Rice has been with Lauren Fryer for more than a decade, and the two are raising a young son together. There has been no engagement and no wedding, despite plenty of posts online calling her his wife. Some of those posts pair the claim with a quote Rice never actually said, that he doesn’t need “an upgrade.” The real version of that line is six years old: he told The Sun in 2019 that Lauren was “the love of my life” and that “there is no one better for me.”
Rice’s public profile has grown fast over the past couple of years. He has walked in a runway show at the Emirates Stadium, become a face for L’Oreal Paris, and appeared on the cover of British Vogue earlier this year. He gets recognized enough now that going out in public means constantly being stopped, and he has said he has to pick and choose who he responds to. When hotel guests waited around after his Vogue shoot hoping for a photo, he gave them one anyway.
Lauren Fryer, his girlfriend since they were both seventeen, has taken the opposite path. She grew up in Chessington, a few minutes from Rice’s home in Kingston upon Thames, and the two met as students at Grey Court School. Both are 27 now. What she does for work has never been reported anywhere, despite a decade of tabloid coverage of the relationship. Rice has said almost nothing about her either, not even in the Vogue piece, the one long interview where he has discussed her at all. What is on the record instead comes mostly from photographs. The couple reportedly live together in London and also keep a home in the area where they both grew up. Rice still turns up at the youth club in Kingston where he played as a boy, the same place his own parents met.
Rice revealed the birth of his son without giving a single interview. He and Fryer had a son, Jude, on August 7, 2022, and three weeks later, playing in a Premier League match, he showed off new ink on his forearm: Jude’s name, his birth date, his star sign, and the words “nothing else matters.” There was no interview or caption to go with it, just the ink on his arm, left for people to notice on their own. Jude has since turned up at plenty of the biggest moments in his father’s career, including next to the Premier League trophy this May and in the stands during the World Cup a few weeks after that.
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The trolling, and what came after
Fryer used to show up fairly regularly at Rice’s matches, going back to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, and she kept attending for a while after that too, including Euro 2024 in Germany that summer. In between, toward the end of 2023, private holiday photos of her were shared online and she was hit with cruel comments about her appearance. Love Island’s Liberty Poole spoke up at the time, asking online what had happened to “celebrating different body types,” and called the reaction to her “crazy.” By early 2024, Fryer had deleted every photo from her Instagram account, and it has stayed empty since, though she still went to a handful of matches over the months that followed. The real gap came after that: for close to two years, between that summer and this May, she was barely seen at a football match at all. The account now holds roughly 121,000 followers and zero posts.
Dani Dyer, who is married to Rice’s former West Ham teammate Jarrod Bowen, spoke about the abuse to Hello! Magazine in 2024, calling Fryer “a really good mum who keeps to herself” and adding that “no one deserves to be criticised like that.” Rice never addressed the abuse directly himself, and simply kept playing.
A different year
May brought the biggest season of his career so far. Arsenal won the Premier League for the first time since 2004, and Fryer and Jude were pictured on the pitch afterward. Then came the World Cup. England lost their semi final to Argentina, but Rice captained the side for the first time in his career in the third place match against France, scoring inside the opening three minutes of a game England won 6 to 4. Fryer and Jude were there too, having flown to the United States that summer to watch him play, not long after everything that had already happened online.
