” says Watling warmly. “He always looked freezing cold!”

This weekend, Nketiah and Rice could line up against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge for Arsenal. Their paths to the top have not been straightforward and are illustrative of a dogged determination to prove people wrong.

From that first day in the under-10s, Rice’s mental strength was apparent to Watling.

“He’s an elite football player, but his X-factor has always been that psychological side,” he says, “He never drowns. He went into playing in the Premier League with West Ham and he survived — then he swam, then he excelled. He’s gone into Arsenal — he’s playing Champions League football, in World Cup semi-finals and European finals. And he keeps on excelling. That’s down to his mindset.”

That manifested in the way Rice applied himself, even as a boy. “He’d be out early for every session,” recalls Watling. “He would stay on after training. I’d walk past and see him and Mason Mount practising free kicks into an empty goal.”

After initially joining Chelsea at eight years old, Rice quickly made Cobham a second home. He is from a family of passionate Chelsea fans in south west London and was a popular figure within the academy.

Ruben Sammut was in the year group above him at Chelsea. “Declan was always a lively and confident character, right from when he was eight,” says Sammut. “We used to travel to away games all together on a Sunday morning. It was alternate age groups: under-nines, 11s, 13s, and 15s together. Even as an under-nine, Declan used to be at the back of the bus with the 15s and have them all on the floor laughing. I could never believe how he did it! He was just never shy to speak to anyone.”

Those coach trips are the source of many happy memories for Rice and Nketiah. “We used to go on long away days,” recalled Rice recently while on international duty. “Eddie used to bring a massive bowl — but like it would be in a big box — of (west African staple) jollof rice and he’d feed the whole team.

“All the lads would be buzzing over it. He’d bring plates, knives and forks! All the way home, everyone would be eating it, it was so good.”

But then, at 14, they were ditched.

For Rice, it was a devastating blow. “How do you tell your friends that you’ve been released by Chelsea?“ he said on The Overlap channel and podcast.

“You go to Chelsea every other day, you’re known as the boy who plays for Chelsea,” Nketiah told The Athletic this summer. “It’s part of your identity… Accepting that being gone is hard to take.”

A number of factors contributed to the respective decisions. Watling recalls Chelsea having an “outrageous amount of talent in the building”. Beyond Mount, James and Abraham, there were also the likes of Callum Hudson-Odoi, Tino Livramento, Josh McEachran, Jamal Musiala, Levi Colwill and more. It was a hugely competitive environment and the club simply couldn’t keep everyone on.

When it came to Rice, the main concerns were over his physical development.

“If I’m being brutally honest, I think there was a slight lack of patience on Chelsea’s part,” says Watling. “Dec had a bit of a growth spurt and he just lost a little bit of coordination — as they all do. I think if you lined up a load of 13, 14 and 15-year-olds next to each other, you would see some of them are very mature and look like men, some of them are under-maturated.

“No one’s got a crystal ball, but you definitely need to have the experience of knowing where players are in their maturation curve. Then you can go, ‘OK, this boy has just gone through a period of growth. His coordination is totally gone, he can’t run at the moment, he’s getting used to his body again. He’s going to go through some Osgood-Schlatter (a condition that is a common cause of knee pain in adolescents) maybe, maybe some shin splints’ — but you have to give the players a chance to get used to their bodies again.

“It’s like taking a professional golfer’s clubs away from them and giving them a new set that are two inches longer. It can kill them initially. Ball-striking becomes difficult… everything goes out the window.”

While Rice had grown too quickly, Nketiah had the opposite problem: he was dwarfed by some of the centre-halves he was facing — a boy up against young men.

Fortunately for the pair, neither of them were out of the game for very long.

On the day Rice was released, he spent the evening training with Chelsea’s neighbours, Fulham. And the following day he went to West Ham over in east London, where he would be reunited with Watling some years later.

Nketiah also found a new home across London, at Arsenal, within five days. “We knew a little bit in advance that Eddie wasn’t going to sign with Chelsea again,” says Steve Morrow, who spent more than a decade as Arsenal’s head of academy recruitment. “My scouts were aware of him — he was in our database. We were quite surprised about his availability and began having some talks with the family.

“We knew his qualities. What really stood out was his goalscoring, his instinctive finishing — albeit we knew that he was probably a little bit physically behind certain others in the group.”

That was not enough to put Arsenal off. “We were willing to take a chance,” explains Morrow. “We always tried to look at the science behind it.”

Arsenal had the facility to make projections on how a youth player might physically develop over the next few years, with a good degree of accuracy. The fact Nketiah was yet to go through his growth spurt reassured them. “If you see some basic qualities and you see potential, then we were always quite patient on the physical development,” says Morrow.

As Nketiah settled at Arsenal, his personality began to blossom. “To begin with, I guess he was reasonably quiet,” says Morrow. “But he had a kind of inner confidence. I always felt he had a bit of sparkle in his eye. A little bit mischievous, you know?”

It’s tempting to imagine that once Nketiah and Rice arrived at Arsenal and West Ham respectively, it was all plain sailing to Premier League fame and England caps. But that’s not the case.

Morrow recalls having to urge senior management to give Nketiah a professional contract, deep into his under-18s season. Rice himself has admitted that at 16 it was a “50-50 decision” whether West Ham would award him a scholarship: “Half the coaches were saying ‘Keep him on’ and half the coaches were saying ‘We’re not too sure’.”

And yet both players, buoyed by the support of their families, were able to build professional careers. From an early age, they displayed real resilience. Before Watling joined West Ham as an academy coach, he went on a training course where Terry Westley — then head of the club’s academy — was speaking.

“He said that (as a pro player) ability will get you to 18, character will get you to 35,” Watling recalls. “He said, ‘I’ve got two players at the moment in my building. One of them is an elite talent right now, but the other one is going to be an elite football player in the long term’. That was because he had all those mental qualities we’ve talked about. That player was Declan Rice.”

It’s easy to say Chelsea got it wrong with Rice and Nketiah. Both, after all, are now full England internationals following Nketiah’s debut last week against Australia. But it’s also possible that fateful day when they were shown the door at Cobham actually proved a springboard in each case. It may have forged in them the indefatigable spirit that has spurred them on to their current success.

“They might have got that one right after all,” reflects Watling. “Dec might have needed that, Eddie too.”

For Nketiah and Rice, a day that could have broken them may instead have been the making of them.

Additional reporting: Jordan Campbell

(Top photos: Getty Images)

James McNicholas has covered Arsenal extensively for more than a decade. He has written for ESPN, Bleacher Report and FourFourTwo Magazine, and is the co-host of the Arsecast Extra Podcast. Follow James on Twitter @gunnerblog