Five years. That is how long it took Richard Mille and Audemars Piguet Le Locle to bring the RM 41-01 Tourbillon Soccer to life. The result is not a watch that nods to football, but a watch that tracks a match in real time, in full, down to every goal scored and every period of extra time. With the 2026 World Cup on the horizon, the timing is deliberate, and the execution is as extreme as you would expect from the brand.
The Dial
Forget the traditional conception of a dial. The Richard Mille RM 41-01 presents a fully skeletonised, satin-finished and microblasted grade 5 titanium surface that frames the movement rather than concealing it. At 9 o’clock, the match-time indicator reads the current phase of play: 1st Half, 2nd Half, 1st Overtime, 2nd Overtime, advancing with each flyback reset. At 4 o’clock sits the function indicator, three titanium plates over a lacquered background, showing N, W, or H as the crown moves through its positions. Running across the flanges, the two goal counters for home and visiting teams track scores up to nine, with the hands travelling along metallic rails before springing back to zero. The central chronograph displays overlapping minutes and seconds hands, and a power-reserve indicator completes the layout. It reads like a technical drawing, and that is precisely the point…
Calibre RM41-01
The movement measures 32.00 x 30.40 mm and sits 10.23 mm thick, housing 650 components: all within a skeletonised grade 5 titanium baseplate and bridges. The baseplate alloy breaks down as 90% titanium, 6% aluminium, and 4% vanadium, the same formula aerospace engineers trust for its weight-to-rigidity ratio. The tourbillon measures 12.40 mm in diameter; the Glucydur® balance wheel runs at 21,600 vph (3 Hz) with a moment of inertia of 11.5 mg- cm² and an angle of lift of 53°.
Power reserve sits around 70 hours without the chronograph running, drawn from a fast-rotating barrel with involute profile gearing at a 20° pressure angle. It is a solution that optimises torque transmission and reduces mainspring adhesion. KIF Elastor KE 160 B28 shock protection and an Elinvar balance spring from Nivarox® handle resilience. The patented double-column-wheel flyback construction is the crowning technical achievement: two dedicated column wheels orchestrate the levers separately for start/stop and reset functions, delivering uniform tactile feedback across all pushers, unprecedented in a flyback chronograph. The movement successfully completed 120 of Richard Mille‘s shock-resistance tests, including a 5,000 g trial.
The Case
The tonneau-shaped tripartite case measures 43.23 x 16.08 x 49.65 mm and assembles with 20 spline screws in grade 5 titanium against 316L stainless steel washers, achieving 50-metre water resistance via two Nitrile O-ring seals. The case comprises 105 components, bringing the total component count including strap to nearly 800. Richard Mille offers two versions of 30 pieces each: Red Carmin Basalt TPT®, a brand-new composite derived from volcanic rock developed with North Thin Ply Technology, and Dark Blue Quartz TPT®.
Basalt TPT® uses 40-micron-thick basalt fibres stacked at 45° rotational increments between layers, producing a naturally wood-like grain entirely unlike Carbon TPT® or Quartz TPT®. Both case versions use Carbon TPT® casebands, with pushers in microblasted titanium featuring polished bevels, TPT inserts, and 5N gold guards. Sapphire crystals have anti-glare coated on both sides: cover front (1.10 mm) and back (1.00 mm centre, 1.84 mm outer edge).
Conclusion
The RM 41-01 Tourbillon Soccer is Richard Mille operating at full capacity: a genuine, purpose-built complication that no other brand is attempting at this level. At a price reported at $1.94 million per piece, and with only 30 examples of each variant available, this is not a football watch, but a collector’s object that happens to track football better than anything else with hands and springs. If you need to ask whether it is worth it, you are probably not the target audience.
