Cole Palmer has had a meteoric rise in the world of football thanks to his remarkable performances for Chelsea.
After a standout first season with the Blues where he netted 22 goals in 33 Premier League games, the doubts regarding Chelsea paying the £40 million price tag for Man City were all quashed.
Palmer has swiftly silenced those concerns with his performances, cementing himself as one of the top young talents in English football.
He’s carried his stellar form from last season into the Euros, and is now continuing in the same fashion this season.
Bagging goals has never been a problem for the midfielder, but his form culminated into a historic performance against Brighton that sent waves around not just the football world, but also the world of statistics and economics.
Palmer made Premier League history during Chelsea’s 4-2 win over Brighton, scoring all 4 goals for his side. While this in itself is a major feat for most players, Palmer managed to do it in just one half of football.
His flurry of strikes came in just 20 minutes, making him the first player in Premier League history to score four goals in a single half. His goals, scored in the 21st, 28th, 31st, and 41st minutes, left Brighton reeling.
Palmer’s display was a complete showcase of his ability: a penalty, a long-range free kick, all displaying his lethal finishing from different ranges.
It was this very performance that got him featured in an economics professor’s lecture at college.
A student-recorded video captured the professor discussing Palmer’s remarkable feat, suggesting he might have a theory to explain how the midfielder managed to score four goals in the first half.
“I have a theory to explain how come he can score 4 goals in the first half, alone of a certain match” he says.
Alternatively, he noted, Palmer’s performance is likely a statistical outlier, an anomaly that defies conventional models of probability and prediction. “Or it’s just an outlier as it seems to be, it’s clearly an outlier if you score 4 goals in the first half of a football match in the Premier League.”
Let’s try and see the statistical possibility ourselves. According to match data, Palmer’s expected goals (xG) for the game was 2.41, yet he outperformed this by scoring four goals.
The chance of him missing his first shot and then converting the next four is estimated to be less than 2%.
This small 2% chance might just prompt the professor to consider whether Palmer’s performance requires the development of a new statistical model to accurately capture the nuances behind it.
This isn’t the first time Palmer has pulled off such a performance. The young midfielder also scored four goals against Everton in a 6-0 win last season.
With his latest feat, Palmer also matched Frank Lampard as the only players to score four goals in a game twice for Chelsea in the Premier League.
It was not just the economics professor who was praising Palmer, his manager Enzo Maresca was also equally impressed, but had some critical feedback for the youngster as well, “I said that he scored four, but he could have scored more. I always tell him to be ambitious and hungry to score more,”
Palmer’s new record and the video made by the student are both an insight as to how the modern game of football is viewed. The terms xG, xA are all statistical terms that have come into the spotlight in the recent past. The world of statistics and football are intertwined more than ever.
Fans on Twitter are having a laugh about how the phrase, “He needs to be studied” and how it’s been taken literally thanks to Cole Palmer and an economics professor.
The performance was generational, a statistical outlier- and there remain no doubts about it, the question that remains is if Cole Palmer can continue to produce such extraordinary numbers for Chelsea.
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