he style formation of Brennan Johnson

In Match Fits, GQ links up with the most fashion-forward stars in the Premier League

Views: 434 · 09 May 2025 · Time: 10m

Sport

It started, for Brennan Johnson, on the Disney Channel. It was there he met Zeke, and Zeke’s best friend Luther. Their story was one of a battle against the odds. Of bravery, disobedience, and extremely baggy trousers. It was, more specifically, about two pubescent knuckleheads from California trying to become the greatest professional skateboarders ever. Sat on the sofa of his family home in West Bridgford, a Nottingham suburb that was also home to Forest’s stadium, young Brennan was hooked.

Thanks to Zeke And Luther, a pre-teen sitcom set to the worst ska-punk theme song you’ve ever heard, skateboarding became Johnson’s obsession. It was so far removed from the world he lived in. “Me and my best friend, we’d sit at home watching that show and think it was just so cool,” the £50 million Premier Leaguewinger tells me, a decade later. “Everything about it – the way they dressed, the way they spoke, the phrases that they used… After that I went straight out and bought a skateboard.”

He was terrible at the start. His parents – David, a footballer, and Alison – worried about him. He hadn’t been in the Forest Academy long — signed aged eight from local amateur club Dunkirk, where David was chairman – and now this? A death wish. Or at least a twisted-ankle wish. Knee pads, elbow pads, helmet: non-negotiables. Johnson stuffed them into a bag as soon as he left his parents’ sight.

He kept at it. “It was its own little world,” he says. “The feeling of learning a new trick was so good. It brought me so much joy. I’d do it again and again and again and again, then go learn another one.”

Now a handsome guy with strawberry-shaped face and warm eyes, there’s a three-inch scar between his eyebrows — the outcome of a dramatic clash of heads during his first match against Forest since leaving for Tottenham Hotspurlast year. Even with all he’s achieved in football so far, you can still see Johnson light up when he speaks about skateboarding, lost a little in reverie.

He could do “the basics”, he says. “Ollie. Pop Shove-it. Kickflip. I was OK on a half-pipe. I started street skateboarding because you could literally do it outside your house, but I moved on to proper parks.”

He began visiting more and more of those parks, including one at Lady Bay just the other side of Forest’s City Ground, meeting other people who cared about skateboarding as much as he did. “I met so many cool people,” he says. “I learned so many things.” It’s where he learned about new music, new fashions, new ways of looking at the world. At home Johnson was destined to follow in his father’s footsteps. Out there he could be whoever he wanted to be.

“I met people with such different lives to me,” he says, “who grew up so differently. It took away everything else I was involved in.”

But eventually, Johnson had to choose. His career at Forest won out. His skateboards now sit untouched on the wall of his new home in Hampstead, a reminder of the smallest tinge of regret. “Skateboarding made me feel free,” he says. “Free to express myself. And that world… I could still go there now, and nobody would care about football.”

On a street in Brick Lane, East London, not far from the TikTok-beckoned hordes outside a neighbourhood beigel shop, Johnson flows once more in a chequered Wales Bonner cape.

It’s a role he feels comfortable playing. Today’s fashion shoot is an expression of the fascination he’s had with clothing since those days in Lady Bay, although you’d imagine this fit – Bonner, YMC trousers, Our Legacy shoes – is a little more tasteful than the Zeke And Luther era.

“Fashion is massive for me,” says Johnson. “That’s been consistent in my life. I love finding out new things about clothes, what looks good on me, what looks bad. It’s a way to learn about yourself. And about what influences designers, too, especially designers from different cultures. I’ve always grown up in England, but through football, I’ve seen a little about how people from different places live.”

Does he dress to fit in or to stand out? “I definitely went through stages of both”, he says. “When I first started buying my own clothes, I was only interested in things like crazy shirts or shoes. I’d kinda just dress for vibe without thinking about it, and I’d look horrendous. I remember this one shirt that was covered in roses. You can imagine. It sounds like something you’d wear once as fancy dress but… I just loved mad shirts for some reason. I used to get inspired by seeing people wearing properly out-there things and thinking, That’s how I wanna be, you know?”

Nowadays, Johnson’s usual choice of clothing runs to the understated. When he arrives at the studio, he’s dressed in subtle luxury. His boxy and fuzzy Our Legacy long-sleeve polo nods to his skating past: tastefully-wide trousers from Brain Dead which drape just so over his ERL x Dior B9S trainers, shoes with chunky laces and doughy upper that call to mind a pair of Etnies hitting the Euromillions.

“I still love that streetwear crosses over from skateboarding,” he says. “But a lot of fashion brands use skateboarding looks now, and those kids’ styles just came from them being themselves. They didn’t ask for their clothes to be on the runway. They wore them because it was practical for skateboarding.”

Johnson still watches the videos of legends like Ryan Sheckler or newer names like the Supreme-sponsored Kader Sylla, wondering if their talents were God-given or the product of hard work. He knows he can’t risk imitating them any more, so he makes do with posting outfits with tell-tale silhouettes and expensive takes on skate-rat classics on Instagram. Where some players’ reps politely chide their clients to share some of their personal style online to become, in industry parlance, more of ‘a cultural figure’, when Johnson shares photos of his style on his Instagram, it’s not because anyone has told him to. It seems style remains one of the few places he can truly express himself in public.

Today’s players are a literal lifetime away from the era of conspicuous consumption and Mayfair nightclub excess. They live as human bento boxes: each element of their day (and night) divided into incredibly specific portions. They are fed, watered, and rested with military precision, all for the goal of wringing maximum effort and effect on match day. I ask Johnson how he finds distraction amid the noise.

“Languages,” he replies quickly, and his frustration at Duolingo becomes apparent. They are the words of a man haunted – as many of us have been – by the little green owl avatar of the wildly popular language-learning app.

“It’s so repetitive,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “Like, yeah — match the words to the gaps in the sentence. I know that. I know how to do a puzzle, but I’m trying to learn a language here.”

He’s been learning French to connect with a couple friends in the south of the country, and a few teammates at Spurs.

He lists travel as another hobby, although he has little time for holidays. Instead, he explores those cultures through clothes. “I especially love learning about Asian fashion, the cultures and traditions,” he says. “I’ve never properly been there, which is something I’d love to do. The pride they take in their fashion and their perfectionism is inspiring.”

The biggest misconception fans have about players, Johnson says, is that they aren’t allowed other interests. “Obviously, the standard opinion is that players who get paid loads have the best life ever, which is true,” he says. “But I think when things aren’t going so well – when they’re playing bad or the team’s playing bad – you can’t stay thinking about football 24/7. Even when things aregoing well, you need to be allowed to do other things.

“Sometimes you’re super cautious. There are many times when you’re out and people are so friendly, and everyone is just so nice and respectful…” he says, trailing off. “But sometimes you’ll notice someone watching you, or following you, trying to take a video or something, and that can be quite unnerving.”

Johnson cannot retreat, as most of us do, into the dopamine mines of social media. These are not safe spaces for a player about whom everyone has an opinion. Instead, he finds freedom in an unusual place: international football.

A youth international with England, he was first selected for Wales in 2018. The England set-up had the bigger pool of players, the money, the glamorous friendlies. “[But] as soon as I played my first game for Wales,” he says, “everything felt completely different. When you play for Wales, you just know. And from there, it grows and grows and grows. It grows into you.”

While many players complain of the toll international games take on their body, Johnson relished the energy it brought. It took him back to that feeling he’d been searching for, as the pressure cranked in his day job. It took him back to Newport on the England-Wales border, the birthplace of his mother, Alison, and where her childhood sweetheart David landed after his emigration from Jamaica. And to Rhayader, where Johnson, over cup after cup of sugary tea in his grandparents’ little house at the end of a cul-de-sac, first discovered his Welshness.

“I’m super proud of my Jamaican side,” he says. “But I feel more and more Welsh whenever I play.”

After shunning England and Jamaica and declaring for Wales age 17, Johnson learned the national anthem – Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (The Land of My Fathers) – and never looked back. “Playing for them in front of my mum and my grandparents…” he says. “Seeing how much they loved it, I love it just as much.”

By the time he’s 35, Johnson says, he knows who he wants to be. It’s pretty simple, really. “I want to be someone who has so many different hobbies, different interests, who has taken so many different avenues and found so many different things to take pleasure in.”

Sometimes it’s on a skateboard. Sometimes it’s on Duolingo. And so, Brennan Johnson – learning, trying, failing, succeeding, as the world watches – keeps searching, in places big and small.

“I want to be more than someone who just loves football,” he says, finally. “I really want to be a lot more than that.”