Was Cole Palmer meant to be this good?

On a cold, rainy morning in March 2016, Kevin Betsy, then England Under-15s coach, travelled to Warwick University. He was there to watch an under-14 Premier League international tournament featuring academy teams who had come through regional qualifiers across the country, as well as a select group of invited youth sides from some of Europe’s elite clubs.

One of Betsy’s priorities was to get a closer look at Manchester City, who boasted several of the country’s brightest prospects born in 2002. It did not take long for one of their attackers to catch his eye: Cole Palmer, playing in a shirt and shorts that looked much too big for him, already possessed many of the technical skills that are lighting up the Premier League at Chelsea but was physically a world away from what he would become.

“He was probably the smallest player on the pitch,” Betsy recalls of Palmer in an interview with The Athletic, “but very efficient, with outstanding technical quality.

“He had a lovely feel when receiving the ball, and he was able to dribble in tight spaces and then find combination passes in and around the box.”

Those attributes have become all too familiar to Premier League defenders since he made his debut for Chelsea in the competition in September 2023. Palmer’s 43 direct goal involvements (28 goals, 15 assists) in 39 league appearances for Chelsea even put him ahead of Manchester City’s goalscoring phenomenon Erling Haaland since the start of the 2023-24 season. He has been established as a legitimate contender to be considered the best attacker in England.

So rapid has been Palmer’s rise to superstardom since leaving City for Chelsea in a deal worth up to £42.5million ($56m) a year ago, that many are asking if anyone in football expected him to be this good. The answer is not entirely straightforward, not least because it takes in the physical challenges of adolescence that can alter the trajectories even of the most talented prospects in the unforgiving environment of elite academy football.

---

City saw the same qualities in Palmer that would later become obvious to Betsy when they signed Palmer to their academy at the age of nine.

“He stood out just in terms of how comfortable he was on the ball,” Scott Sellars, the club’s former head of academy coaching, tells The Athletic. “He never looked flustered and always looked like he had answers, even as a young boy. He had a great way of dropping his shoulder and going past people. I never like to use the word ‘natural’, but he had that ease of receiving, dribbling and decision-making at a very high level from a young age.”

The memory of watching the 10-year-old Palmer dominate a youth tournament in Germany for City sticks with Sellars more than a decade on. “It was very frantic, small pitches, people frightened to make a mistake, and Cole would just get the ball off the goalkeeper and dribble past people — past one, past two, past three,” he says. “He was only small by comparison to the other players, but he had that ability to keep going past people, inside and outside.

“We made a compilation video about a year later trying to show the talents we had in the academy, and the philosophy and methodology at the time, and Cole was in a lot of it because of his ability. That was the type of player we were looking to create: the player who could handle the ball and solve problems.”

But it would be an exaggeration to suggest that Palmer stood head and shoulders above the many other bright talents in City’s academy at the time — in part because he did not stand head and shoulders above any of his peers for the majority of his youth career.

Most grew up and bulked out much earlier and faster than he did, meaning Palmer endured no shortage of frustrating days as he waited for his body to catch up with his talent. “From age 13 to 16 is really difficult for the smaller, more technical players, and they can get lost and not have as much success as when they were younger, because it becomes a bit of a physical mismatch at times,” Sellars says.

See more

Crazy growth spurt https://t.co/E7KZxAdfoi pic.twitter.com/8eY2x5kOdK

— SB (@ShowBoat00) August 27, 2024

Betsy had no reservations about including the small, slight Palmer in his England Under-15 squad, and offered a reassuring voice when it came to the physical difficulties he was experiencing.

“Cole’s technical ball manipulation meant he was able to out-feint or jink a player quite easily, but the player would catch up with him purely because of physicality,” he says.

“We identified that he would grow really well in his body in the next two to three years and it wouldn’t hinder his progress. It’s just, when you’re trying to deal with not being able to accelerate and beat a player one-versus-one because they’re physically stronger than you, that can be difficult for a young player. You might lose confidence.”

Palmer’s ironclad self-belief ensured that did not happen, backed by his father Jermaine, the keen amateur footballer who had helped him refine his immaculate touch with hours spent in the park before City found him. “His dad was strong in terms of believing in his technical ability over his size,” Sellars says. “He had great support from his family.”

Betsy moved up to coach England Under-16s the following year, and Palmer made only one start during what he has since admitted was the most testing stretch of his career.

“Physically, we had to manage him very delicately when he came on England camp, because he was going through a lot of growth and maturation,” Betsy says. “You can’t play significant minutes in a two or three-game international week. That comes with the player understanding the condition their body is in at that moment, and Cole was fully in the loop on that.”

Not everyone at City was convinced that Palmer would develop enough physically to make it at the top level. There was a lively internal debate about whether to offer the diminutive 16-year-old a professional contract that was eventually settled by Jason Wilcox, then the club’s academy director, who never wavered in his belief that he was too talented to discard.

“When we went to watch him at City Under-14s, Under-15s, Under-16s, Cole wasn’t always the standout player,” Betsy says. “He had a huge champion at the club in Jason. He was a huge fan of Cole. There were a couple of times we went to watch and Cole would be on the bench or wasn’t playing as well as he would have liked, but we were very convinced and Jason was very convinced that Cole would be the player that they and England believed.”

Even if City had made a different decision, it is unlikely that Palmer would have fallen far with his body of work at academy level. “I was at Wolves (as technical director) when he was 15, 16, and I would hear other people saying Cole might not get a scholarship,” Sellars says. “Behind the scenes I was saying, ‘Well if he doesn’t, give me a call’.”

---

A drastic growth spurt in his late teens validated Wilcox’s faith and transformed Palmer into the player now shining in a Chelsea shirt: listed at 6ft 2in tall, but with the touch in tight spaces and blend of technical skills more readily associated with much smaller attacking midfielders.

With that physical development came an uptick in Palmer’s on-pitch production, both for City’s elite development squad — where he worked with Chelsea head coach Enzo Maresca in 2020-21 — and for England Under-21s, becoming a key contributor in qualification for the 2023 European Under-21 Championship.

City were convinced enough of his elite potential that when Southampton enquired about signing him in the summer of 2022 their interest was immediately rebuffed. Their analysis had indicated that he would be well suited to playing as a goalscoring No 10 in coach Ralph Hasenhuttl’s 4-2-2-2 system, but they were told that Palmer and Phil Foden were the two academy prospects who were off the table in transfer discussions.

It was a different story when Chelsea came calling a year later, ready to make a significant up-front investment in Palmer as well as offering a clearer path to the regular game time he craved after struggling to complete his first-team breakthrough at City. “The only thing Cole was waiting for, from the outside perspective, was minutes,” Betsy says.

What has happened since has exceeded even the most optimistic projections — and not just in terms of Palmer’s goals and assists. “I always felt in central areas he would score,” Sellars says. “He was always calm, composed, never flustered. It was just a case of him getting stronger. I thought he would grow, but I never thought he would be as tall as he is.”

“Manchester City recruited Cole at under-9 because of the huge talent they saw in him, and the same with England at under-15,” Betsy adds. “It was a slow burn in terms of his progression, purely because of his physical characteristics, but that comes with time and patience.

“No one has got a crystal ball in youth development — there are so many variables — but we had huge belief in Cole and that he could be one of the stars of the future for his club and country.”

Palmer is very much a star of the present at Chelsea and, with a contract that commits him to the club until 2033, a foundational pillar of the young team taking shape at Stamford Bridge.

(Top image — design: Eamonn Dalton; photos: Getty Images)