The White House / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons
Cole Palmer has credited his childhood cage football sessions in Manchester with laying the foundations for the player he has become, speaking during Chelsea’s pre-season tour of Asia and Australia.
The Chelsea No. 10 appeared on the club’s podcast CFC Unlocked, recorded in Hong Kong, where he discussed his early years growing up near a local park and the informal games that followed.
“I used to live ten seconds away from a park. So I used to just go on the ramps with scooters and bikes and whatever. And there used to be a cage next to it, so we just used to flip between the two,” Palmer said.
Palmer said the regular competition against older players proved particularly formative. “It was always older kids than me. To be fair, it helped me, because if I didn’t play with them then I probably wouldn’t be as good as I am now.”
He identified ball retention as one of the key skills he absorbed from those sessions. “Naturally I learned skills that you wouldn’t probably do at that age, like protecting the ball. That was a big thing I did when I was little, learning how to use my body.”
Palmer also touched on the arrival of his former friend Morgan Rogers at Chelsea and offered responses to supporters’ personal dilemmas during the wide-ranging conversation.