Morgan Rogers: The England player’s scenic route to stardom

This story is taken from the summer 2026 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally from June 5. Pre-order a copy of the magazine here.

You can tell a lot about a person from the mobile network they’re on. The phone rings somewhere along the M40. It cuts out. I’m trying to get hold of Morgan Rogers – one of the most exciting footballers in the Premier League, the second youngest English player to score a Champions League hat-trick and the reigning PFA young player of the year – on his way down to London for his Dazed cover shoot. I try again. Then the answerphone kicks in. Welcome to the Tesco Mobile voicemail service.

When I bring it up, he laughs. “It’s the same number I’ve had since I was 15,” he says. “I just never saw a reason to change it.”

We meet a few hours later at the Barbican. Photographer Kingsley Ifill is already set up when Rogers arrives, wearing a splash of bright Burberry checks that cut through the estate’s monotonous concrete like a signal flare. The 23-year-old attacking midfielder may be a stranger around these parts, but he moves through the brutalist walkways as if he belongs here, gliding up and down the staircases with unhurried ease.

In person, Rogers is taller than he appears on television. The physical presence that wrongfoots Premier League defenders registers differently up close; there is a solidity to him, a gravitational quality that the camera flattens. Those who know the Aston Villa player away from football will tell you he has always been the loudest person in the room – the class clown, the one keeping everyone going, the person teammates at both Villa and England fall in around naturally. But on the pitch, Rogers is pure tunnel vision. “I know my job, and I try to do my best,” he says, between setups. “I’m not really good at doing two things at once.” Under Villa boss Unai Emery, whose demands are total and whose attention to detail borders on the forensic, that singular focus has become Rogers’ most potent quality. He says that Emery’s instruction has been simple and constant: “Try, try, try.” With that effort came extra confidence. The goals soon followed.

Rogers grew up in Halesowen, just outside of Birmingham, the middle of three brothers in a household where his dad, a fireman, established early and often that how you carry yourself is the first thing people see. The laces tied properly before every session, the boots clean. “[It’s not negotiable] to have respect for the game,” Rogers says. “If you give yourself respect, you’ll get more out of it.”

Mike Skinner once said that a lifetime of being told your accent sounds stupid doesn’t encourage you to stay faithful to it. He said it in 2002, the same year that Rogers was born, then spent the next decade making era-defining anthems from the same streets the footballer grew up near. “People hate on Birmingham so much,” Rogers says, smiling, in his own thick Brummie accent. “I like that.” The negativity, the dismissiveness: he takes it all and channels it into something clinical on the pitch. “The fact that I’m from there, I can try and be positive about it. It’s just about how you deal with it. [You can] use it to your advantage.”

On the pitch, Rogers was moved up two age groups at six years old because he was operating at a level his peers couldn’t match. “I remember feeling like I was going against these giant people with insane strength,” he recalls. “You have to find different ways to be successful.” When Rogers signed for Manchester City in 2019, fresh from West Brom’s academy, the assumption was that he’d rise rapidly as one of the country’s best prospects. What came next was something else. Loan move after loan move followed, to Lincoln, Bournemouth and Blackpool. Each one was supposed to be a platform, but each move was more complicated than the next. Bournemouth was the hardest, though, with Rogers far from home, further away from the team sheet, and nowhere near the player he believed himself to be. “I’d never experienced that before,” he says. “Having to deal with not playing is one thing, but I wasn’t anywhere near it. [I wasn’t] getting the chance to show what I could do.” He was frustrated with decisions not going his way. But he shifted his mindset: “If I let it affect my headspace, then I’m bringing it on myself. And then there’s a problem.”

What held him together was his family, his mother answering the phone every night during those long months on the south coast. “I just remember being on the phone every day, expressing how I felt; my family were giving me advice and telling me how to deal with it.” He looks briefly like the teenager he was then. “They’ve always been massive for me.” Meanwhile, Rogers’ closest friends in football, Jacob Ramsey and Cole Palmer, get a Snapchat almost every day. When I ask him if he’s told either of them about today’s shoot, he looks almost puzzled. “Nah,” he says. “I’d rather just do things before I speak about them.”

“[Playing for England] is everything you ever wanted. But you don’t want it to overwhelm you. You’ve got a job to do”

Rogers’ career truly began to take off under Michael Carrick at Middlesbrough, where he bagged seven goals and eight assists as well as becoming the Carabao Cup’s top scorer in the 2023/24 season. He was then offered the chance to fulfil a huge homecoming move. Securing an £8m transfer to Aston Villa, Rogers returned to the West Midlands, back within a few miles of where he grew up.

What he has done since defies straightforward statistical logic. This season, Rogers is repeatedly scoring goals that break the algorithms of most data models. For the true football nerds out there, the cumulative probability of him scoring the specific goals he has, from the specific positions he took them, is one in 1.6 million. Rogers laughs in slight disbelief when I mention it. “I haven’t seen that, nah,” he says. “It’s nice when they go in, because I do practise it, I do work on it. But I also want to get the rubbish goals. The easier ones are more likely to get me further than those. I can’t keep relying on the good ones.”

Those long shots have a specific influence behind them. His GOAT is Cristiano Ronaldo, whom he watched obsessively on YouTube growing up, turning his back garden in Halesowen into a makeshift training ground for techniques with the senior squad before he’d had time to process it. The interim England manager, Lee Carsley, pulled him aside. A few days later, he was walking out in Athens as a fully fledged England international. “It’s everything you ever wanted,” he says. “But you don’t want it to overwhelm you. There’s a game on. You’ve got a job to do.” He scored his first England goal against Wales at Wembley last October. The World Cup is this summer, and he’ll do anything to be a part of it

Rogers’ most direct competition for an England starting place is someone he grew up alongside: Stourbridge and Real Madrid’s Jude Bellingham. Laughing off the notion of taking his spot, Rogers is adamant that the competition between them is healthy. “The media put us in the same category, but I don’t think we’re the same type of player at all. We have different styles, different things we’re good at. I think we bring different things to the team.” His next response makes clear that competition and friendship are not mutually exclusive. “It’d actually be nice to play together. I want to play with the best players regularly, and he’s one of the best. Why wouldn’t I want that?”

Every goal Rogers scores is capped off with the same celebration. Arms crossed, shoulders rubbed, face completely still: the cold celebration has become one of the defining images of the last few Premier League seasons. Cole Palmer borrowed it; it has since been adopted by athletes across different sports worldwide. But the celebration crystallises that had no business being attempted by a teenager from the West Midlands. “You’re never going to be able to do it exactly like him, but I would get in the back garden and try,” says Rogers. “I was no different to everyone else. I was trying to be my idol.” Growing up in Halesowen had its other pleasures too, of course. He laughs when reminiscing about his favourite Brum takeaway. Would he even be from the West Midlands if he didn’t say he missed kebabs? Today, sadly, they’re off limits. His diet is different now. The margins for greatness are too fine.

Rogers says he reached what he describes as his ideal flow state against Manchester City last season, during a game that carried a particular charge given his time at the club. A missed penalty against Bologna in this season’s Europa League quarter-final, the kind of moment that deflates lesser players, was answered within minutes: Rogers collecting the ball, cutting on to his weaker foot and beating the keeper at his near post. At his best, he’s irrepressible.

Revealing what he’s excited for next, it’s clear that the summer is already on his mind. (Rogers is likely valued by Villa at around £100m and has been linked with moves to Manchester United and Chelsea.) But for now, his priorities are simple: finish the season as strongly as possible, with Villa still in the hunt for European silverware and a place in Thomas Tuchel’s World Cup squad at stake.

“Not everything’s going to happen perfectly; it’s about learning and improving every year. This is just the start of bigger things to come”

Rogers’ England debut arrived almost by accident. Initially, he was called up for the under-21s, but found himself training something deeper – a cutting, nonchalant response to years of doubt, often delivered directly to the Holte End of Villa Park. When I ask about the loan moves, the managers who doubted him, the clubs that moved him on, he is precise about what drove him through it. “It’s not ever in a spiteful way,” he says. “I just wanted to show what I had.”

Rogers moves through today’s Burberry looks naturally, and describes his own style as “unique to me – some people like it, some people don’t”. By 7pm, the shoot is wrapping. Rogers’ publicist, Caroline, is already waiting with a ball and a Sharpie. Before he signs the ball for Dazed, the pair knock it between them; the keepy-up sesh looking particularly brazen inside a beautifully minimal living room.

As the light begins to dwindle out over the Barbican’s concrete frames, Rogers points out that his career is only just getting started. This is just his second full season of Premier League football. “I sometimes have to remember I’m still learning on the job,” he says. “Not everything’s going to happen perfectly; it’s about learning and improving every year. This is just the start of bigger things to come.”

In the days that follow, Rogers proves he is a man of his word. After 12 games without a goal, he finds himself back on the scoresheet: two goals and an assist, delivered in the quietly devastating fashion that has become his trademark. The doubters silenced, once again, in the only language he has ever needed. Some like it hot. Morgan Rogers has always preferred it cold.

Grooming Marina Belton-Rose using Shiseido and Bouclème, photographic assistant Braxton Gorringe, styling assistants Isabella Grace, Jon Bannister