Ignore, for now, how it ended. Cast your mind back instead to the 70th minute of this summer’s men’s Euros final – a moment that, for England at least, represented a demarcation, a fulcrum, a… sure, why not, a vibe shift. A moment that at the time seemed so prosaic you probably barely noticed. With 20 minutes left to play, the Three Lions having trailed for most of the second half, Gareth Southgate made an uncharacteristic substitution. He took off Kobbie Mainoo.
Mainoo, the 19-year-old who in his first senior tournament had forced his way into the England starting lineup and definitively solved a quandary that had plagued Southgate for months: who to accompany Jude Bellingham and Declan Rice at the heart of midfield. (Alexander-Arnold? Gallagher? Wharton? No.) Mainoo, who having only just finished his first season as a starter for Manchester United, grabbed hold of that midfield spot like a prime Paul Scholes, spraying passes (forward passes!), muscling off opponents, and carrying the ball head-up, with a cocksureness downright unreasonable for someone his age. Watching Mainoo during the tournament, you couldn’t help but feel feelings long forgotten among England fans: certainty. Calm.
For 69 minutes of the final in Berlin, Mainoo and his teammates had toiled against the relentless Spanish. Then, a goal down and with time running out, Southgate decided to switch the safety off. He decided to bring on Cole Palmer.
It was as if Southgate had finally heard the nation’s prayers (OK, epithets). In less than a year, Palmer had gone from a semi-permanent piece of Manchester City’s dugout furniture to tearing up the Premier League at Chelsea, putting up numbers – 22 league goals, 11 assists – greater than even Blues legends like Eden Hazard ever produced in a single season. Palmer, whose dead-eyed finishing and merciless technique already had fans referring to him not by name, but by his supposedly ectothermic blood type: Cold. And yet for England, he had hardly featured. Palmer came on against Switzerland and scored the opening penalty in the shootout; he came on against the Netherlands in the semis and set up Ollie Watkins’ winner. But generally, Southgate had kept him benched for the sake of his preferred option on the right, Bukayo Saka. (This is not to besmirch Saka; one could opine here upon the merits of Southgate’s decisions, but enough column inches have been wasted on that exercise already. Besides, we’re in the Tuchel era now.)
Anyway: 70th minute, Palmer comes on. 73rd minute, Palmer scores.
It’s still a sumptuous goal. Palmer receives the layoff from Bellingham maybe 22 yards out and hits it hard and low and sweet. Watching it back, you can’t help but relive the instant the whole stadium, the whole country, went absolutely crazy.
Mainoo, by then watching from the sidelines, remembers it well: “I ran to the byline, told Cole to do my celebration as well – which he did,” Mainoo says. “I was gassed.”
But for Palmer, trying to recall perhaps the most historic highlight of a broadly unforgettable year? “It all happened so fast,” Palmer says, scratching his neck. “Obviously, I’ve watched it all back, the highlights and that… but it’s one of those things that happened so fast you don’t really remember it.”
It’s October, and the pair are sharing a rare mid-season chance to hang out, making jokes and eating Nando’s at a north London photography studio. Although both players grew up a few miles apart on the south side of Manchester, they hadn’t really spent much time together before being called up for England this summer. One of the happier outcomes of the tournament is that they became friends over intensely competitive games of mid-camp padel.
“He’s actually good,” Palmer says. “I’m better at table tennis, he’s better at padel.”
“You don’t believe that,” Mainoo says. “Table tennis!?”
“I’d even say both, but I’ll let you have one.” (This kind of competitive banter is incessant; you sense they could make a sport of watching dust settle.)
After the final whistle in Berlin – if you’re somehow in the centre of the miniscule Venn diagram of “people reading this cover story” and “people who don’t know the result”, England lost 2-1 – both players happened to be randomly selected for drug testing. “Just me and Cole,” Mainoo says. So off they went together, bodies exhausted, eyes puffy, to give the only things they hadn’t left on the field for their country: piss and blood. “We did that, and then we went back to the hotel, saw the families, and in the morning we were gone.”
And here’s the thing: you can read that and take away the memory of bitter disappointment: two players’ improbable breakout years dashed by one final, crushing anticlimax. Or, with a little distance, you can look back at that 70th minute substitution – the most exciting young forward in the Premier League coming on for the most exciting young midfielder in the Premier League, both at the very start of their careers, both of them English – and feel electrified, knowing the horizon has never looked brighter.
It tells you how crazy Mainoo’s breakout year has been that, until very recently, he was still living with his parents. For the whole of his wild and strange season he’d spend the day exhilarating Old Trafford, or some distant away stadium, then come home quietly to crash out at his mum’s or dad’s like any other teenager. But this autumn, after the Euros, he finally got the keys to his own place. “I moved in like, two or three days ago,” Mainoo says, opening the door to a spacious family home on the outskirts of the city. The walls are grey and bare, the living room set up with just the essentials: a squidgy corner sofa, a TV, his PS5.
It’s somehow still less than a year since Mainoo made his first Premier League start for United, a 3-0 win away to Everton last November. Even that may not have happened if not for a calf injury to his teammate Mason Mount; his loss our collective gain. Mainoo had just come back off the medical table himself, and remembers being nervous. “Before the game I got a few butterflies,” he says. “It was a big opportunity, so I just tried to prepare myself the best way possible.” It worked: Mainoo dominated the game, and although his teammate Alejandro Garnacho took home the Player of The Match award, all the commentators were talking about Mainoo. (Gary Neville: “[He was] Manchester United’s best player by a street.”)
What’s remarkable is that during those early matches Mainoo didn’t seem to grow in stature so much as arrive, fully formed. Sure, there were moments of spectacle – a curling strike against Liverpool; a twisting, meg-and-run Goal of the Month against Wolves – but what really stood out was something that statistics struggle to show. At 18, he looked totally at ease.
Mainoo was born in Stockport, to Ghanaian parents, and coming up through the local youth teams he was already known for this preternatural poise; Chris Pheiffer, his junior school PE teacher, once said that he was dribbling with his head up aged eight. As a kid, he would play as a striker or a number 10, something you can still see in his attacking mindset. “I feel like in some ways it helps, in some ways it doesn’t,” Mainoo smiles. “In terms of going forward with the ball, definitely. [But] then if it’s receiving the ball, like, my body position, sometimes I still do it as if I’m a striker, where I should be doing something else. So it’s just trying to find the balance.”
Mainoo knows he’s still raw (“the [former] manager [Erik ten Hag] is very demanding, he’s always wanted more”) so he watches midfield legends for ways to improve his own game. “I like to watch Busquets, the way he used to turn. Players like Seedorf, Modric. Players like Yaya Touré – I like the way he used to play.” That might help to explain perhaps Mainoo’s standout characteristic for England; what coaches call “press resistance”, but a layman might call fearlessness. When more conservative players might pass backwards and play things safe, Mainoo strides forward. “I don’t think about it too much,” he says. “It’s more an in-the-moment type of thing. Like if I check” – his head owl-pivots over his left shoulder to demonstrate – “I see a guy here, then I’ll turn this way. Or if I don’t have to do that, I can just bounce out. I don’t think, like, I’m gonna turn here… it’s more that if the defender gives me an option, then I’m gonna take it.”
Manchester United limped to an eighth-placed finish in the league in 23/24 – a humiliation by the club’s historic standards. Amid the turmoil surrounding Old Trafford (in February, the British chemicals billionaire Jim Ratcliffe bought a 27.7 per cent stake in the club for about £1.25 billion, and assumed sporting control) Mainoo was one of the few bright spots, alongside a clutch of young talent – Garnacho, Rasmus Højlund – that then-manager ten Hag had bet his future on. “He was performing consistently well in the side that wasn’t performing consistently well,” England legend and Match of The Day presenter Gary Lineker told me. “That’s when you look at players and think that they might have something very special.”
In a league where big clubs tend to spend huge rather than promote academy players, Mainoo credits United for giving him the chance. “I feel like at United it’s very much in the history that they play young players, going all the way back to the Busby Babes,” Mainoo says. “There’s big writing up on the wall [at Carrington, the training ground] saying, ‘If they’re good enough, they’re old enough.’”
That bet seems to be largely paying off. In May, United beat Manchester City to win the FA Cup Final, in what was – in a sign of the times – seen as a major upset. Mainoo, naturally, scored the winner. “I remember just the feeling around it was like, no one expects us to win,” he says. “They’ve just written us off. I used that as motivation.”
The images of that triumph – Mainoo posing with the Cup in a red devil bucket hat, beaming with his family – were all over social media afterwards. “I won’t say it made the season a success for us as a team, but we definitely needed it. We couldn’t go into the summer with nothing, just finishing where we finished in the table,” he says. “A trophy brings hope. But it definitely didn’t make the season a success.”
It seems odd to think about now, but Cole Palmer’s miraculous season almost didn’t happen. “I wasn’t even gonna go [to] Chelsea,” Palmer says. “I got persuaded.” (Who persuaded him? He nods towards his manager.)
What he did know for sure is that he wanted to leave Manchester City, the club that had nurtured him since he was seven. “I just knew I wasn’t going to play as much as I wanted to. Even when I was going to England [camps] with younger age groups, you had players there who were playing in the league every week. And you’re looking around thinking, I can play in the league.” Palmer, already known on social media for his dry humour and understated delivery, sums it up with a shrug. “When you’re not playing, it’s annoying.”
We’re talking at a hotel close to the Chelsea training ground in Cobham, Surrey, where Palmer has been dutifully signing kits and merchandise for competition winners; the less glamorous side of the job. (Given his newfound love for padel, I’d assumed he was here for the hotel’s court. When I told him the hotel had one, he lit up. “What, they’ve got padel here?!”)
Palmer eventually joined Chelsea on deadline day, for £40 million. Pep Guardiola later claimed that Palmer had been agitating for a move for two years. “No – do you know what, I just wanted to go on loan,” he says. But when it became clear that he wasn’t going to be among City’s starters, even after the departure of Riyad Mahrez to Saudi Arabia, he decided he had to leave. To place his faith in himself.
“I remember training on a Wednesday at City in the afternoon, and the news was ‘they’re trying to agree a fee,’” he says. “Every time the ball went out I’d ask the kit man or the doctor if they’ve agreed the fee yet.” But the deal dragged on, as deals do, and most people went home. “So I didn’t really get a chance to see many people and say I’m going. I just had to get my stuff.” That’s the mercenary reality of football at the top level: no goodbyes, except what can be said over text. “I messaged the group chat, said ‘Thanks and everything. I’m gone.’ That was it.”
During the first half of last season, as Palmer’s performances for Chelsea went from ‘huh, maybe this kid can play’, to ‘City were silly to sell him’ to ‘where did this guy come from?’, he watched the growing discussion around him online. “I’d see people saying, like, ‘He’s just in good form,’” he says. “Then I think it was after the first England camp where I went a bit quiet, and people were saying, ‘This was always going to happen.’ But then I just picked up and went even better. Played Middlesbrough at home, played Everton, United at home, and I just kept scoring, scoring, scoring.”
As weeks passed, and winter turned into spring, Palmer kept scoring. Penalties, sure (as his teammate Noni Madueke put it, “that’s why they call him Cold Palmer, innit”) but also sweeping assists, and goals of ridiculous skill, like the mazy, humiliating pass-and-move he scored against Everton. “I knew I could do it,” Palmer says. “But for it to happen so fast… I surprised myself, yeah.”
For defenders, Palmer is a daunting prospect. He’s quick, strong, and at 6ft 1in, taller than most. Where other wingers exploit their speed – knocking the ball past opponents, always playing the game at a sprint – he’s more likely to slow down, to floor his marker with a toss of the shoulders or a sudden turn, buying the half second needed to make a pass or get a shot away. “His decision making is extraordinarily mature for a young footballer,” says Lineker. “He makes the right calls, when to pass, when not, when to go for gold himself – and his finishing is extraordinary.”
Palmer’s misleadingly laconic style stems in part from being a scrawny kid. “Maybe because I wasn’t the quickest when I was younger, I had to use body movement instead of speed,” he says. “I remember I would say, ‘I want to be fast, I want to be stronger, bigger’, because I was so small – like, just tiny. I would try and do something and I’d just get the ball took off me. I said, ‘Why am I like this?’ And my dad said: ‘Wait. You will take over everybody.’”
Palmer grew up in Wythenshawe, south of the city. It was his father, Jermaine, who would take him to football, teaching him in the park how best to shoot, how to protect the ball. Jermaine’s parents hail from Saint Kitts and Nevis, which is why Cole wears the island nation’s flag on his boots. Palmer has said in other interviews that one of his first memories is of them playing together. “He messaged me the other day, after I scored that chip versus Wolves, saying, ‘You remember practising chips in the park?” Palmer says. (That goal, a first-time lob from outside the box, came as part of a 6-2 thrashing; Palmer also got three assists.) “But I actually do, to be fair.”
Over time, as the league and eventually the world got wind of Palmer’s exploits, his DMs would light up with missives of support. “ [David] Beckham messaged me,” he says. “I scored one day, and I saw him in my DMs.’” (Were you the right age to watch Beckham? “Not really. I was a bit young.”)
The attention, he says, was unsettling. “It was strange. When I first would score or something, [I’d be] like proper gassed and excited, I’d look at my phone. But now the more it’s happened, I realise people just talk. I don’t read into it.” Thanks to his lively persona – rapping on his sister’s TikTok to Vybz Kartel, or joining the opposing team’s huddle during the Chelsea-City game as a prank – Palmer has become something of a meme player, the subject of countless YouTube mashups and TikTok clips. “Sometimes it’s annoying,” he says. “To keep seeing yourself.”
Mainoo was at Saint George’s Park with the England U-21s when he was called up for the Euros. “I remember people telling me ‘congratulations’ and stuff. I didn’t realise the squad had been released,” he says. Once at the training camp in Blankenhain, the team settled in, he and Palmer often hanging out with Phil Foden and Adam Wharton. “There were loads of activities and stuff for us to do, it was a good group of guys. So it wasn’t always talking about football. Just laughing, jokes, messing about – what we do if you’re at home,” he says. “Off the pitch was pretty chilled. I enjoyed it.”
Still, it was hard for him, sitting on the bench for the first two games against Serbia and Denmark, as England struggled to gel. “I was just itching to get on,” he says. Even harder was not paying attention to the discourse surrounding England – and particularly Southgate – after the stuttering first few games. “I mean, it’s hard not to see it, you have a phone. It’s everywhere,” Mainoo says. “So it was like, brush it off. People talk just to talk. And the manager made it a big thing, to like, ‘Forget what they’re saying, it’s just about us. You have to go out and play. You have to win games, that’s what it’s all about.’”
The game he remembers most, paradoxically, is not the final, but the semi against the Netherlands. On the bus to the stadium, he says, “all you could see was just orange. All the streets were orange.” The match was played at the Signal Iduna Park, Borussia Dortmund’s stadium, often compared to Anfield for its cauldron-like atmosphere. “The Yellow Wall [Dortmund’s famed packed south stand] was completely orange. It’s a long, dark, thin tunnel, walking out to the pitch, and when we got out there it was smoky. The atmosphere was crazy. Bouncing. It was just unbelievable.” Amid all that noise, all a young player can try and do is keep their head. “I was taking every game as it was coming, trying to perform my best. And then if I played well, it was on to the next one. Play again, play well again. Next one. You know?”
Play again, win again – until somehow, there was the prospect of maybe winning the whole thing. “The feeling of winning games and getting closer and closer and closer and being this close.” Until they weren’t.
Despite the highs of his club season – in August, he was awarded PFA Young Player of The Year – when Palmer arrived at the Euros, it was like going back in time. Suddenly, he was back on the bench, watching as other players stumbled. “It was frustrating at England, to be fair,” he says. “Not to say that the players aren’t good. But just coming off the back of the season I had, the form I was in, everything I was doing was coming off… so I’m not playing in the first two games even when the team was struggling, it was a bit like, Why? Do you know what I mean?”
The effect, of course, was that when he did get onto the field, Palmer had a point to prove. “If you bring me on [in] the third game and I don’t do anything, then I can’t really say anything,” he says. “I just had to try and force my way in.” You could see the hunger when he did get on; setting up Ollie Watkins’ winner in the semi-final, pressing intensely, always a threat.
Still, when the final came, he found himself again on the bench. “I remember Watkins coming on, and I was thinking, Why not me?” So when he finally did come on to replace Mainoo, it felt like deliverance. “I had a feeling I was going to score,” he says. “Even in the hotel the night before the game, I was just looking at the mirror, just thinking, What am I gonna do if I score? Am I gonna do my celebration? Am I just going to go mad?”
Losing hurt; all of us felt it. But the feeling, strange as it is to say, is a relatively unusual experience for Palmer, having spent most of his life playing for one of history’s most dominant teams. In his final season in Manchester, City won the treble – the League, Champions League and FA Cup. But he, of course, rarely featured, and recently, Palmer passed on his trophies and medals. “I give them to my mum,” he says. “I wanted to restock. Clear them out so I can stock up again.” He kept his Chelsea Player of the Year award, and the PFA award from last season. But the rest is space, for the future. “The feeling you get when you win… you just want it again. You don’t want to stop and never get that feeling again.”
At the studio, the photographs are done, and the clothes are being packed back into trunks. Mainoo, who is increasingly into menswear (“Enfants Riches Déprimés… Chrome Hearts, Bottega”) seems at home amid the racks of clothing and watches. Palmer, less so.
“I just wear trackies,” he says.
“I’ve seen you in jeans, bro,” Mainoo says, sympathetically.
This season, Palmer has started in even better form than last: 12 goals and assists in his first nine games. He scored four in the first half against Brighton, but Palmer was annoyed: he thought he should have had six. Under Chelsea’s head coach Enzo Maresca he has moved into a new number 10 role – the centrepiece of the league’s most expensively-assembled team. He’s working on adjusting his game, accordingly. “Different types of turns… mainly it’s not even stuff on the ball, like off the ball, trying to find more space.” In other words: how to get even better.
United, meanwhile, are engulfed in their worst start to a season since 1989. (As GQ went to press, the club sacked ten Hag, appointing Rúben Amorim as the new manager.) Mainoo has played well, and despite missing several weeks through injury, is focused on his goal of seeing the club back at football’s summit. “It’s definitely an ambition, and something I want most – to see United back on top. That is what pushes me,” he says.
This a rare respite ahead of what is, due to changes in the international structure and European competitions, the busiest football season in modern history. “It’s a crazy amount of games,” Mainoo says. “People will start getting injured more,” says Palmer. (Would he like to see a winter break? “Yeah. The more breaks the better!”)
For now, it’s nice for them to reflect on their year. Palmer has treated himself to a platinum and ice-blue Rolex Daytona, bought after his first England camp last year (it was not, he says, a reference to his nickname: “I just like it”), and a new car. “I bought a Lamborghini,” he says. Inevitably, brands have approached him, offering campaigns and sponsorship.
He doesn’t accept much – a nine-minute film of him fishing quietly in a Burberry duffel is the highlight – but one that stands out is an ad in which he goes back to his old youth clubs in Wythenshawe to donate boots to the youngsters there in person. It’s a small gesture, but in a place where, according to the End Child Poverty Coalition, 39 per cent of kids are estimated to live in poverty, you can feel the impact. “Maybe because, like you’re growing up, you don’t really have much, do you know what I mean?” Palmer says. “I remember wanting boots off my dad and he wouldn’t get me them, and that. You’re living in council houses. So just to try and give back when you get to this position is nice.”
What do you think those kids see, when they look at you?
“They look at it and think that they can do it, as well.”
There’s the clanking of sets being deconstructed; Mainoo has a train back to Manchester to catch for tomorrow’s training. Before they leave: can they sum up each other’s big year?
Palmer looks awkward. “Well, you’re young…”
“I’m not that young, bro!”
“He knows I think he was the best player at the Euros,” Palmer says, serious for once. “And obviously what he’s doing for one of the biggest clubs in the world…”
Mainoo’s turn. “It’s been crazy in his first full season for the club – to be up there in goals and assists and goal involvements. It’s massive.”
And as for England? The international breaks are approaching. The team will soon have a new manager, the German Thomas Tuchel. Next summer’s Nations League knockouts don’t seem far away. Then the 2026 World Cup. They are – no matter what Kobbie says – still young.
“Definitely,” Mainoo says. “It would be sick to play together for a long time.”
A version of this story originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of GQ with the title “Kobbie Mainoo & Cole Palmer Are Just Getting Started”
Styling by Martin Metcalf
Tailoring by Faye Oakenfull
Hair by Tariq Howes using Babyliss Pro and Bumble and Bumble
Grooming by Cathy Ennis using Nars
Set Design by Josh Stovell
Produced by Fuse Production