Cold Palmer Returns. Chelsea Are "World Champions."
PSG trounced in the Club World Cup final.
It was fitting that PSG met Chelsea in the final of the Coppa della Cash, but only one of them showed up. The European champions got humbled, and plucky Chelsea are top of the world. All it cost them was €1.62 billion.1 At the final whistle, the DAZN commentator said the Londoners had triumphed on “football’s grandest stage,” as if this thing built yesterday is worth more than the Champions League or the World Cup.
Cole Palmer won’t be worried about any of that, and fair enough. The lad is here to play football (and scooter through Times Square) and he played it extremely well at MetLife Stadium on Sunday. Chelsea came storming out of the blocks, swamping the Parisians in a sea of blue, and their #10 was flitting around causing trouble from minute one. Palmer nearly struck after just seven and a half minutes, popping into space at the top of the box to latch onto a clever backheel from João Pedro and whip one towards Gianluigi Donnarumma’s right post. It punched just wide.
“To me, we won the game in the first 10 minutes,” Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca said on the pitch after the match. His blue shirt read, “WORLD CHAMPIONS.” I thought Chelsea might rue their failure to capitalize on early dominance in yet another demonstration of the Iron Law of Football: If you fail to take your chances, you will be punished. Instead, it was PSG forward Désiré Doué who rued. He really should have smashed it at goal rather than cut the ball back to a teammate when PSG sliced Chelsea open on 15 minutes. Marc Cucurella dealt with the danger, and not long after that, Cole Palmer took over and the Blues had the run of MetLife Stadium.
It was poor from Nuno Mendes on a high ball just inside his own half in the lead-up to the opening goal, and he gifted Chelsea a stampeding break towards the PSG box. Malo Gusto did well to turn inside, and Palmer showed that perhaps the way to beat the indomitable Donnarumma is low with a directional disguise. Chelsea’s attacking maestro didn’t put a huge amount of pace on either of his shots — it was just on the ground and in the corner at the right time.
Palmer struck twice, on 22 and 30 minutes, to seize control of the game. Then he dropped in off someone’s shoulder in the PSG backline and into midfield, where he accepted the ball relatively unhassled, turned, drove downfield into space with that PSG in retreat. He slotted a well-weighted through ball between full back and center back to find João Pedro scampering in behind and the Brazilian finished with class, dinking over Donnarumma. PSG’s Italian #1 is such a large and dominant shot-stopper, a mountain of a man who makes Atlético Madrid’s Jan Oblak look merely Very Big, but Chelsea clearly did their homework on how to beat him. It’s not with force — you’ve got to wrong-foot him and go around him.
It was an incredible scoreline at the half.
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The final kicked off in northern Jersey with a mishmash of Euro oddities and Default Americana, a rare meeting of the “Let’s Get Ready to Rumble” guy — a New York legend — and Robbie Williams, who dropped a closing ceremony concert that suffered disastrous audio/acoustics issues and was generally unusual to say the least. A lot of the performances were, though J Balvin absolutely killed it with his set design for the halftime show.2
PSG did not kill it at any point. They didn’t threaten all that often even when they took the possession. Chelsea keeper Robert Sánchez stepped in with some fantastic saves to prevent any swing in momentum when they did fashion an opening — not unlike Donnarumma’s exploits in the late stages of the UCL — and by the 73rd minute, Luis Enrique was hauling off Achraf Hakimi, Fabián Ruiz, and Désiré Doue for Gonçalo Ramos and a couple of 19-year-olds in Senny Mayulu and Warren Zaire-Emery. The Champions League champs weren’t exactly fighting to the end in the New Jersey summer conditions (heat index: 87°F) and you just got the sense that there was a bigger circle around this date on the calendar in Chelsea’s office than on the one in PSG’s.
The Blues were energetic and dynamic in a way the Parisians were not. Front-footed, physical, fast, sharp. They hunted for the ball in packs, crunching into tackles. There was an edge to their game that PSG just lacked, and the London club even did some game management (nuisance-fouling and tomfoolery to create time-wasting altercations). Chelsea were nasty customers throughout and pressed their freshness and physical advantage to dominate the key moments in the encounter.
In some mix of frustration with their opponents’ antics and (surely) embarrassment, PSG did not take things well, and simmering feuds bubbled over into pushing and shoving both before and after the final whistle. Along the way, João Neves got himself sent off when his intrusive thoughts won and he grabbed the shaggy mane of Cucurella, who’s always one to be in and around the antics when his team are trying to see out a result.
It was conduct unbecoming from PSG at times, but I’d probably lose my head if I’d gone to the mountaintop — champions of Europe by a country mile — and then had to endure the Conference League champs telling you that you ain’t shit.
But Chelsea were good value for this one against a team that has been dismantling European powers in this tournament. Willian Pacho looked a big miss at the center of PSG’s defense as they got overrun in the big spaces running back towards their own goal, but perhaps nothing would have saved PSG’s very movable object from Chelsea’s apparently unstoppable force. The Parisian midfield three also weren’t at their stellar best, unable outsmart Chelsea by passing and moving through pockets of space in the thick of things as they did to bigger and stronger opponents all spring. They struggled to sidestep the physical battle they were losing, but they got beat on the tactical side, too.
They just weren’t at it, and through some combination of mental and physical exhaustion after 64 matches — and Luis Enrique probably getting out-thought by Maresca — PSG got dismantled. Even when Chelsea set up deeper on the pitch in the second half, the script did not really change.
They were happy to give up the ball after the mercurial Palmer settled things when he’d got hold of it in the first period. In 21 first-half minutes, he’d made the difference — a true #10 in a modern era where they’ve grown scarce. (Though he ran the hard yards, too.) If he’s in this kind of form when the Premier League season kicks off in 33 days, Chelsea could be a real player at the top of the league.
World Champions they may already be, but their exploits on Sunday have little to do with the question of whether Chelsea Football Club fields the best team in the world. I’d compare this Club World Cup victory with a Europa League trophy, though Chelsea are obviously better than Tottenham. Beating PSG is no joke, but Chelsea didn’t meet many top teams on their way to the final. The Brazilian sides game them a fright, but what if Barcelona, Liverpool, Arsenal, even Napoli were at this tournament, lurking in the later knockout rounds?
Before Sunday, Chelsea’s only victory over a top team in 2025 was over Liverpool when the Reds were on the beach, their first match after clinching the league on April 27. Their level will be judged according to their performance in the Premier League and Champions League this season, though they’ll gleefully add this golden spinning orb to their trophy cabinet.
And where else could it so perfectly belong? PSG’s is a cynical project, but their vibrant fan culture exudes Paris and provides a new tent pole for a famous world city. They might just have something to cling to beyond sporting success that’s drenched in a certain kind of dollars and pounds. This and the Europa Conference League are the first major trophies the Blues from West London have claimed since their favorite Russian oligarch (and Putin BFF) left the scene in 2022. Now they’ve got American billionaires, and they’ve secured a trophy that’s swimming in a giant vat of cash. At least Cold Cole was a joy to watch.3
ESPN reports that “even when you account for all of their player exits over that period, they're still more than €1 billion in the red.”
The top-shelf stage was really well done by whoever FIFA hired to produce this thing. New York skyline in the background, and a major differentiator from the Super Bowl halftime show — without having to worry about damaging the playing surface.
Also, the ref cams are very good.