Welcome to the ‘Beverly Hills of Britain’, where the only thing missing is sunshine.

There are luxury cars, fancy restaurants, gated mansions and enough high-level professional footballers to create the United Kingdom’s most dominant five-a-side league.

‘Elmbridge Borough Council welcomes you to Cobham’, the sign reads as you enter the village made famous by Chelsea Football Club, whose training ground named after this place is a four-minute drive from its high street (and actually in nearby Stoke d’Abernon).

Chelsea moved to Cobham, part of London’s southern commuter belt, 19 years ago from Harlington, near Heathrow Airport on the western outskirts of the city. Since then, the village itself and surrounding areas, including Oxshott, have become home to footballers past and present, the streets — many of them private roads — lined by multi-million-pound mansions hidden behind security gates.

Over the past two decades, residents have become accustomed to seeing Premier League footballers wandering down the high street (Belgium international Eden Hazard was a regular in the village’s high-end Waitrose supermarket during his 2012-19 spell at Stamford Bridge), stopping for a coffee or enjoying a meal in one of the restaurants.

Even on the gloomy September morning when The Athletic visits, an array of fancy cars — Land Rover Defenders dominate — are passing through or pulling over to park outside one of the local stores.

Just over 20 miles south-west from central London, but away from the glare living in the UK capital would bring, Cobham and Oxshott are two of the most desirable — and expensive — locations in the country, where houses regularly sell for millions of pounds.

On any given day, you could bump into John Terry, the former Chelsea and England captain, or Sir Andy Murray, the British men’s tennis player who retired from that sport after the recent Olympics in Paris.

It is the south of England’s answer to the north’s ‘Golden Triangle’ of villages — Hale, Alderley Edge and Wilmslow — which is home to many Manchester City and Manchester United footballers.     

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(Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)

Nicknamed the ‘Beverly Hills of Britain’ due to the number of celebrities who now call it home, this area has long been popular among London-based stockbrokers and hedge-fund managers. There are elite private schools, fancy hair salons, Pilates studios and yoga classes at the disposal of players and their families.

Trevor Kearney, founder of property company The Private Office Real Estate, sums up what life is like as a Premier League footballer based around here: “If you go to Grappelli on a Saturday night then, no matter who you are, there is always someone more famous than you in the room.” 

Grappelli, an Italian restaurant only a couple of hundred yards away from The Ivy Cobham Garden, is frequently visited by footballers and, alongside its pasta dishes, is known for its ebullient front-of-house manager, Eddy, who has become a friend to many of them.

(Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)

During Eddy’s chat with The Athletic over coffee, several passers-by stop to say hello, while Chelsea player Cesare Casadei parks his Mercedes on the other side of the road before disappearing into a shop. Eddy says Casadei, a 21-year-old midfielder, is a “good guy”.

“Most of the footballers that come here are Chelsea players,” Eddy says. “Lots of old players still live in the area, so we have Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Ashley Cole… they are regulars and good friends with the owner.

“We have had John Terry, Ashley Cole, Noni Madueke, (Marc) Cucurella, Roberto Di Matteo, Gianfranco Zola, Andriy Shevchenko, Mauricio Pochettino, Joao Felix, Robert Sanchez… I don’t watch football, but I started following it because I needed to know who they are!”

During our conversation, Ryan Bertrand, the former Chelsea and England defender, pulls up in his car down the road. Yes, Eddy knows him, too. But with the most prominent players away on international duty at the moment, this is a relatively quiet morning in Cobham.

On the day The Athletic visited, Ahmed Alsanawi, a barber with 1.2 million Instagram followers whose social media posts show him cutting the hair of Hazard, Phil Foden, Jack Grealish and Reece James, among others, turned up in his yellow Lamborghini Urus.

“It’s trendy, it’s cool, but it has all the right fundamentals of what makes up a great community and environment,” Kearney says of the area. “When Chelsea arrived at Cobham, there was a mandate that the players need to live in a two-and-a-half-mile radius of the training ground, so that meant Cobham and Oxshott has seen a new breed and type of buyer. 

“All of a sudden, you had this new breed of person, wealth and fame injected into it. It transformed it, but it was already headed in that direction.

“Chelsea didn’t change the market, they just turbo-fuelled it.”

Kearney estimates that around 100 footballers are living in this part of the county of Surrey, including the towns of Weybridge and Esher a few miles to the north. Many of them, particularly those of a Chelsea persuasion, reside near Cobham, though.

A typical house in the area — where gated mansions dominate (Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)

“Chelsea moved here and then other players at different clubs, let’s say (their west London neighbours) Fulham, who didn’t want to be in central London, saw everyone was in Oxshott or Cobham and moved there instead,” Kearney says. “It’s the same at (south Londoners) Crystal Palace.

“It became the south’s hub for players. If you were at a north London club, you would stay relatively north. But if you lived more towards the south, then you were coming to Cobham or Oxshott.

“Even if you were further south, let’s say at Bournemouth (on the south coast), you would live in Cobham or Oxshott and commute. I had two friends playing for Stoke City (in the Midlands, north of Birmingham) who lived in Oxshott and got the train there because the family didn’t want to move as it was the perfect area for them.

“That shows the allure and pull of the area.”

It became common for the players from other top clubs in London, such as Palace, to make Oxshott their home and they would frequently travel to the training ground together. A Palace contingent of Joel Ward, Gary Cahill, Martin Kelly and Scott Dann, for example, used to link up in the mornings, collecting team-mate Jason Puncheon at the nearby Reigate junction of London’s orbital M25 motorway along the way.

According to data from Foxtons, a UK-based estate agency, the average price of a house in Cobham has doubled since Chelsea made this area their home in 2005. On average, houses were selling for just over £600,000 then, compared to more than £1.2million in 2024. The gated enclaves lining the private roads and populated by footballers are selling for much more than that latter figure.

Including Oxshott, Kearney estimates that footballers are spending around “£4m to £7m” on a house. Houses in Oxshott, though, are, on average, more expensive than those in Cobham, which is under four miles away.

“What Oxshott has is the Crown Estate,” Kearney explains. “The Crown Estate was once Crown land (property of the Royal family) and has an incredibly high-end housing estate with values from £3m to £20m. They are gated enclaves, safe environments, roads that were run by management companies and it is a super-smart setup.

“Oxshott was in that radius and it has an incredible school called Danes Hill. People were training in Cobham and a couple of minutes up the road is an amazing place to live, with knockout houses and a brilliant school, and it works for them.

“Cobham has a few of those estates, too, but not as big or as powerful as the Crown Estate. Oxshott has a little high street, but it hasn’t got an Ivy or a Grappelli’s. People who live in Oxshott would visit Cobham for the coffee spots, hair salons and restaurants.”

The drive of the Crown Estate (Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)

In 2022, Didier Drogba, the Ivory Coast international striker who left Chelsea in 2015 to play for Montreal in MLS, put his six-bedroom house on the Crown Estate up for sale for £6.25million, according to the UK’s Daily Mail. In 2014,  the same newspaper also reported Terry sold two Oxshott properties for a combined £21.5m.

Players who choose to rent instead of buying, especially if they are arriving from a different country and are reluctant to commit to spending millions on a house, are spending anywhere from £15,000 to £30,000 a month. “The rental market is interesting because there isn’t enough good enough stock to come and rent,” Kearney says. “If I had a house that someone could move into today, it would go instantly.”

When it comes to a player getting a mortgage, banks will consider their career and trajectory before deciding on the terms of a deal.

Kearney notes how a lot of them can “very easily get high-leverage” mortgages, sometimes “up to 100 per cent”. The majority of these are spread over the length of the individual’s club contract, although exceptions can be made if a player is more established or quite clearly on their way to becoming a superstar.

Aside from a modern exterior and interior, along with a big enough garden to install a five-a-side pitch — Kearney says this is a more common request than you may think — the most important thing house-hunting footballers are looking for is safety and security.

The houses are imposing and worth millions (Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)

Footballers are often deemed easy targets by criminals who will know when a player is likely to be at training or playing in a match, maybe at the other end of the country or possibly overseas, due to their club’s schedule and fixture list.

In recent years, players’ houses have been targeted, including in Oxshott.

Chelsea and England forward Raheem Sterling’s home was broken into in December 2022, leading to him flying back from the World Cup in Qatar.

Four men were jailed in July 2017 after targeting Terry’s home in Oxshott in February 2017, as reported by the BBC, with the former Chelsea defender being told by Judge Susan Tapping in court that it “might have been a mistake to post a family photograph on social media to show that he was away on holiday”.

During that raid, the convicted burglars stole more than £220,000 of jewellery and designer handbags worth £126,000. “His home was deliberately targeted and the master bedroom suite was ransacked,” Judge Tapping said.

Sterling returned home from the World Cup in Qatar after his Surrey home was broken into (Julian Finney/Getty Images)

According to police.uk data, from October 2021 to the end of June 2024, 193 burglary offences were committed in Cobham and Oxshott, with the most prevalent crimes being violence and sexual offences (1,075) during the same period.

“Safety and security is paramount,” Kearney says. “I’ve also got a company that is a security service around players and that works phenomenally well. If you are buying a new house, they go in and make sure the basics are right, such as intercoms, CCTV, and everything like that, but also layering additional security depending on your needs.”

Safe rooms, panic buttons and patrol dogs have become commonplace. “They want to live really normal, unaffected lives, with the best technology and security systems in their house,” Kearney says.

Given the focus and attention placed on footballers, especially those playing at the highest level, living an ‘unaffected life’ almost seems implausible. But in Cobham, Oxshott and the wider Surrey area, that is something they, within reason, have been able to do. Their fellow local residents have become used to seeing them on a daily basis, whether that is Terry, who played 78 times for England, or the lesser-known ones such as Casadei.

As in Beverly Hills, the Los Angeles district that is home to actors, singers and other A-list celebrities, a Premier League footballer can turn up to a supermarket or restaurant in Cobham and, like Kearney says above, there is a good chance they will not be the most famous person there.

(Top photos: Daniel Sheldon/The Athletic; design: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic)