The England footballer made it from a Halesowen cricket club to the World Cup, all by the age of 24. He tells GQ how he’s keeping his feet on the ground while his career takes off

Morgan Rogers is thinking about freedom. The kind he has always wanted on a football pitch: to just play. “My game is still based off instinct and what I see,” he says, dressed in a blue hoodie after training. “So if I’m allowed that thought and feeling on the pitch, you’re going to get the best version of me.”

That becomes harder when you have £117 million attached to your name, play for Chelsea and England, and millions of people are watching. Modern football is increasingly ruled by data, with everything a player does watched, measured and picked apart: goals, assists, minutes, distance covered, chances created. Rogers, though, has always loved players who made football look spontaneous. He singles out Neymar, Paul Pogba and Mesut Özil – players with “spirit and freedom”.

Funnily enough, he says, they were often players fans loved to criticise. That was part of what drew him to them: “I liked the fact they’d still go out there and be the same versions of them. I always used to like the people that people used to hate on because I felt like once they came out and did the same thing again and again, people didn’t like it because it was so easy and effortless to them.”

It’s a confidence Rogers says he wants for himself. But professional football can squeeze that out of you. “It’s hard to just be you, because you can get lost in so many different things, with so many people telling you to be them,” says the 24-year-old. “The biggest skill in football is to still be you when everything is going on.”

Since joining Aston Villa in 2024, Rogers has become one of the Premier League’s most exciting attacking players, with a habit of scoring from almost anywhere. He bagged a Champions League hat-trick in January 2025. Last season, he helped Villa win the Europa League, scoring in the final. He played for England at the World Cup and returned home to a record-breaking transfer to Chelsea.

Things haven’t always moved this quickly. After joining Manchester City as a teenager in 2019, Rogers went out on loan, and a rough spell at Bournemouth in 2021 and 2022 left him questioning where his career was going. He found himself on the bench a lot more than he wanted. “People think that money solves mental problems or issues, and that getting paid well should cover that,” he says. “But money doesn’t change the way you feel or the way you think.”

The people around him helped. At least one of his parents has been to every single match. His dad will “find a way no matter what,” says Rogers. During the warm-up, he makes a point of finding them in the stands. If he needs a tactical thought, he looks to his dad. If he needs a lift, it’s his mum. “I know which parent to look at to help and to guide, whether I need one or the other in that moment.”

That support was really important to him at Bournemouth. “Sometimes you need football advice and sometimes you need life advice,” he says, “and in those low situations it has nothing to do with football.”

Rogers didn’t have many players from his part of the country to look up to. “I like the fact that, especially in football, everyone’s from London or Manchester,” he says. “It made it harder, but then the ones that do [make it], they stick in your head more, in your memory. Because Birmingham’s smaller in that sense, there are less models to relate to, so the ones that do make it, they’re role models instantly.”

Rogers grew up in Halesowen, where his world was still small enough to get around by bike. In the centre of town, near a roundabout, there is a McDonald’s and a cricket club. He knew both well: cycling down with his mates, grabbing something to eat, hanging around until it was time to go home. Long before the stadiums, England camps, and everything that came with them, this was his patch. “I loved [cricket] as much as football,” he says. Eventually, the fixtures began to clash and he had to choose. Football won.

Rogers started playing at five and quickly outgrew his own age group. “You just couldn’t get the ball off him,” Paul Tait, an ex-pro who ran a local football session in Halesowen, told Sky Sports. Within a year, Tait began putting Rogers in games with 10- and 11-year-olds to see how he would cope. “He tore them to shreds.”

He joined West Brom’s academy at six. Manchester City followed when he was 17. After Bournemouth came Middlesbrough, where Rogers began to find his rhythm, then Aston Villa, where things started to click.

Jack Grealish helped, too. He had grown up on the other side of Birmingham and, when they were at City together, became a kind of mentor. “We had a natural connection,” Rogers says. “People like that are important and influential, because they go through everything you go through.”

Even now, with London his home and Chelsea his club, Birmingham remains a constant reference. When he drives to see his parents, who have moved, he passes by Halesowen. “I haven’t lost sight of what I want to achieve and what I want to do,” he says. “I’m just a normal person who has managed to find something that he’s good at. I’m no different to anyone else in that sense.”

At Chelsea, Rogers is surrounded by the kind of players he admired growing up, in a team he hopes will let him play on feel. His ambitions are not modest. “I want to win everything,” he says. “Every competition, I want to compete. I want to win every award.”

But he knows individual recognition tends to follow collective success: “I always put the team first. If the team’s doing well and you can contribute to the team, individual accolades take care of themselves.”

A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2026 issue of GQ with the title “Fine Young Men”, featuring Joe Locke, Nemzzz, Harry Collett, Italian Bach, Matthew Broome and DC3.

Styling by Ben Schofield
Tailoring by Nafisa Tosh
Grooming by Jody Taylor
Hair by Tariq Howes 
Make-up by Natasha Tereshko using Lisa Eldridge Make-up
Set Design by Thomas Bird
Production assistant, Tess Perren 
Photograph retouching, avant post