Cole Palmer interview: ‘Manchester was same old, same old – something fresh was needed’

It is nearing the end of the photo shoot and Cole Palmer, whose blank resting expression is perfect for modelling, needs a little persuasion to smile. Step forward his agent, Mark Rankine, a wisecracking character with a gift for piercing Palmer’s defences. For a few moments the pair lark about on set, throwing their arms around each other and taking peace-sign selfies with their iPhones against a background of vivid Chelsea blue. “This,” Rankine tells his young superstar, “is the pose we’re going to strike when you win the Ballon d’Or.”

Such a statement might, in reference to any other 22-year-old, smack of hubris. Since its inception in 1956, only four Englishmen have claimed the Ballon d’Or, bestowed on the world’s finest footballer over the previous season. Palmer, despite his nomination for the game’s ultimate individual accolade, will fall short of becoming the fifth, with Manchester City’s Spanish midfielder Rodri claiming the prize in Paris last month. But his trajectory so far, propelling him at warp speed from the parks of the Manchester suburb of Wythenshawe to a nine-year Chelsea contract and a lavish lifestyle in the Surrey stockbroker belt, hints at the rarefied air he could yet reach.

We meet at Brooklands Studio, a cavernous rehearsal hangar on a Weybridge industrial estate. It is only a 15-minute drive from Palmer’s Esher home, although he contrives to be half an hour late. “Footballers, eh?” laughs Rankine, arriving from Yorkshire before his client. “Cole says he can’t find his keys. Usual story.” It is clearly not his car keys, given that a BMW limousine has been provided to pick him up and ferry him back. When you earn a reported £130,000 a week, a salary sure to increase across a rare “golden handcuffs” deal tying him to the club until 2033, such indulgences come as standard.

The question is how you market him. Palmer wears his extravagant talent so laconically, with his cold-blooded goal celebration in which he crosses his arms and rubs them as if shivering, that he has gained cachet as the consummate emotional flatliner. As Burberry, whose latest collection he has come to model today, worked out how best to promote their partnership with Palmer, they chose a nine-minute video of him sitting largely motionless beside a lake with a fishing rod, wearing a £2,490 duffel coat but saying nothing. I ask him if he feels the footage has added to his air of mystery. “Yeah, because people thought I was going to get up and do something,” he says. “But I ended up just wasting nine minutes of their time.”

Such sangfroid is synonymous with his image. No sooner did the Professional Footballers’ Association honour him as their Young Player of the Year in August than Palmer was filmed opening a fridge door to show the trophy nestling in a tray of ice cubes. “It goes well together, I think,” he says, trying to explain this “Cold Palmer” shtick. “With my name as well, it sounds similar, doesn’t it?” Just as the fridge stunt has drawn more than 40 million views on TikTok, the angling film is already proving a minimalist viral sensation. Singer Lily Allen, a supporter of Chelsea’s west London rivals Fulham, wondered aloud on her Miss Me? podcast: “Who would have thought Cole Palmer just fishing could be so fit?”

With this level of celebrity love-in, he is a magnet for designer brands. A sudden growth spurt in his late teens has given him a lean, elongated physique. At 6ft 2in, Palmer is tall for an attacking midfielder, and after he is forced to change into double socks to fit into a pair of metallic shoes, he clops down Brooklands’ steel staircases like a gangly mountain goat. He stops frequently to send pictures to his friends of him in an assortment of expensive check patterns, and yet you question whether high fashion is quite his natural realm.

Once he has dressed down in his day gear, I inquire whether he has a signature style. “This?” he shrugs, gesturing at his ensemble of a green Nike hoodie and tracksuit bottoms. “I did like the other stuff, though. I just never really put it on.”

Palmer, as you might have gathered by now, is not exactly the loquacious type. “A man of few words” is how he is billed – and that is by his own PR. It is not just that he is naturally deadpan, but that he seems unsure at times as to what he should say at all. He denies, for example, that he feels any pressure in the Chelsea dressing room to stay on trend. “Actually,” he corrects himself, “I do love fashion. What you put on, people do look at, and maybe they’ll start wearing it.” He confirms, as the owner of a Lamborghini Urus, that this same enthusiasm extends to cars, but insists that the stereotype of the fancy-Dan footballer can be overplayed. “I do see where it comes from. Not everyone’s like that.”

It is hard to overstate how vertiginous Palmer’s rise has been. Just three years ago he was still in the Manchester City academy, so restless to prove his credentials that he played twice in one night, first coming on as a substitute for the seniors before wolfing down some food, bolting over the bridge to the Academy Stadium next door, and scoring three for the Under-23s. This addiction to the pure joy of the game has since moulded him into perhaps the finest footballer in the country. At Chelsea’s kit launch in the summer, when invited to hold up three fingers to represent a hat-trick, he replied: “What about four?” Two months later, he became the first player to score four goals in the first half of a Premier League match.

To examine Palmer’s life story is to wonder if this eerie inner conviction is innate. At Gatley Primary School in Cheadle, every child leaving in 2013 had to sign an “aspirations book”, completing the sentence, “One day I’ll be…” Palmer, having been on City’s books from the age of six, wrote: “A footballer.” Even once he graduated to the private St Bede’s College, his tuition paid for by City, this resolve never wavered. “Teachers always tell you to get a plan B,” he says. “But I didn’t listen.”

He is cut from the same cloth as Wayne Rooney, famously dubbed the last of the great street footballers. It comes as scant surprise that Palmer, who grew up a Manchester United fan, would consciously model his style on Rooney’s during kickabouts with his father Jermaine at Wythenshawe’s Hollyhedge Park. “If he’d scored a goal on the weekend, I would go out and see if I could do it,” he says, reflecting that part of him still hankers for those more innocent days.

“My family still live in Wythenshawe, so when I’m going past the park I always try to stop and remember it. I do try to take it in my stride, but you do sometimes have moments when you think, ‘Maybe 12 months ago none of this was like this, maybe I could go more places and do things.’ I do stop and think, ‘Wow, it has changed fast.’ I’m still getting used to it.”

Since Palmer joined Chelsea from City in September 2023, for a £42.5 million fee that would now be three times as much, he has referred obliquely to the importance of getting away “from people I didn’t need to be around, going out to certain places when maybe I shouldn’t have been there”. Unlike some of his peers, he has never veered violently off the rails, but he acknowledges that he required a change of scenery, a freedom from temptation. “It was good to get out of the comfort zone. Manchester was same old, same old. So something fresh was needed, I think. By the time I went to the Euro Under-21 tournament last year, I realised it was good just to focus on football.”

The ruse worked: where Palmer had watched England’s European Championship final in 2021 in the pub with friends, he played in this year’s instalment in Berlin, channelling his customary ice-cold precision to score the equaliser in a 2-1 defeat to Spain. But for all the fame and the eye-watering wealth, being the young superstar in whom everybody’s hopes are invested can be a peculiar existence. Parachuted into Surrey, wrenched away from his close circle, you formed a sense initially that Palmer was none too sure about his surroundings. In one interview, he said he did not know what the M25 was – quite the achievement given the location of Chelsea’s Cobham training ground, barely a mile from Junction 9.

Has he struggled to settle, to find a house where he is happy? “The club help a lot,” he says. “They’ve done most of it, which is helpful, because it’s stressful.” I ask if he enjoys the area as a base, having long been curious about how much there is to do for 20-something Chelsea players in the manicured suburbia of Surrey’s Golden Triangle. “Manchester’s better, but I don’t mind it. I do like it around here, because it’s quiet, there are no distractions. Everyone you would go out with on a day-to-day basis is nowhere near you.”

Still, the odd London rap artist does gravitate in his direction. Palmer is an avowed rap enthusiast, happily listing his favourite acts: “Central Cee, Nines, they’re the people I listen to from the UK. Then Lil Baby in the US. I need to give Tunde a shout-out as well, he’s a good rapper.” This is a week when Central Cee – real name Oakley Neil Caesar-Su, from Shepherd’s Bush – has turned up in his sideways-on baseball cap to see him, with the rapper posting an Instagram picture of the pair giving the camera the middle finger. The setting of leafy, ultra-affluent Cobham is about as incongruous as Ali G pretending that Staines signifies the ghetto.

Such swagger is a pattern across his appearances on social media, with Palmer drawing praise last year for his perfect lip-syncing to Clarks, a Jamaican dancehall anthem by Vybz Kartel. If you are starting to think his frame of reference is classic Generation Z, you would be right. His city of Manchester might be in the renewed grip of Oasis-mania, but he shoots down any idea of attending one of the band’s reunion concerts next year. “That,” he says flatly, “doesn’t appeal to me”.

His embrace of Caribbean music is no mere affectation. Palmer is proud of the fact he can trace his paternal ancestry back to St Kitts and Nevis, even having the country’s flag stitched into his boots alongside the St George’s Cross. His grandfather Sterry, whose parents emigrated to the UK as part of the Windrush generation, was born in the nation’s capital of Basseterre and set sail for Southampton at the age of six, settling initially in Manchester’s Moss Side neighbourhood. More than 60 years later, Palmer’s prodigious success ensures that his goals top the evening news bulletins in his ancestral land 4,000 miles away. “We sent some Chelsea shirts out there, and now the whole island seems to be wearing them,” he says, smiling. “I haven’t been there yet, but I’m going to go next summer.”

While Palmer’s heritage technically renders him eligible for St Kitts, he has represented England since the Under-15s, his importance to the national team never more vividly highlighted than by his 20-minute cameo against Spain at the Euros, in his team’s first major final on foreign soil. Oblivious to the thought that more than 24 million people were watching him back home, he needed only three minutes as a substitute at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium to deliver the strike that kindled a surge of cruelly thwarted hope. “I don’t pay much attention to it,” he says of the hoopla. “After it happens – and maybe I haven’t thought about all this enough – I do say to myself, ‘Yeah, that was a big moment.”’

A perverse irony was that despite Palmer glittering in bursts, Gareth Southgate largely overlooked him in Germany. Four months on, his frustration lingers. “It’s difficult not playing, when you think that you could have helped the team more.” Was it a struggle to understand, given what he knew he could contribute? “You could say that.” It is why he shows little sentiment for Southgate in the wake of his resignation, and why he refuses to buy into the hue and cry over England appointing a German successor in Thomas Tuchel. “I don’t see any difference, to be honest. Everyone knows he’s one of the best coaches out there, by his record. Hopefully he can bring it home.”

Palmer’s profile is soaring at such a rate, with his visionary passing and exquisite finishing leaving hardened pundits lost in admiration, that he is not about to dial down the expectation. His target at Chelsea? “Trophies.” The Ballon d’Or? “That’s the aim. I’ve only been playing a year at this level.” He is not so myopic, however, that he forgets to acknowledge his father for all the meticulous work on his technique when he was a boy. A powerful motivation, he says, is to pay him back. “And my mum,” he adds, hastily. “She used to take me to matches with my dad. Both of them.”

A preconception has developed around Palmer that he is vacant, so immersed in his football that most general knowledge passes him by. It is not helped when Chelsea put out a video where he is asked what AM and PM denote. Staring dead ahead for several seconds, he finally replies: “What?’’ “Post-meridiem,” answers Marc Cucurella, his Spanish teammate, on his behalf. “Post who?” Palmer says.

Except you have to set this caricature against the more endearing persona he projects around those closest to him. Conducting a “girly” online quiz with his sister Hallie, he confounds her predictions by correctly identifying what bronzer, contour and kitten heels are. “Common sense, I’ve got loads of it,” he declares, triumphantly. “To everyone who says I’m dumb, I’m not.”

Palmer’s intelligence with a ball, where he can execute in a heartbeat the type of cross lesser players cannot even imagine, proves acuity cannot be defined by academic ability alone. His feel for the game is such that he can name his favourite goal without hesitation. “I have two,” he says. “The free kick versus Brighton [in September], and the first goal against Everton last season.” Would he consider himself a perfectionist? “Oh, you always want more,” he grins, rising to his feet. Our time is up, and his limo is waiting. His magic-carpet ride rolls on.