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I HAVE to admit I was amazed to discover the favourite car of Premier League footballers a couple of weeks ago.

Surely it’s the flashiest, most costly, in yer face declaration of wealth and arrogance of all time.

Well it isn’t. It’s the humble Range Rover Evoque. A car that starts at just a morning’s wages (£30,760) and adds a couple of hours in the afternoon to take it to £55,585 for a top spec convertible.

Why do footballers choose an Evoque? Simple, their wives and girlfriends need something they can actually drive rather than the second choice of footballers, which turns out to be a £271,146 Lamborghini Aventador.

Massive

In case you missed the top 10, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, these two are followed by the Merc GLE Coupé, Bentley Continental GT, Ferrari F12 Berlinetta, Lamborghini Huracan, Jeep Wrangler, Porsche 911 GTS, Bentley Bentayga and the humble £285,450 McLaren 675LT Spider. Gulp.

Range Rover’s 2018 model Evoque is on sale now. It has new engines, paint jobs, seats, headlights (don’t worry, they’re glitzy) and the sat nav has been replaced by a massive, near foot wide, screen.

On the engine side Rover didn’t send me the 290hp petrol turbo footballers’ fave which rockets this 14ft 4in beast from 0-62mph in 6.2s and 144mph.

Instead I got a new 2.0-litre diesel with 180hp which proved to be surprisingly quick and fuel efficient considering it weighs 1,690kgs. That’s 10kg more than a Nissan X-Trail.

My car comfortably returned 40mpg, which may not be close to its claimed 55mpg average figure but was nevertheless impressive.

Here’s a car that will cruise almost silently at 80mph, probably because the enging is turning over at just 1,500rpm thanks to its nine-speed auto box. A slight tweak on the throttle has it silently gliding forward with surprising ease and power, but there’s a lot more to it than just silence and speed.

Equipment levels on the Dynamic Lux model are huge and while it takes a while to get used to its new seats I’d got to like them a lot by the time Rover took it back home to Birmingham.

The only complaint I had about the seating position was that it’s too close to the steering wheel, which cannot be pushed back far enough for a small driver (me) to stretch out my arms. The quality of the interior is undoubted, with a herd of leather surrounding black silver trimmed instruments set in beautiful mottled silver surrounds and soft touch dark trim which is even padded on top of the doors to turn them into arm rests.

Yep, it’s so classy it could easily be a Mercedes or a Jaguar, and when you add its acre of driving aids that give it such terrific off-road ability it starts to look like something of a bargain.

Upgrade

Even so, though, there’s one thing that’s not so clever.

Instead of continuing with the 19-inch alloys that give the normal Evoque such an excellent ride the wheels have been upgraded to 20-inch alloys on top-range models like the Dynamic Lux.

It may not sound much of a change but it results in the Evoque bouncing around like a golf ball on a marble staircase on all but perfect road surfaces.

And how many of those do we get in the UK? Exactly.

Still our Premier League star won’t care. He’ll be too busy driving his Lamborghini to worry about the comfort of his wife and children.

After all, they’ll still look cool and isn’t that what’s really important?