As recently as February Louis Rees-Zammit refused even to consider abandoning his NFL dream. “I’m not ready to give this up and I don’t think I ever will be,” he insisted. Less than six months later he is heading back to rugby. What happened?
The answer is multifaceted but rooted in one key truth: Rees-Zammit was always trying to scale an incredibly perilous mountain. There is no precedent for a twentysomething athlete turning his hand to the NFL and finding any meaningful success as a wide receiver.
In fact, there are countless examples of college stars who spent their formative years appearing to master the art before earning a much-coveted first-round Draft pick, only to flop at the highest level: Treylon Burks, Jalen Reagor, N’Keal Harry, John Ross, Laquon Treadwell, Josh Doctson — and that’s just in the past decade.
An 18-month journey — in which Rees-Zammit remarkably missed only one Wales victory — was pockmarked with bumps in the road. For starters, his high-profile signing for the Kansas City Chiefs in March last year quickly turned sour when they asked him to play running back. The 24-year-old had spent the entire International Player Pathway scheme learning to be a receiver.
Rees-Zammit signed for the Chiefs in March 2024, shortly after they had won the Super Bowl
He then landed with the Jacksonville Jaguars, which seemed a match made in heaven given the franchise’s British connection as “London’s team”, but the entire coaching staff changed during this off-season, so any impression he had made last year quickly dissipated. They then drafted Travis Hunter — the best player in college last season — to complement Brian Thomas Jr, so the Jags now have two of the NFL’s most exciting young wide receivers in recent memory.
It was two months before the Draft that Rees-Zammit sat in a Florida hotel room, having signed a new contract with the Jaguars, adamant that he would not be gracing a rugby pitch any time soon. “I didn’t just leave rugby just to try it for a year,” he said. “People would be pretty dumb to think that I’d leave straight away.” And then: “This was always my dream and I want this to be the thing I do for the rest of my career.”
Rees-Zammit returned to wide receiver after his move to the Jaguars but faced serious competition in a strong unit
PETER VAN DEN BERG/ISI PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES
That stance soon changed. In an interview with talkSPORT six weeks ago, Rees-Zammit said: “International players get probably two to three years to make it in the NFL, so I wanted to do it at a time where I maybe could come back to rugby. I’m 24 now, probably got one to two more years to try to make it depending on how this year goes. I’ll be 25, 26 when I go back to rugby.”
Still six months shy of his 25th birthday, the Welshman is looking for a rugby team before the start of the new season and it’s difficult to argue with his decision to return. A reported back injury could have disrupted his entire training camp and prevented him from making any pre-season appearances, which are his only realistic opportunities to impress his coaches. After that, another season on the practice squad beckons, complete with inevitable thoughts of: “Am I wasting my best years here?”
Rees-Zammit could have been part of the present Lions tour had he not left rugby
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER MARC ASPLAND
Rees-Zammit will probably have no shortage of suitors in Britain and France — he’s still young and left rugby as arguably one of the best wingers in the world — but while the frustration of not living his dream will linger for some time, perhaps more galling is the timing of his ill-fated sojourn. Had he known that he would spend only a year and a half across the Atlantic, there is no way Rees-Zammit would have chosen the 18 months just gone — a period that neatly encapsulated the two Six Nations campaigns leading up to a Lions tour, as well as the tour itself.
Back in January 2024, the day before he dropped the bombshell news that he was leaving, very few pundits would have drawn up a Lions squad that didn’t include “Rees Lightning”. He may get another chance to tour, possibly two, but the only thing we know for certain is that he wasn’t part of a squad that is 80 minutes away from completing a historic whitewash in Australia. Given the way things have panned out, that is a bitter pill to swallow.