Eberechi Eze has never been slow to make an impression. Coaching staff at QPR recall the warm and smiley 18-year-old street footballer who honed his skills in the cages of south London turning up for a week-long trial at Lilleshall in 2016. The following year, while on loan at Wycombe, he had teammates giggling on the pitch so audacious was some of his body of work. Then there is the 20-second hat-trick he scored on his first day of training at Crystal Palace two years ago. It is fair to say the smile on his face has not diminished this week, with Eze primed to make his England debut in Euro 2024 qualifiers against Malta on Friday or on Monday against North Macedonia.
As a boy growing up on a council estate in Greenwich, money was tight. Eze remembers the days when, while playing for Bruin FC in Bermondsey, southeast London, he and his father would have to weigh up whether attending trials at certain clubs was feasible because of the cost of fuel to get there. His first stop was West Ham. He signed for Arsenal aged nine but tears flowed when he was deemed too small and released by the team he grew up supporting at 13. He played for Fulham until 16 and then joined Reading, who let him go a few months later. Trials at Bristol City, Norwich, Swansea and Sunderland came and went. Millwall gave him another chance but did not offer him a professional contract.
By the time he arrived on trial with QPR’s development sides in the summer of 2016 he was preparing to start a part-time job at Tesco and considering college courses. Nearly all the rejection stories centred on clubs being unconvinced by his work rate but QPR focused on nurturing his undoubted talent. “A lot of people used to say: ‘He needs to learn the other side of the game,’” says Paul Hall, head coach of QPR’s under-23s. “Yes, you do, but the side of the game he was an expert at was supreme. I saw: ‘What can he do? How can we bring that out?’”
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One of the club’s primary tasks was to inject belief into a player released four times as a youngster. He has overcome his fair share of setbacks. He was forced off with a calf strain 18 minutes into his QPR debut against Blackburn in January 2017 and even after breaking through he had to win over doubters.
Two years ago he suffered a serious achilles injury on the day he was supposed to be named in Gareth Southgate’s provisional 33-man Euro 2020 squad. “It was almost like he was waiting for permission to go and rip it up,” Hall says of Eze’s early days at QPR. “What we used to see in training at times he would struggle to put it in a match. But what you are seeing now is he is getting more and more confident, and he’s going to push on again, I’m sure.”
QPR gave him an incentivised contract to keep a then teenager hungry. Eze was en route home when the call came but did a U-turn to put pen to paper. There were times at training when Hall felt unable to put Eze and Ilias Chair, part of the Morocco team that finished fourth at the World Cup, on the same side for fear of ruining the session. “Ebere had the skills on the pitch when he came to us,” Hall says. “We had given him encouragement about being resilient, focusing on what he needed to be doing away from the pitch. Sometimes I would call him up on his day off just to see how he is to make sure he knew that we had his back.”
Eze credits the influence of Hall as well as Chris Ramsey, QPR’s technical director, and Andy Impey, Hall’s assistant, as integral to his progress to this point. Those who have coached the 24-year-old speak of a humble and family-orientated character. His eldest brother, Ikechi, last played for Stranraer and his youngest, Chimaechi, also spent time at QPR. Eze recently called Hall out of the blue to thank him for his part in his development. A few years ago Hall played middleman, asking James Maddison, whom he coached as a “cheeky 13-year-old” at Coventry, to speak with Eze about how to cope with noise and increased attention. “He always gives the glory to God,” Hall says. “He is very, very religious and I think that keeps him grounded in the reality of this crazy world.”
The laidback character and languid style of Eze could easily be misconstrued as laissez-faire. The way he would glide, pirouetting up the pitch transforming defence into attack, led his development coaches at QPR to nickname him the Drunken Master, after the martial arts student played by Jackie Chan in the classic kung fu film. “Because of the way he weaves his way past people with a drop of a shoulder,” Hall says. “It is super to see and he does that regularly … that excited us. He’s got a demeanour where he is quite relaxed in his approach to everything – I’ve never seen him lose his temper. Not once. But sometimes I expect it wouldn’t have excited other people, to be that laidback.”
A loan to League Two with Wycombe, in 2017, proved priceless in his development. Wycombe’s then midfielder, Marcus Bean, went to Harlington, QPR’s old training ground and flagged Eze’s extraordinary hat-trick for QPR’s Under-23s against Hull to his manager, Gareth Ainsworth, and two weeks later Eze was a Wycombe player. His first professional goals, against Cambridge, stick in the memory for those there that day; the first a nonchalant half-volley with the outside of his right foot and the second a peach that curled into the top corner with his left. “I think that loan was pivotal for him because it answered a lot of questions that maybe people at QPR had about him off the ball,” says Bean. “He went back into the QPR first team and the rest is history.”
The exciting bit for Eze and England – and the frightening thing for opposition defenders – is that there is a sense there is still so much more to come. “I look at him now and think: ‘He’s still yet to explode,’” Hall says. “Some of the things he would do in training with us in the Under-23s when he was coming through were just flabbergasting … I always used to say to him: ‘If you play well, you’re going to be the best player on the pitch, no matter who is playing.’”
Hall was always adamant Eze’s talent would see the sun and how now he is shining.
