Something about Adam Wharton struck his teachers. Without seeming to put the work in he would turn up, switch on and nonchalantly shine in tests. He got ten GCSEs, with A-star grades in maths and computer science, despite an aversion to revision. “I never revised,” he says, in his Lancashire drawl. “My mum tried . . . but I can’t just sit there and write what I already know.”
That is Adam. Laid-back achiever, different-thinker; a one-off with a different way of doing things, who keeps his mind clear until the point of execution. His agent James Featherstone, knowing him since he was 11, says he is both the most relaxed and present young footballer he has ever met. By “present” he means one who stays in the moment and does not get ahead of himself.
You see it on the pitch where, rather like with school tests, Wharton has an uncanny capacity to retain information and — snap, when the ball comes under pressure — find solutions. I see it in front of me, flopped on a sofa at Crystal Palace’s training ground, a 21-year-old unfazed by all the praise (from people such as Pep Guardiola) and social media highlights videos that his unusual style generates.
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“I wouldn’t say I’m very . . . energetic. I like to just go home, maybe go for a little walk, watch a movie, some footy, just literally chill. I don’t like doing anything too much,” he says. All the social media videos? “My mates send them from Twitter or TikTok, Instagram, and I’ll probably watch to see if it was a good clip. But you can take a snippet of anyone’s game and make them look decent,” he shrugs.
What I most want to discuss is passing. The football writer, George Simms, pointed out that Wharton’s pass completion rate is exceptionally low — 75.6 per cent, which makes him 200th among all Premier League players — but in a similar ballpark to the likes of Cole Palmer (76.9 per cent) and Kevin De Bruyne (76 per cent) and his progressive passing stats are through the roof. This nicely unpacks the Wharton enigma. He is a No10 wrapped inside a No6.
It is part of what has made him feel so unusual for an English player, and why Gareth Southgate took him to Euro 2024 after only 16 Premier League games. He seems parachuted in not from Lancashire but La Masia. Head up, socks down, he somehow finds looseness and time in even the most furious games.
It was there in a casually sensational performance against Aston Villa in the FA Cup semi-final. Wharton’s pass for Eberechi Eze to win a penalty was so soft-footedly exquisite it seemed the ball was made of velour.
Ismaïla Sarr’s first goal stemmed from Wharton robbing Youri Tielemans. Another part of the enigma: Wharton’s stats for ground duels are like he describes his cooking skills — “bang average” — yet he is Palace’s best for possession won per 90 and it is down to anticipation; his way of materialising, like a milk-bottle Rodri, at just the right instant to steal the ball.
What makes a good pass? “Weight. Execution. The message you put on it. If you’re playing to a full back and he’s high and wide, can you play it in front of him? Can you play it softer to someone when you want them to set you again?” Wharton says.
His accuracy stats? “I don’t really care. 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. 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.”
He played No10 in younger days. “As a No10, you get in so many positions in the pockets but don’t receive the ball, it’s so frustrating,” he says. “And the impact of a No10 in the pockets is very often what decides a game. So, from deep, if I can pass to a No10 — I’m passing it to a No10.”
He says something striking when we talk about styles. That how his team plays is not important, it is the coach’s choice and, “I think, personally, I should be able to adapt and play any way”. So, Wharton’s numbers are in the context of Palace’s pass accuracy being lowest in the Premier League — because Oliver Glasner wants fast transitions and the attempt of immediate, bold passes to feed breakaways. But under the possession-orientated Jon Dahl Tomasson at Blackburn Rovers, his accuracy was 89 per cent, and on his international debut against Bosnia-Herzegovina in June last year, Wharton broke records — becoming England’s first midfield debutant to make 30+ passes with 100 per cent accuracy since Opta passing stats began.
His first game at Wembley Stadium was representing Salesbury Primary School in the Kids Cup final. He won and, last Christmas, as a present, his mum, Helen, gave him the little trainers he wore — framed.
Helen is a PE teacher and champion racket sports player. His dad, John, has a French polishing business and still goes by the nickname “Spinner”, a reference to his cricketing days, when he played for England schoolboys. Adam and his brothers, Scott and Simon, inherited cricketing talent, all playing at high junior level, with Adam representing Lancashire Under-10.
He was an attacking batsman and spin bowler “but as the game got longer I didn’t have the patience” and, anyway, football was always the Wharton brothers’ first sport: Scott plays for Blackburn and Simon, now a joiner, had a non-League career. But Adam had something special. By 11, he and a friend had their own YouTube channel where they showcased skills that he spent “hours and hours” perfecting in the garden and driveway at home.
“I played a lot of video games, so it got me away from that and my dad preferred it if I was outside,” he says. What did he play? “Fifa, Fortnite, Call of Duty. Yeah, spent way too many hours [gaming] . . . probably still do.”
Mr Jackson, his old sports teacher at Moorland independent school, claims Wharton was bright enough to have been “a rocket-scientist” but Wharton says he does not know about that. “I’d say I’m pretty intelligent,” he admits, “without blowing smoke up . . .”
He was a late developer physically, as a first-year scholar at Blackburn playing down an age-group because he was small, and when Tony Mowbray brought him into first team training he kept pitting him against Lewis Travis — a feisty, aggressive player who allowed no time on the ball and helped build Wharton’s press-resistance and physicality.
His reasoning for choosing Palace in preference to rival Premier League suitors was typically astute. It was their record of taking players from the Championship — like Eze — and developing them into stars, plus the fact their sporting director at the time, Dougie Freedman, was at Ewood Park for his Championship debut. “A club being interested isn’t really much in football terms. Everyone can be interested. But I liked the fact Palace liked me from the start,” Wharton says.
“And I never wanted to go to a club that was ‘bigger’ where, yeah, you might get a better contract, but if you don’t play what are you going to do? Palace was a good fit. And, yeah, it sort of went better than expected.”
He loves Glasner’s tactical acumen and way of licencing talents. “He analyses the opposition and makes it so easy. As long as we’re doing the game plan, then on the ball we’re able to express ourselves.”
We talk scanning. Glasner said Wharton’s “pre-orientation, his solutions with one or two touches, is amazing” and perhaps the thing that allows him to seem to play in slow-motion, while others rush around the ball, is an ability to take pictures of what’s around him. Receiving possession, usually his body is already angled with the next play in mind and he offloads in one or two touches, having pre-calculated the next pass.
I tell Wharton that Martin Odegaard was practising scanning when he was eight and Xavi once said you could blindfold him and he could tell you where everything was in a room. Wharton is intrigued. “I maybe couldn’t do that but if you were to stop me during a football match I feel I’d have a pretty good idea where everyone was.
“My fitness guy here uses lights. A certain light will show and I’ve got to pass it, then sprint to the light. That’s pretty good to get the brain working.
“In a game, if I don’t scan then turn into someone I’ll be like ‘come on!’ and when I’m doing the warm-up I’ll get a ball and dribble around the pitch in positions I’ll be in during the game, then imagine the movements of other players.”
His world is simple. Amid the Hummers and supercars in the car park sits his sensible mid-price Mercedes, and family is central to him — a whole minibus of Whartons, and friends, will be coming down from the Ribble Valley for the FA Cup final against Manchester City next Saturday. He is expected to be fit, despite missing Sunday’s Premier League game against Tottenham Hotspur with an ankle knock.
Wharton cannot wait to see how Palace fans are going to outdo the noise and colour they brought to the semi-final. “You couldn’t hear yourself on the pitch,” he says, grinning. “There were a few times I thought about shouting [to a team-mate] but I’m like, I’m not even gonna waste my energy.”
Two last things. One, he is nicknamed the “Wilpshire Pirlo” but doesn’t remember too much about Andrea Pirlo as a player, so who are his touchstones? Growing up they were Xavi, Andrés Iniesta, Sergio Busquets and Frenkie de Jong, when he was at Ajax. Among present opponents, the standout, inevitably, is Rodri and: “I really like Sandro Tonali. When we played [against Liverpool], Ryan Gravenberch was good.”
Then, England. His brilliance against Bosnia came in a 29-minute cameo that remains the extent of his international career. He stayed on the bench throughout the Euros and has been with the under-21s since. Of course getting back in the senior squad “would be good,” he says. “But it’s not the be-all and end-all.”
What did he take from the Euros? “Literally everything. It was an unbelievable experience. I didn’t expect to be there and had a feeling I wasn’t really going to play, especially after the group stages, so I just tried to take in as much as I could from training, or things like speaking to Harry Kane at breakfast or to Declan Rice about certain situations on the pitch.”
He passed the time with “golf, padel, a bit of chess, board games. The spa.” On the chessboard he played a tight series of games against a member of FA staff. Who? The chief executive Mark Bullingham..
Tottenham Hotspur v Crystal Palace
Premier League, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium
Sunday, kick-off 2.15pm
