Манчестер Сити Кристал Палас-ын хагас хамгаалагч Адам Уортоныг эгнээндээ нэгтгэх сонирхолтой байна

This is an updated version of an article first published in October 2025.

“Adam Wharton is always watching…”

Those five words accompanied a video the Premier League posted from its official Instagram account last season.

The footage had been doing the rounds on social media for a while. In case you didn’t see the clip, it showed Wharton warming up at Everton. Alone in his thoughts with a ball at his feet, the Crystal Palace midfielder dribbled around the pitch with his head up, visualising the positions he was going to take up, picturing the movements of players, and practising scanning, which feels like an art that he mastered a long time ago.

👀 @CPFC’s Adam Wharton is always watching… pic.twitter.com/h0jF9WQkhI

— Premier League (@premierleague) October 10, 2025

A couple of hours later, Jack Grealish reluctantly accepted the the man-of-the-match award after scoring the winning goal. “That should have gone to Adam Wharton,” Grealish said. “He was the best player on the pitch.”

Another clip of Wharton was posted a few days later, this time by Palace, showing a passage of play against Chelsea. Receiving in a pocket of space inside the Chelsea half, Wharton turned beautifully, expertly playing a one-two with Ismaila Sarr that enabled him to glide away from Moises Caicedo, and then fed Jean-Philippe Mateta with one of those lovely crisp passes that he always seems to see way before you.

‘Midfield magic from Adam Wharton’ was the line above the clip with an emoji to match.

Midfield magic from Adam Wharton 🪄 pic.twitter.com/l3IxB9Ksr7

— Crystal Palace F.C. (@CPFC) October 9, 2025

The video was interesting timing. Four hours later, when England were kicking off at Wembley against Wales, Wharton and his left-footed wand were nowhere to be seen.

The worry for the Adam Wharton fans among us at the time was that his omission from that squad was a sign of things to come, namely that the 22-year-old didn’t fit the England midfield prototype under Thomas Tuchel – and so it proved this summer.

When England’s head coach named his World Cup squad in May, Wharton failed to make the cut.

“I’m not going to sit here and cry about it,” Wharton said 48 hours later, on the back of a man-of-the-match performance for Palace against Rayo Vallecano in the Conference League final that had pundits purring.

“I love the way he looks forward and passes. He can hit killer balls – balls that take the whole defence out with one pass,” Glenn Hoddle, the former England manager, told TNT Sports. “I am not sure we have got that many who can do that from a deep-lying position on a consistent level. So definitely my eyebrows went up when I saw he wasn’t there (in the England squad).”

The extent to which Wharton could have made a difference for England at the World Cup is impossible to know. But what we can say for sure is that Wharton is different — different in a way that worries some people (is he athletic enough to be an elite midfielder in the modern game?), and different in a way that excites others (how refreshing that he’s constantly trying to break lines with his passing).

Manchester City clearly take the latter view and it will be interesting to see just how much they are prepared to test Palace’s resolve between now and the end of the transfer window after an initial enquiry for the midfielder was firmly knocked back.

Inside Selhurst Park, the message is firm: Wharton is not for sale this summer.

The fact that City are keen on signing Wharton in the first place is fascinating, bearing in mind his physical profile and the way in which that has led to him being overlooked at times in his career.

Some managers and scouts visited Ewood Park when Wharton was a teenager at Blackburn Rovers and decided that the skinny kid with a buzz cut and his socks rolled down ‘isn’t one for us’.

‘Champions League with the ball, Conference League without it’ — that was the tone of some of the feedback at the time.

It will be Champions League, full stop, if he ends up making the move to City.

Either way, worrying about what a player can’t do so well, rather than focusing on what they can do exceptionally well, feels typical of how the football industry operates at times.

Wharton is a footballer — a footballer in the purest sense.

Tony Mowbray, his former Blackburn manager, described him as “a genius”.

Still only a schoolboy when he first started training with Blackburn’s first team under Mowbray, Wharton was miles off it physically but streets ahead of everyone else with a ball.

In an interview with The Athletic in January last year, Mowbray told a story about how his assistant Mark Venus would marvel at Wharton’s performances during their debrief after sessions. “He’d come in after training and say: ‘Just so I’m not going daft, who was the best player in training today?’.

“I’m saying, ‘I know, I know’, but you can’t put him in the team when he’s 15! Veno would then compare him to Paul Scholes.”

Naturally forward-thinking from his younger days when he played as an attacking midfielder, Wharton is the antithesis of the modern-day defensive midfielder. Playing safe deep inside his own half and weaving all the usual passing patterns really isn’t his thing, and that makes him such an enjoyable footballer to watch.

For example, look at the way he solved being trapped on the touchline during that Everton game when he impressed Grealish last season. As Iliman Ndiaye closes him down, Wharton fakes to go one way and comes back the other, leaving the Everton midfielder in a different half of the pitch to him. He then turns down the pass to Daichi Kamada that is staring him in the face and instead slides a reverse ball into Sarr that cuts through the opposition.

That is Wharton in a nutshell and it’s easy to see why the directness of his play appeals to City, especially when he would be dovetailing with Elliot Anderson, an athletic and tireless runner who made more defensive recoveries last season than any other player in Europe’s top five leagues.

“I can play a game and get 100 per cent success if I pass it to my centre-backs and full-backs every time. But anybody can do that,” Wharton told UK newspaper The Times in an interview the season before last. “Every professional footballer can get the ball and pass it from side to side for 90 minutes. If you can play forward, I don’t see why you wouldn’t.”

Analysing Wharton’s game on a spreadsheet, without any context, can be dangerous for that reason. Last season, a well-known football statistics website listed Wharton’s ‘characteristics’ and cited passing as one of his weaknesses, which is a bit like saying Harry Kane needs to work on his shooting.

Wharton is an exceptional passer. But he wants to play passes that make a difference, and those passes — incisive, around-the-corner, eye-of-the-needle — are often the type that carry an element of risk. Risk, but also reward.

In a 2-1 win against Liverpool last season, Wharton tried a pass at the start of the second half that would have registered as incomplete on the data sheet. In reality, it was a gem of a ball that was a whisker away from putting Mateta through on goal. Mateta, raising his hand afterwards to acknowledge the quality of the pass, had been caught slightly on his heels. As for Liverpool, they were floundering.

The fact that Wharton is left-footed, and also so keen to play forward, opens up passing angles that do not just disrupt the opposition press but also totally change the rhythm of an attack.

Take this example from the the game against West Ham United last season. Wharton let the ball run across his body inside his own half and fizzed a pass into the feet of Yeremy Pino, taking out the entire West Ham midfield.

Two minutes earlier he did the same thing, albeit higher up the pitch — striking the ball with a mixture of disguise and pace (see the extent of his kicking action). Pino, Palace’s No 10, received again.

It is a trademark Wharton pass and brings to mind something he said a few years ago, while at Blackburn, in an interview with Scouted, an online magazine dedicated to up-and-coming players.

“This might sound weird, but I love rapping passes through to the No 10, so they can turn and drive at the defence — maybe more than a goal or an assist. Because I was a No 10 myself, I can appreciate how difficult those passes are to make, but also how valuable they can be, especially if you’re being found between the lines.”

At this point, you can imagine Rayan Cherki’s eyes lighting up.

Wharton talks how he plays: intelligently. If a question is asked in a team meeting at Palace, it’s a standing joke that Wharton will know the answer. But there is no ego or arrogance. Laidback bordering on horizontal, he simply enjoys playing football and has this knack of making the game look ridiculously easy.

“Technically, you just have to watch him and enjoy him,” Pino said of his club-mate in an interview with The Athletic. “He has the quality to play in the Spain national team, no doubt.”

But not, it seems, the England team.

Aided by his receiving skills, Wharton plays a lot of his football one and two touch. In fact, forget pass completion rates. The chart below, which uses data gathered from SkillCorner covering the last two seasons, shows the extent to which Wharton plays passes progressively but also quickly. Around 60.5 per cent of his passes are either first-time or “quick” (those that the player releases in under a second after receiving), which makes it so hard to press him.

As for his running, the data below shows that Wharton’s game has evolved in some ways — he was five times more likely to be “dropping off” while playing for Palace last season compared to the year before — but it would be fair to say that he is not too active when it comes to getting forward in support of attacking moves.

Perhaps tearing around the pitch is overrated when you can find space, receive and pick out a team-mate in the way Wharton did against Liverpool in the Community Shield last season. One touch to control and a second, with a chip-and-run pass, to set Sarr free for Palace’s second goal, freezing Florian Wirtz, Dominik Szoboszlai and Alexis Mac Allister in the process.

The vision from Adam Wharton for the assist 🤌#CommunityShield pic.twitter.com/EcfJbmZkWf

— Emirates FA Cup (@EmiratesFACup) August 10, 2025

You would hope there would be a place for that kind of vision in the England squad in the future and that Wharton will be “always watching” from the pitch, rather than his home, when his country are playing.

For the moment, though, it will be curious to see what Manchester City decide to do next.

Additional reporting: Thom Harris