Cole Palmer is worth at least £90million to Chelsea, sporting director Lawrence Stewart has claimed, just over 12 months after joining the club. Having arrived for £45million on deadline day in the 2023 summer window, his stock has risen sharply since.
In his 54 total appearances for Chelsea (47 starts) he has scored 31 times and assisted 20. Aged 22 – he doesn’t turn 23 until May next year – Palmer is already 50th on the club’s all-time top-scorers list.
In fact, Jimmy Greaves is the only played with more than 20 games played to have a better goalscoring ratio for Chelsea. Palmer’s sample size may well still be relatively small but the trajectory has remained consistent.
Even as a bright academy prospect at Manchester City, few predicted Palmer would make the impact he has, especially this quickly. After initially being laughed at for the price, Chelsea now know they have picked up a bargain.
For Stewart and his co-sporting director Paul Winstanley, who were key drivers behind the late and secretive push for Palmer, it was an opportunity they couldn’t turn down. Speaking in just a second public interview since joining during the 2022/23 season – the other being to Chelsea’s own in-house media team – they opened up on the process behind getting Palmer.
“We didn’t think necessarily that we’d be able to get him here really, did we?” Stewart said to the Telegraph. There was a feeling that ‘no, Cole Palmer won’t be for sale.’
“We’d been speaking about him throughout that window and then as it came towards the latter stage of the window, we felt like we wanted to do something else and do something around that area of the pitch. He came up again and we all said, ‘let’s go for it, let’s see what’s possible.’ And then there seemed to be a little bit of feedback that there could be something there.”
Chelsea benefitted. Palmer hit the ground running immediately and ended last season with an individual outcome to rival the best of Frank Lampard and Eden Hazard’s prime.
It is no surprise, then, that even with a contract extension signed – placing him on money befitting of a true world star, not just a young prospect – tying him down until 2033, there has been a suggestion that Chelsea will struggle to keep hold of Palmer without Champions League football for long.
Candidly, Stewart accepts that his value has certainly shot up. “I think if he went into the market now his value would be a lot higher,” the former Monaco chief admitted, responding to whether the hypothetical price is above double what was paid for him. “that’s for sure. His output’s been incredible.”
If Chelsea were to get offers for Palmer then even a fee two times what they signed him for is unlikely to be enough given his current stature. The same is true of Levi Colwill.
Chelsea were sent offers for the academy defender in 2022, 2023, and then 2024 but nailed him to a long-term contract as well. “There was a little bit of a question mark about Levi’s future when we arrived and what that might be,” Stewart accepts. “So, obviously, we’re delighted that he’s here.”
Winstanley had also been honest about the interest, although he didn’t go as far as naming Colwill. “We had a significant offer for one of our academy products this summer that we absolutely chose not to take,” he said, rubbishing talk of Chelsea selling Cobham graduates.
football.london understands that a European heavyweight made a play to land him earlier this year. Bayern Munich are among several teams – including Liverpool, Brighton, and Paris Saint-Germain – to have been credited with looking at Colwill.
After a bruising few years in the recruitment department, having both Palmer and Colwill is a big win for two figures who have been under fire for their work.
