Cole Palmer's Premier League Comeback: What Tuchel Missed
Cole Palmer is ripping through Premier League defences again, and the question hangs over it all like a storm cloud: what on earth was Thomas Tuchel thinking last summer?
The evidence is everywhere. That deft, first-time flick into Joao Pedro against Fulham, followed by the ruthless low finish under Bernd Leno. The sudden burst of pace and 20-yard curler past Brighton’s Bart Verbruggen. The way he drifted to the edges of Hull’s back line, waited, then exploded into space to slide another pass into Joao Pedro’s path.
This version of Palmer looks inevitable. Unavoidable. World Cup material. So how did he end up watching the tournament from his sofa?
The truth is brutal. This player didn’t really exist last season.
The season that vanished
Across 2023/24, Palmer stacked up 42 goal contributions for Chelsea. The following year he piled on another 32 in 2024/25. Those are superstar numbers, the kind that make a World Cup place feel like a formality.
Then came 2025/26.
His output collapsed to 14 goal contributions. Just two of them arrived in his final 12 games of the season, the period when Tuchel was weighing up his World Cup squad. When the England manager needed to see a spark, Palmer faded.
The groin injury that disrupted the start of that campaign never truly let him go. He played, but never quite moved the same way. Tuchel wasn’t snubbing the Cole Palmer who had shredded Brighton with four goals the previous year, or the one who had dismantled PSG in the Club World Cup final in New Jersey 12 months earlier. He was judging a diminished version, a player stuck in the fog of his own body.
Had Tuchel been watching that earlier Palmer in the spring, the one who toyed with elite defences, there is little doubt a ticket to North America would have been waiting. Instead, the manager even tried to throw him a lifeline during the March international break.
Palmer couldn’t grab it.
He looked lost in the 1-0 defeat to Japan at Wembley. The first touch that once glued the ball to his boots deserted him. The swagger vanished. He wandered about like a man who’d gone upstairs and forgotten why.
No regrets, no apology
So did Tuchel lie awake in June, regretting the call?
"No," he said. "I was very happy with the squad selection. I had a lot of sleepless nights [beforehand]. But I had not one sleepless night about our selection because I was more than seven weeks with this group of players, and they were nothing but fantastic."
No backtracking. No remorse. Tuchel drew a hard line under it.
Now, though, Palmer is back in the England squad for the 2026/27 Nations League games against Spain, Croatia and Czechia. This time, he arrives with numbers that look a lot more like his old self.
"He has his numbers back," Tuchel said. "He has assists back. He has decisive goals back. So that's why he's in the squad, and I think he has a point to prove."
Swagger restored
You can see that point in the way Palmer moves now. There’s a sway to his stride as he scans for weak seams in a back line. A lazy-looking shoulder drop that sends a defender down the wrong road. Those sudden, sharp accelerations that cut through the idea he’s some languid luxury player.
He doesn’t look like the archetypal No 10. The limbs are long, the joints sharp, the frame almost awkward. Yet everything is in tune, like a stick insect on a mission. The aesthetic jars with the stereotype, which only makes his game more compelling.
There’s a flair to his thinking that feels almost un-English. He solves problems on the run, changing angles and options in a heartbeat. For an England side that can drift into predictability, that kind of mind is gold.
Winning his place back was no formality. Phil Foden missed out despite a bright start to the season, his red card in the Manchester derby counting against him. Fulham’s Joshua King came under serious consideration but stayed at home. Morgan Gibbs-White, outstanding for Nottingham Forest and central to keeping them in the Premier League, still finds himself on the outside.
Gibbs-White, Tuchel admitted, was particularly unlucky. "We can see the form that Morgan is in and he ended the season very, very strongly, and was the key player for Forrest to not be relegated. We can see him stepping up now. But it makes no sense to nominate three, four, five No 10s. It just does not help anyone."
Palmer has squeezed through a very tight doorway.
A warning attached
His recall, though, comes with a sting. Tuchel made sure of that, swerving away from the praise to issue a reminder.
"It is one thing to be nominated, by the way, like with Cole, getting your ticket back in the squad. But it's another thing to perform for England. Especially Cole, he needs to step up when he comes and needs to show these kind of numbers and these kind of performances to get his place, to keep his shirt, to justify the decision."
That is the next barrier. For all his club brilliance, Palmer’s England record is modest: two goals and one assist in 14 appearances. He can point out that only six of those were starts, and he’d have a case. But the numbers are the numbers, and Tuchel has made clear that the shirt must be earned, not assumed.
This time, Palmer arrives with a clean bill of health, sharp form and a summer’s worth of frustration behind him. The pain of missing the World Cup, the sense of being left behind while others seized the stage, has clearly fuelled this resurgence.
Tuchel sees that too. "The quality of Cole Palmer, we don't need to talk about it," he said. "But [he needs] to show it … There are steps to be taken. The first step is to be nominated. The second step is to fight and perform on the highest level for that shirt."
The first step is done. The second will play out under the floodlights, with Spain, Croatia and Czechia waiting to see whether this new, sharpened Cole Palmer is finally ready to turn club genius into England’s cutting edge.
