On August 23, after a seemingly relentless social media marketing campaign in which shouting/cooking ace Gordon Ramsay trumpeted the “Rolls-Royce of pans”, premium cookware manufacturers HexClad were hit with a lawsuit by… Rolls-Royce.
Ramsay — who is not a defendant in the trademark case in federal court in the U.S. state of New Jersey — is no stranger to some frivolous Rolls-Roycing: at some point on his many TV shows, he has dubbed the fillet as “the Rolls-Royce of beef”, the rack of lamb as “the Rolls-Royce of lamb”, the loin as “the Rolls-Royce of wild boar” and the poulet de Bresse as “the Rolls-Royce of chickens”.
Despite the belated efforts of Rolls-Royce’s lawyers, the marketing phenomenon of “borrowing” their luxury cars’ prestige has spread like wildfire.
A portrait by 18th-century artist Allan Ramsay (presumably no relation) sold for £18,000 at auction after being listed as “a Rolls-Royce painting”. Grammy-nominated British vocalists VOCES8 have been dubbed “the Rolls-Royce of a capella ensembles”. Various products have been self-hailed as the Rolls-Royce of sofas, turkeys, luggage, pianos, office chairs, Prosecco, pies and chalk (Hagoromo is excellent chalk, to be fair. Mathematicians literally hoard whole boxes of it, in case production is ever ceased).
As a multi-billion pound industry itself, obsessed with the depiction of elite players as assets to be coveted, moved around and often overpaid for, football is far from immune to the tenuous art of Rolls-Roycing. But the game’s track record here is mixed.
Brian Clough once justifiably called Roy McFarland, a towering centre-back for his Derby County side in the early 1970s, “a Rolls-Royce of a defender” — and you can just hear him saying it — while a young Phil Jones was also Rolls-Royced by his then Blackburn Rovers manager Steve Kean, mere days before being signed by Manchester United.
The Journal, a regional newspaper covering the north east of England, went rogue in 2011, labelling a 30-year-old Titus Bramble as “potentially a Rolls-Royce” after he signed for Sunderland, while Martin Keown — not a Rolls-Royce himself, based on criteria we will clarify shortly — described Brighton winger Kaoru Mitoma this week as “like a Rolls-Royce out there, the way that he just meanders with the ball.”