Cole Palmer's Journey at Chelsea: From Star to Struggles

Cole Palmer knows what it feels like to own Stamford Bridge. To bend a game to his will, to turn a restless crowd into a roaring one, to look every inch the heir to Chelsea’s great modern creators.

He also now knows what it feels like when that magic fades.

The 2025-26 season never really let him breathe. A groin problem, then a broken toe, ripped 26 games out of his year and with them much of his rhythm. Palmer closed the campaign on 11 goals and three assists in all competitions – a return that would be respectable for many, but jarring for a player who had set his own bar so high.

Because the standard was brutal. The moment he walked through the door from Manchester City in the summer of 2023, in a £40 million move, Palmer lit the place up. Twenty-five goals in that first season, PFA Young Player of the Year, the sense that Chelsea had stolen a star from a domestic rival and fast‑tracked their rebuild around him.

The second year told a different story. Chelsea still won – a Conference League crown and a FIFA Club World Cup added silver to the cabinet – and Palmer remained influential enough, finishing with 18 goals. But the edge dulled. The numbers dipped, the swagger flickered, and the questions started.

By the time Thomas Tuchel named his England squad for the 2026 World Cup, the answer on Palmer was brutal in its simplicity: no place. A player who had once looked like a lock for a major tournament found himself watching on, his omission a clear signal that his form had slipped.

When a talent of that calibre stalls, the rumour mill spins. Talk of a return to Manchester, this time in red at boyhood club United, has surfaced more than once. The reality, though, is firmer than the gossip: Palmer is tied to Chelsea on a long-term contract running to 2033. Any escape route would be complicated, expensive, and – for now – hypothetical.

So attention turns to the new man in charge. Chelsea, again, are starting over. Xabi Alonso, the Spaniard whose playing career married elegance with authority, has been handed the keys to another “new era” at Stamford Bridge. His task is clear: restore structure, restore belief, and, crucially, restore Palmer.

Alonso may be exactly the sort of figure to do it – a coach who understands how to build around a technical hub, how to give a gifted playmaker responsibility without leaving him exposed. Palmer does not need a reinvention; he needs a platform.

What he has not always had, according to former Chelsea striker Tony Cascarino, is protection.

Speaking to GOAL on behalf of Tonybet’s World Cup Card Collection campaign, Cascarino did not dress it up. “There's been a drop off from Cole Palmer, that's why he's not been in the England squad,” he said. “There's obvious reasons why, he's just not played to the level that when he first joined Chelsea.”

The numbers back him up. The electricity of that first season has given way to something more stop-start, interrupted by injury and tangled in the broader inconsistency of a young, expensive Chelsea side still trying to work out what it wants to be.

Cascarino’s criticism did not land solely on Palmer’s shoulders. He pointed straight at the squad profile around him.

“Now, Chelsea haven't been very good also at that particular time and I feel that one of the things that's a standout feature of Chelsea and I think would have helped Cole Palmer is having experience in the team,” he said.

To underline the point, he went back to his own club loyalties. “I'm a Liverpool fan, Stevie Gerrard broke through, one of the shrewdest signings we ever made was Gary McAllister at 35 years old on a free transfer to play alongside Stevie Gerrard.”

That, in Cascarino’s eyes, is the gap at Chelsea. No McAllister-type figure. No older pro to lean on when the form dips, when the legs are heavy after injury, when the noise grows.

“I don't think that's happened at Chelsea with Palmer,” he continued. “I feel like he was the young kid, the young bucks coming on fire but when he's had a bit of a dip, he hasn't got the people around him. Enzo Fernandez is there, Moises Caicedo, they're great players, we know that, but they were big transfers as well so they have to prove themselves and their worth to the team.”

It is a damning snapshot of a dressing room full of talent but light on scars and stories. Palmer, Enzo, Caicedo – all brilliant, all expensive, all still establishing themselves. All, at times, looking around for someone older to steady the ship.

So where does that leave Palmer now? At 24, he is no longer the fresh-faced kid with everything in front of him and nothing to lose. He is a marquee signing with a major individual award, a mixed second season, a brutal injury-hit third, and a World Cup missed.

The ceiling has not moved. The question is whether Alonso and Chelsea can build the kind of environment – tactically and emotionally – that lets Palmer climb back towards it, and whether the club finally decides that a bit of hard-earned experience in the dressing room is worth as much as the next big-money prodigy.