Cole Palmer heads five Manchester City rejects for which we are grateful

Original working title for this was ‘Five players Manchester City regretted letting go’ but we soon realised that wasn’t quite right.

City don’t really do regrets. They do winning. Not much call for rueing when you’ve just won the treble, is there? So no, City might not necessarily regret these players’ departures, but the rest of us should be pretty grateful about them – if only for keeping things halfway interesting and stopping City being even more dominant than they already are.

Cole Palmer

Obviously. It’s the reason we’re here. He represents surely the zenith of Manchester City selling a player of obvious excellence to the enormous benefit of someone else but barely measurable downside to themselves.

It’s not even like they sold him before Kevin De Bruyne got injured. They lost a player like De Bruyne in August, knew immediately he was going to be unavailable for ‘some time’ given his history and still merrily let a player like Palmer toddle off to Chelsea for what was, admittedly, an eye-watering sum of money for a player of his limited experience. But not, as we’re now discovering, limited ability.

Mauricio Pochettino must give thanks to the football gods for City’s beneficence on a nightly basis for granting him the gift of Palmer, already – and by a damningly wide margin – Chelsea’s most important player and one keeping them out of an even more embarrassing situation than spending half-a-billion quid to still be stuck slumming it in mid-table.

The Cole Palmer England Clamour after a disappointing and staid group stage draw with Denmark this summer already feels every bit as real as the Dominic Solanke clamour that will follow Harry Kane’s failure to get on the scoresheet in England’s opening game.

Douglas Luiz

Most departures from City are, pretty unusually for a club of their means and standing, actually fairly straightforward. Pep Guardiola is very consistent on it: players have a price, and if that price is met and that player wants to leave, that player can leave.

Douglas Luiz, though, is a bit different. City didn’t so much allow the brilliant Brazilian to leave as find themselves boxed into a corner and forced to do so.

When they signed him from Vasco De Gama as an 18-year-old in 2017, he couldn’t get a work permit. As City tried to secure him one, he ended up spending two seasons on loan at Girona – at that time as luck would have it a newly-minted member of the City Football Group. Still no work permit could be secured for the Brazilian, so in 2019 he was sold to a newly promoted Aston Villa for £15m.

The existence of such a fee actually helped Villa get the permit City never could, which is undeniably quite funny. He’s gone from strength to strength as Villa have done likewise, and whether or not that ever would have happened had he got his work permit and spent his time instead sat watching Rodri is pretty much moot. Although it may have stopped City being quite so entirely dependent on him.

Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko

This is an interesting one. Or more accurately two. But it feels instructive and necessary to include them as a pair. They cannot – unlike others on this list – be said to be players from whom City didn’t extract use and value. But they demonstrate the sheer scope of City’s powers.

They were players City really no longer required and yet the change in mindset they helped engender in the red half of north London was vital in the way Arsenal first positioned themselves as title contenders and then convinced themselves of that status sufficiently to remain in said contention right up to April.

City made life harder for themselves in a way they could never in fairness have foreseen: a couple of players used to winning things being enough to make Arsenal think they could win stuff.

But what’s really startling about them is that in the space of 18 months they’ve already done their job. Arsenal absolutely do not become title contenders without those players and their experience of such combat. Yet now Arsenal are exactly where City were with them: out the other side of that and needing to replace them with better players themselves. Nothing is new, it just happens quicker.

Pedro Porro

The Spanish right-back spent three years technically being a Manchester City player, all of them on loan. The last of those years was spent at Sporting, who liked what they saw and made that move permanent. He excelled for them as a buckle and swash right wing-back – including in the Champions League against Antonio Conte’s Spurs.

Conte also liked what he saw, and lo it came to pass that Porro was brought back to England as the sort of desperate grand gesture that we’ve all produced at enormous cost towards the end of an obviously doomed relationship. Some people go on make-or-break holidays (hint: it’s always break), some have a baby, and some commit 40 million pounds on signing a player who appears to be capable only of playing in one very specific position in the very specific formation adopted by a manager who almost certainly isn’t going to hang around long enough to really see the benefit.

It appeared to be a classic slice of Spursy goodness, especially when they subsequently brought in a manager whose teams deploy inverted full-backs. It is, essentially, as far removed from right wing-back as it’s possible to be while still being vaguely, theoretically, a similar position.

Yet Porro has excelled in the right-back-central-midfield hybrid role Ange Postecoglou requires, and the only reason he isn’t the best in the Premier League is because Trent Alexander-Arnold exists and has been at it for years. And it all adds up to yet another example of this really quite common phenomenon: a player who leaves City and becomes a really quite enormously important figure at one of their supposed rivals while City barely notice they’ve gone.

Ferran Torres

Slightly different to the rest, this one. While others on this list eventually flourished and shone away from City in a way that suggests the move was actually probably best for everyone in providing a chance that may not have come at City, Torres’ career has taken the alternative path.

He did get the chance at City, he did take it, but then quite reasonably decided he wanted to go back to Spain but has never quite hit those heights again. Sixteen goals in just 43 games for City has been followed by 21 in almost a hundred games for Barcelona. But he’s probably happier. And that’s still important, isn’t it? Bit of happiness? Let’s be honest, it’s not a bad life, is it? Playing football pretty well for Barcelona? In the grand scheme? So it’s still worked out, even if it looks like maybe it hasn’t. Hooray.