When Chelsea drew 2-2 with Bournemouth on January 15 2025, you could be forgiven for thinking it was one of the more insignificant results in Premier League history.
216 days on, it is becoming of increasing importance to one player in particular: Cole Palmer.
On that day, Palmer opened the scoring, beating the offside trap before sending the keeper one way and rolling the ball the other. It was the kind of goal that sums up the Manchester City academy product; timing meets composure to make everything look rather easy.
Having scored 22 in the 2023/24 campaign, Palmer was well on his way to beating that tally with his 14th of a season that had seen him score four in one half. And yet, seven months on, that cool finish remains the last time Palmer has scored in the league from open play.
On Sunday, he began his new Premier League season with four off-target shots, one chance created and an xG of 0.17. Micky van de Ven’s xG was higher.
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Any hope that Palmer would spring back into form at the start of the new season has so far proved fanciful, and it is now a drought that has lasted 17 Premier League matches.
Palmer probably wanted nothing more than some time away from the game to reset the radar, but this is modern football so he had England duty followed by a new summer tournament in the humid bowls of the US, all while 18 other Premier League teams had their feet up.
Unsurprisingly for a player coming off a summer international tournament and a season which saw him play 46 games, Palmer started the Club World Cup slowly, taking five games to score his first goal before showing glimpses of his old self with two goals in the final against PSG.
But the 0-0 draw to Crystal Palace was a reminder of reality. This was a game away from the Trump-infested fever dream of Infantino’s tournament. One where not every game will be against PSG for a big shiny trophy.
Palmer’s problems extend beyond just him. To some extent, every team can be accused of being over-reliant on a stand-out player – Salah at Liverpool, Saka at Arsenal, etc – but of the big six, it is Chelsea that are perhaps the most dependent on their star man. In 2025, coinciding with Palmer’s drop in form, Chelsea are seventh in the Premier League form table, just one point better off than Crystal Palace. Only three teams to have played the same number of Premier League fixtures have scored fewer goals.
Chelsea’s participation in the Club World Cup meant they were always likely to come into the new season not firing on all cylinders, but how long does a drought have to drag on for before it becomes the new normal? Even the top players are not immune to a run of bad form, but seven months is verging on something more than a temporary blip, especially for a player early in his career.
Last season was only the second in which he was a first-choice starter, meaning that the sample size of his playing career is still quite low, making it hard to determine which is the ‘real’ Cole Palmer.
His breakout year in 2023/24 had many believing that 33 goal contributions in 34 games was going to be his level and that this run is merely a dip in form, but the reverse could just as easily be said. What if, going forward, 2023/24 was the purple patch, with this now his usual level?
Writing a player off that easily would seem a foolish endeavour, and Chelsea need only look to one of their favourite sons as a reminder from years gone by. Having scored 14 in the previous two campaigns, Eden Hazard managed only four goals in the 2015/16 season, but the Belgian followed that with a career-best 16 as Chelsea won the 2016/17 title.
Undoubtedly, Hazard was able to achieve that by actually having a break. When Belgium were knocked out of Euro 2016 on July 1, Hazard did not have another competitive game for 45 days.
Palmer’s loss of form is not only down to him as an individual. As well as the schedule, Palmer has been inundated with new faces playing around him. In the two seasons and one game he has played in the blue of Chelsea, Palmer has had exactly 50 different teammates share the pitch with him. Declan Rice, who joined Arsenal in the same window that Palmer moved to Chelsea, has had 36. Of the front four that started against Brighton, Palmer was the only survivor from the opening round of last campaign.
Minimal rest + new teammates + a player down on confidence makes it unsurprising that Palmer could not so easily snap out of his slump when the new season began, even if there are question marks over where his true ability lies.
Thankfully for the 23-year-old, the fixture list has been kind with a trip to West Ham on Friday, but if he can’t break his duck there, it may be time to reconsider where Palmer fits in the hierarchy of great Premier League players.
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