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calciopics · 3 years ago

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Chelsea boy Mason Mount stars with Emilia Boateng on the cover of the December issue

He shoots, he scores – and his five million Instagram followers love him for it. With the World Cup kicking off, Tatler anoints Mason Mount the most eligible man in Britain in this year’s Little Black Book and teams him up with fashion It girl Emilia Boateng

Chiselled? Tick. Perfect white teeth? Tick. Five goals scored for England? Tick. No wonder Mason Mount is Tatler’s most eligible man and Chelsea’s golden boy, having joined the club at the age of six and risen up through the ranks to become one of its most valued midfielders. He’s hard-working and determined, but he’s definitely not all work and no play. He also has a cheeky side – or, as he says with a smile, ‘a bit of spice’.

Everyone on the Tatler set agrees – especially the three women in charge of grooming – that Mount is utterly charming. He walks in wearing a grey Nike tracksuit and asks: ‘How have you ladies been? You been busy?’ And, just like that, they’re putty in his hands, giggling and fawning over him while they file his (bitten-down) nails. Did one slightly gasp when he broke the news that he is single?

‘Football is my priority,’ he affirms, when asked about his relationship status. (He had been dating the model/singer Chloe Wealleans-Watts since 2017.) It seems his schedule is far too busy: before 3pm, he’d already had training with Chelsea, followed by two interviews for the club’s YouTube channel, for one of which he got ‘majorly stitched up’ and had to dress up as a scarecrow. He does, however, occasionally go on dates (‘sometimes when I come up to London’, he shrugs), but he’s not trawling through Tinder or Hinge. Would he be interested in a high-society It girl if she pounced at Tatler’s Little Black Book party? Perhaps someone who is, say, 42nd in line to the throne? ‘Hmmm, maybe not,’ he says.

This young buck already has five million followers (and counting) on Instagram, but he is about to go stratospheric, as one of the hopefuls on track to be picked for the England World Cup squad in Qatar. (All eyes would be on him: the 2018 World Cup in Russia drew 3.57 billion viewers.)

Mount may be on an eye-watering salary at Chelsea (he’s worth a reported £20 million), but he’s resolutely level-headed. With him for the photoshoot isn’t a gaggle of important and slightly annoying agents, as with most A-listers, but his brother, Lewis, who manages his comms. ‘He’s just my little brother,’ shrugs Lewis when I ask what it’s like having a famous sibling. ‘I don’t even think he knows how to work a washing machine,’ he laughs, adding that Mount’s mother did his laundry ‘until about two weeks ago’.

Mount’s parents, Tony and Debbie, often make the trip from Portsmouth to his red-brick mansion in Cobham, which is brimming with his Nike trainer collection, framed football shirts from opponents such as Real Madrid’s Luka Modrić and a trophy cabinet that’s rapidly running out of space.

He has represented England teams since he was 15, joining the senior side in 2019, when he was 20, and was part of the Euros team that lost out in the final last year. ‘We were so close,’ Mount says. ‘That’s what makes it so hard.’ Mount was taken off during extra time, just before the ill-faced penalties against Italy – to his family’s relief.

So, is football actually coming home this time? Mount thinks so. ‘We want to win. And with the group we have, we can definitely do that. I feel like we’re on the right path. We want to make the nation proud.’ How does he feel about the fact that the Lionesses brought it home before the boys did? ‘Over the moon,’ he beams, explaining that he and fellow England player Phil Foden were watching the Euro 2022 final from a suite in Wembley Stadium. The Lions are ‘very close’ with the women’s team, as they were ‘at camp together’ (St George’s Park in Staffordshire) in the lead-up to the tournament. ‘I was very lucky to be able to see what they did. It was amazing being a spectator. It was unbelievable. I was absolutely buzzing.’

Like everyone else, Mount thought Chloe Kelly’s sports-bra-baring celebration in the women’s Euro final after she scored the winning goal was ‘brilliant’. His style is quirkier: when he scores, he does ‘the Frankenstein’, a dance (which looks like he is playing an imaginary keyboard) popularised by YouTuber ‘Chunkz’. Scoring for England, he says, is an ‘unbelievable feeling’. He’s netted goals five times for his country so far, eliciting emotions of disbelief and euphoria in equal measure: ‘It’s something you never forget.’

England manager Gareth Southgate, he says, is a ‘ledge’ (Mount uses this word liberally; David Beckham is also a ledge), and instrumental to his success. ‘It was my dream to play for England, and he made that happen for me.’ Does the waistcoat-wearing Southgate have a silly side? Apparently not: ‘He’s serious. But it’s what we need.’ That can’t be said for the rest of his team. ‘There are a few pranksters,’ says Mount. ‘You’ve got the up-North boys, like Stonesy [John Stones], Kyle Walker and Jack Grealish. And then you’ve got Dec [Declan Rice, Mount’s best friend, who attended the Chelsea Academy at the same time] and me, who always play pranks on each other.’ What does the curtain-haired Grealish get up to? Does he hide your football boots? ‘I can’t say,’ Mount replies mysteriously with a laugh. ‘We just mess about.’

Somewhere Mason doesn’t mess about is on the golf course. He plays regularly with his father and, ‘from time to time’, his Chelsea teammates Christian Pulisic and Declan Rice. Who’s better: Mason or Dec? ‘I reckon I am,’ he laughs. ‘I get more nervous playing a good game of golf than a game of football in front of thousands.’

The team may feel like a band of brothers, but his actual family is a priority for Mount. ‘Family first, then football,’ he says firmly. One just has to look at his tattoos – ‘I’m addicted,’ he jokes – to see how serious he is. He has a pair of boxing gloves (his grandfather had a mean hook), a stargazer lily (his grandmother’s favourite flower) and a pair of cherubs because ‘my grandparents had cherubs on their wedding cake’. He’s also got three black dots – one for each of his three siblings, Stacey (who lives in Australia), Lewis and Jasmine. Then there’s a slogan that reads ‘Every road will take you home’ and a gargantuan ship, symbolising his hometown of Portsmouth.

At school, Purbrook Park comprehensive, he was quite studious. ‘I passed everything,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t in the top sets, but I always wanted to do well and I wasn’t causing trouble.’ Joining the Chelsea Academy at six years old was ‘intense’. There was training three times a week, plus weekend matches; and his gruelling schedule meant he could ‘almost never’ go to friends’ parties. His life was just football, football, football. Even his father, Tony, coached a local team. ‘He played a bit before he became a coach but obviously not at my level.’ He pauses, looking cheeky: ‘Don’t tell him I said that.’

When Mount was just 15, he relocated to be closer to Chelsea’s training ground in Cobham and moved in with his ‘house parents’ – adults who host young Chelsea Academy players – whom he now considers his ‘second mum and dad’. ‘My [actual] mum hated it at the beginning. I think it [was hard for her] to see me leave,’ Mount says. ‘But it was the perfect decision to be near football and to be able to grow up and be focused every single day.’

Yet his father was sceptical about whether Mount would make it. ‘There wasn’t the best track record of academy products [boys] making it into the first team,’ Mount explains. ‘But I always said, “I’m going to be the one that goes through, to prove you “wrong.”’ And he did: Mount has been in the senior team since 2019, has scored 24 goals, and last year won Chelsea Player of the Year (as voted for by the fans). He was also part of the team that led Chelsea to victory in the 2021 UEFA Champions League. ‘Winning that was the best feeling,’ Mount says, pausing to reflect. ‘I didn’t think we were going to win, if I’m honest. We were the underdogs the whole way through and we did it. It’s an amazing story.’

How did they celebrate? ‘With waters,’ he laughs, before offering the surprising revelation that he’s ‘never been to a pub’. ‘You were in a pub for the Euros,’ Lewis chimes in. ‘Oh yeah, I was, for a Doritos advert,’ Mason remembers. One certainly wouldn’t see him at Chelsea haunt the Lillie Langtry – when near Stamford Bridge, he goes ‘incognito’. Cap and sunglasses? ‘I can’t tell you – I’ll be seen.’

So he’s Chelsea through and through – and famously says he ‘bleeds blue’. But what if he were offered – like the prankster and former Aston Villa player Grealish was – a hefty sum to leave his beloved club, say £100 million? ‘I dunno,’ he says quickly. ‘The money is...’ Then he stops. ‘I’ve always obviously been a Chelsea boy. I’m very, very happy here. We’ve been winning some silverware, which is a big goal of mine, I always want to win things.’

So money couldn’t sway him. Perhaps he is a different kind of footballer. ‘He isn’t flashy,’ says Lewis, when I ask what Mount spends his money on. ‘He’s sensible,’ he adds, revealing how Mount was asked to do a photoshoot featuring a private jet, but turned it down for fear of looking like he was showing off. ‘People don’t want to see it,’ says Lewis. ‘That’s why people relate to him.’

He does have an eye for shiny objects, however. Like a magpie, Mount swoops and picks up a giant gold chain necklace from the glittering jewellery selection on offer for the Tatler shoot. He parades it around, saying he ‘likes messing about’. Then everyone stops when his fellow cover star, Emilia Boateng, arrives on set – swan-like in Celia Kritharioti – with a cascade of feathers billowing behind her. ‘And I’m in trackies,’ Mount laughs, before looking sheepish. They are Dior trackies he’s been put in, after all.

Just as well he’s wearing something comfortable – the shoot is like a football match in itself. He’s doing keepy-uppies, pretending to score penalties and smacks one poor assistant in the face with a rogue header. He prances about dressed as Tatler’s Bystander man in a red Ralph Lauren tailcoat saying he feels like the King’s Guard (before marching on the spot, mimicking the Changing of the Guard).

He’s a totally natural model. ‘Nobody has ever said that to me,’ he says, genuinely flattered. Does he have a Blue Steel? ‘I didn’t think I did, but I think I’m actually steely-eyed,’ he says, squinting and pouting. Well, if all else fails for this charming footballer on the cusp of superstardom, he could always score a career in modelling. Perhaps that’s his next goal?

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