Cole Palmer is a unicorn in this world, inventing moments of pure pleasure. Much like Central Cee, the Chelsea attacker is a distinct presence and right now is perhaps the only truly creative English player out there.
A Distinct Presence in Modern Football
This week Central Cee launched his new Premier League song, called The Team. It owes its existence to a youth-centred, fist-bumping corporate tie-in with Coca-Cola, the press release for which appears to have involved a man in golf-casual clothing frowning at his computer screen for half an hour before typing “cool urban street words, what are?” into the AI search box, then nipping off for a quick brain-bowl strategy lunch with Roger from the Bluesky Synergy hub.
The song is really good, because Central Cee is really good. He’s super-smart with words, funny and snappy, but also surprisingly tender and raw.
Central Cee's Influence and Controversy
Central Cee is a significant figure, perhaps the biggest British recording artist right now. He’s also oddly raw and fearless in the things he says, in a way that feels distinct from the standard, mannered modern person, and which has got him into trouble at least once.
A few years back there was a furore when Central Cee decided to speak out against sexual prejudice. This sounds as if it should just be fine. Except, Central Cee’s call for tolerance was expressed via a lyric in the song Doja. And that lyric was: “How can I be homophobic? My bitch is gay.”
Hmm. Problems there. What Central Cee is saying here, what Central Cee has done while appearing to express a progressive sensibility, is to introduce an entirely new tier of … Basically what he’s saying is: how can I be homophobic? I’m far too busy being sexist.
This caused understandable offence. The b-word is demeaning and cheap, whatever your intentions. Don’t say it. Find better words. To his credit, Central Cee was very good at explaining and apologising, open to other views, while also seeming genuinely non-judgmental of other people regardless of difference or identity, with the exception, of course, of wastemen, mugs and snitches.
He seems to have been forgiven now. More than that, he’s startlingly successful, the most streamed British rap artist of all time. Young people respond to him hungrily. He seems adaptive, fitted to the modern world. In the Coke video he looks blankly into the lens, gives you everything and nothing, risky but also weirdly fearless.
Palmer's Sensational Performance
What does this have to do with Cole Palmer, and the surge of heartfelt Palmer-love across all platforms this week after his brilliant performance against Fulham on Monday?
First, Palmer is good friends with Central Cee. He even turned up at the launch of the Coke song just before Chelsea’s Premier League opener. And Palmer really was sensational at Craven Cottage, twirling about between the defensive lines, all perfect touch and interesting angles.
The reaction was significant too. Everyone went wild for this. In particular passionate football men of a certain age went wild. This boy is gold, this boy gets people off their seats, the man in the TalkSport video chair growled, speaking from the gut and the spleen, coming on less like a piece of football analysis, more like a man offering a brave, husky funeral elegy for a very loyal family dog.
This passion does have an edge to it. It is a mark of how hungry we are for something different, a counterpoint to the dominance of systems football, that despite being entirely academy-coded Palmer still seems to be a unicorn in this world.
Unusual Physicality and Creative Genius
For the middle-aged proper football man he can look like a flicker of the pre-digital memory, football in the time of maverick authenticity, an age of mud, of landlines, of not wearing a seatbelt, of smoking in pubs, of the casually discarded woodland porn mag, of Barry Davies shouting: “Oh, it’s magnificent and can’t they just taste it” while mods throw darts at each other in the background, because old fun is the best fun.
This is, of course, both deluded and incorrect, because football encourages such feelings and because many middle-aged men are already both of these things. But Palmer is genuinely unusual in the modern game. He turns up in strange spaces, finds gullies and currents in between those static pegs.
Right now he is perhaps the only truly creative English player out there, in the sense of inventing the game in front of him, dishing up in those moments the pure pleasure of a story being told in real time.
He even looks a little unusual in an era of hyper-athletes. Palmer is light and mobile. He can turn with balletic grace. But he also has that gangly, mischievous physicality, like a very clever cartoon alpaca has worked out how to put on a royal blue football kit and run around occasionally doing amusing celebrations.
Future Prospects and National Team
From here Palmer will benefit from having a very good club manager who gets his position. At Bayer Leverkusen Xabi Alonso designed an entire team around getting the best out of Florian Wirtz, the “free electron” in the structure.
Beyond this, Palmer is clearly the player the national team should have been configured around after Euro 2024. It made some logical sense not to pick him for the World Cup, because merit and fitness are also important. But Thomas Tuchel simply has to play Palmer, Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane together now, even if you have to pack the team with cement sacks and tins of beans to make it work, because this is just incredibly hot, and there is literally no other point in playing these games.
But it isn’t just the football. Palmer is also just weirdly likable. There is a temptation to cast him as a lego-haired blank, some kind of urban idiot savant, a human being made entirely from white bread, energy drinks and discarded phone cases. But he’s clearly very smart, and also very modern in his own way.
The Nonchalant Persona
This is another element of the Palmer persona. He looks unbothered, wry and oddly gentle. But the blankness is a thing, a way of being in the middle of all that glare. Palmer gives you nothing to bite on, no gaps in the armour. He even seems weirdly post-race, or just non-race, some kind of bowl-headed omni-man.
It is both an attitude and a shield of sorts. There’s a thing young people do on the internet, known as Nonchalance. This is all about projecting indifference and impassive facial expressions, appearing comically unbothered while chaotic things happen around you. In the picture with Central Cee at the Coke thing they’re both doing it, staring blankly into the camera open but also closed.
Palmer seems to do this naturally. He will sit with his legs crossed while a group of angry men have an on-pitch brawl nearby. He will have the sense of raw dramatic irony to look genuinely amused on the live TV feed as the referee decides to stand in the middle of the Chelsea huddle, one of the most comically weird sub-moments of the modern age.
There is a theory Nonchalance is a political attitude, a response by the post-Gen-Z demographic to the challenge of making the world you find less incoherent, less intrusive on your space, a blank against the constant wall of noise, dogma and ideological boilerplate hurled your way.
Even the way Palmer plays has a kind of shrug about it, an existential creativity, making up your own patterns, making the world small, you-sized, following the lines in front of you.
One of the best bits of Monday night’s game was his interview after. Sky’s reporter Emma Saunders asked Palmer: “How ready are you for this season?” His response was: “Did you not watch the game?” – which from some old-school, spam-faced football man might have sounded a bit weird, a bit off on power dynamic, a bit man-woman.
But it really wasn’t that at all. Palmer was already laughing. Saunders laughed back. And it was just a nice moment, banter-stuff, mate-chat, playing the game in front of you. English football has such an interesting figure here, not just a brilliant footballer, but a distinct presence, a way of existing in the middle of all that heat. Let’s try not to break him this time.
