Palmer is a unicorn in the modern world, inventing moments of pure pleasure

Palmer has that gangly physicality, like a very clever cartoon alpaca

29 Aug 2026 - THE GUARDIAN / Sport

Barney Ronay

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 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.

And yes, this is an oh-no-dad’s-talking-about-rap moment. You can just skip a few lines if you like. The whole thing moves on to Cole Palmer very quickly, why he’s both the best English footballer and very easy to love currently, for various reasons.

Central Cee is 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 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, whatever your intentions. To his credit, Central Cee was very good at explaining and apologising, while seeming genuinely non-judgmental of other people regardless of difference or identity, except, of course, of wastemen, mugs and snitches.

He seems to have been forgiven. More than that, he’s startlingly successful, the most streamed British rap artist of all time. Young people respond to him hungrily. He seems 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.

What does this have to do with Cole Palmer, and the surge of heartfelt love across all platforms 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. 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 off 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.

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 football kit and run around doing amusing celebrations.

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 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.

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.

One of the best bits of Monday night’s game was his interview after. Sky’s 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 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.