As a 19-year-old Premier League footballer at Swansea, Ben Davies always took an eternity to leave the club’s training ground. In those days, he drove an old Volkswagen Polo with manual windows – much to the amusement of the rest of the squad – and autograph-hunting supporters kept him busy.
“Ben would wind down the window, say hello, have a photo, sign something, wind it back up and then 15 yards on another fan would stop him and he’d do it all over again,” says Alan Curtis, Swansea’s assistant manager at the time. “But he did it without fuss. He was a lovely boy and he is a gentleman now.”
It is a story that chimes with Davies’s down-to-earth and uber-professional character, the common denominator in conversations when those who know him best discuss the Wales defender poised to win his 100th cap in Monday’s World Cup qualifier against Belgium. The 32-year-old will be the fourth men’s player to reach the milestone, after Gareth Bale, Wayne Hennessey and Chris Gunter.
“Playing for Wales means everything to him and that really shows,” says Gunter. “He’s always leading, in different forms: setting standards, driving the group and being a person the squad can rely on. He is as passionate as anybody I’ve seen play for Wales and, rightly, he will be celebrated and talked about for years to come.”
There is a catalogue of moments that encapsulate Davies, none more than his goal-saving block to deny Slovakia’s Marek Hamsik at Euro 2016. Curtis references a line from Bill Shankly. “A football team is like a piano. You need eight people to carry it and three who can play the damn thing. I’m not calling Ben a piano carrier, but he’s one of those people that every team needs.
“He would be Mr Consistency, unflappable, on the same plane whether he’s playing Kazakhstan or the world champions. As the years have gone by, he’s become indispensable; I’m sure when Craig Bellamy picks the team, the first name down on the team sheet would be Ben.”
He is Wales’s de facto captain in the absence of Aaron Ramsey, who last played for his country in September 2024. Davies has been on the players’ committee for several years and was part of the historic run to the Euro 2016 semi-finals. He also featured at Euro 2020 and the 2022 World Cup.
“He thinks about every part of the game,” Gunter says. “He’s not one to go on the pitch, do the session, go back to his room and then you don’t see him. He’s massively involved in everything.”
For most of his career Davies has been an unsung hero, content operating in the shadows of superstars: Bale and Ramsey on the international stage, Harry Kane and Son Heung-min, the godfather to his children, at Tottenham, who signed him in July 2014. He was Mauricio Pochettino’s first recruit at Spurs, ending Davies’s long association with Swansea, the club he joined aged seven and rejoined after two years living in Viborg, Denmark.
“We were at the end of a pre-season camp in Chicago and due to fly home the next day,” says Curtis, Swansea’s honorary club president. “But Spurs were flying out to Chicago the same day so he had to stay. He realised it was a big opportunity, something he couldn’t turn down, but I remember it breaking his heart and all the boys consoling him. They were genuine tears; he was very, very fond of the club and the area.”
Eleven years later Davies is Tottenham’s longest-serving player and has worked under seven managers, his staying power a symbol of the regard in which he is universally held within the game. His game time has dwindled in recent seasons – he is yet to play in the Premier League this campaign – but his performances for Wales are regularly monstrous. Bellamy suggested Davies’s display against Canada last month, a friendly defeat in Swansea, was the best he had seen him play.
“It goes back to how he is as a professional,” says Gunter, appointed head coach of Wales’s Under-19s last year. “Even if he’s not playing he makes sure he’s in the best possible place so that when he’s on the pitch, he makes the most of every single minute. When he turns up for Wales, you wouldn’t know if he’s been playing or not.”
As a player, he has lived in the Premier League for more than a decade but, as a person, Davies prefers to keep himself to himself. “I think this sums him up: at his wedding his two best men were from his old school,” Curtis says. He is articulate and personable, but politely declined a request to talk at length about his impending achievement to avoid pre-empting anything and ensure total focus on performance.
Davies is bright; he has an Open University degree in business and economics, hence his attendance at the Financial Times’s business of football summit, and last year secured his Uefa A coaching licence with the Football Association of Wales. Bellamy believes Davies has the makings of a manager, but could also envisage him working as a director of football or chief executive. “Ben could stay in the game in a number of roles, which is unique for players, because normally it is coaching or management,” Gunter says. “He is an intelligent and ambitious guy.”
Bale is Wales’s most-capped male player with 111. “Ben definitely won’t be thinking about breaking Gaz’s record – he would swap his caps for team success – but he 100% could do it,” Gunter says. “If he did it really quickly it would be amazing because that would probably mean that Wales are competing at the World Cup next summer and that would be his fourth major tournament, something no Wales player has done.”
For his part, Davies spoke at Wales’s press conference on Sunday. “I’d have been happy if I’d have picked up one cap for Wales in my life growing up as a kid, so it is an incredibly proud moment for me and my family but, at the same time, there is a job to be done,” he said.
Davies deserves his moment in the sun. “I was fortunate because my 100th cap came during lockdown,” Gunter says. “That was a blessing in the sense no one was really allowed in the stadium and it was all a little bit strange. Unfortunately for Ben, he’s going to have a load of attention on him.”
