Where Cole Palmer’s cold celebration came from

Where Cole Palmer’s cold celebration came from

This piece rests on comparing Palmer’s own words across three separate interviews — in 2023, 2024 and 2026 — with the dates of the actual matches. That comparison shows why Palmer links the gesture to Morgan Rogers, why Rogers turns out to have done it before Palmer, and why sources still disagree about the exact date. It also brings in an older NBA basketball line — Trae Young — that football coverage usually leaves out.

The gesture that became a Chelsea signature

When Cole Palmer scores, he often stops, crosses his arms over his chest and rubs his shoulders with his palms — a gesture as if the footballer had suddenly gone cold. The Premier League writes that the gesture brought Palmer worldwide recognition, while ESPN calls it the forward’s signature celebration. Palmer himself explained the gesture’s origin and meaning in an October 2024 interview with The Telegraph, quoted by ESPN: it is a tribute to his former Manchester City academy teammate Morgan Rogers, it symbolizes the joy, passion and graft in the game, and it also happens to fit well with his surname; everyone knows it is his celebration, and while others may have done it too, everyone knows it is his.

The gesture became attached to the nickname ‘Cold Palmer,’ but sources disagree on which came first. ESPN writes that it was specifically the shivering celebration that earned Palmer this nickname. Goal.com, by contrast, traces the nickname to his composure in front of goal, independent of the gesture. A Fox Williams legal analysis mentions both reasons at once — both the composure and the gesture. Palmer himself says only that his nickname ‘fits well’ with his name. Which came first — the gesture or the nickname — cannot be established from the available sources.

Rogers before Palmer: the Premier League’s account and an unresolved question of date

According to the Premier League, Morgan Rogers performed this gesture before Palmer did — at the time Rogers was a Middlesbrough midfielder, and he is now Palmer’s teammate at Chelsea. Rogers scored the only goal, in the 40th minute, in Middlesbrough’s 1–0 Championship win over West Bromwich Albion on December 23, 2023; the score and the minute are confirmed by an independent Sky Sports match report, although that report does not describe the gesture itself. Premier League features from 2024 and 2026 both name this same match as the starting point — ‘a week’ before Palmer.

There is an inconsistency here that the sources do not resolve. In a 2026 interview for the club podcast CFC Unlocked, Palmer remembers Rogers’s match differently, saying Rogers played midweek and that Chelsea then played Luton on the Saturday, at which point he told Rogers he would do the same if he scored. But December 23, 2023 was itself a Saturday, not a midweek date — this follows from that week’s calendar and is confirmed by the date on the match report itself. Four days earlier, however, on Tuesday, December 19, 2023, Rogers scored and celebrated a goal in an English League Cup match against Port Vale: a photo of that moment exists in the Getty Images archive, though its caption records only the fact of the celebration, without describing the exact arm position. The available text sources cannot establish which of these two matches Palmer meant by ‘midweek’; settling that would require either archival reporting from local Teesside outlets on the December 19 or 23 goal that describes the gesture, or a video review of both broadcasts — which falls outside the scope of this piece.

How Palmer repeated the gesture: two goals against Luton

On December 30, 2023, Palmer performed the same gesture for the first time. He scored twice — in the 12th and 70th minutes — as Chelsea beat Luton Town 3–2. On the same day, immediately after the match, Palmer explained the gesture live on TNT Sports, and Metro published that account at 16:00 GMT on that same December 30, referencing Rogers’s goal for Middlesbrough and the promise Palmer had made him beforehand (Palmer would repeat almost the same wording of that promise a year later — see the next section). In other words, the Rogers version entered the public record not later than, but at the very same time as, Palmer’s celebration itself; Chelsea’s own match report simply did not mention it, because it focused on the score and the goal minutes rather than on press reaction.

How the claim that Palmer invented the gesture himself took shape

Since the explanation was given on the day of the match, the claim that ‘Palmer invented it himself’ did not arise from press silence — it emerged later, from mid-2024 headlines once the gesture had become widely recognizable. In July 2024, Sportskeeda ran a headline saying the Chelsea midfielder claimed he started the ‘Ice Cold’ celebration, quoting Palmer’s answer on talkSPORT: “Everyone knows it’s my celebration.” He added that Rogers might have done it too, referring to him only as “he” — the bracketed clarification “[Rogers]” in that quote was inserted by the outlet itself and was not part of Palmer’s own wording. In the same piece, Palmer also spoke about young Chelsea players Estêvão and Kendry Páez, who had also started doing the gesture, saying they were not taking it from him, only joining in. In August 2024, Goal.com separately examined the authorship question under a headline about a ‘reputation as the inventor’ and concluded that Palmer himself had never publicly claimed to have invented the gesture — the confusion was created by headlines and retellings, not by his own words.

Palmer’s own words on Rogers’s priority

In later, more direct comments, Palmer describes the division of roles without ambiguity. The Premier League quotes him saying that his friend ‘Morgz’ [Rogers] did it for Middlesbrough, so he told Rogers he would do the same if he scored. After Rogers joined Chelsea in the summer of 2026, the club’s official website quoted an even more direct admission from Palmer: “He did it first, but I made it famous! That’s the truth.”

An older line: basketball’s Trae Young and ‘Ice Trae’

Even earlier, a similar gesture — crossed arms and a mock shiver — became part of NBA player Trae Young’s persona under the nickname ‘Ice Trae.’ According to the Premier League, Young has performed it since 2018, his rookie season in the league, when he played for the Atlanta Hawks. Sportskeeda gives a different starting point, saying it began in his second NBA season. Young himself described the gesture’s origin on the podcast Podcast P with Paul George: the idea, he said, was suggested by a friend rather than invented by him alone, recalling that he was sitting in a basement with a friend who told him he was ‘Ice Trae’ and should be cold, after which he hit a three-pointer and simply did it, adding that he had not copied it from anyone. This sparked a transatlantic authorship dispute in 2024: Sportskeeda’s headlines ran on July 4 and August 14, and Goal.com’s analysis followed on August 15. Young is no longer with the Atlanta Hawks: since January 9, 2026 he has played for the Washington Wizards, having been traded there for Corey Kispert and CJ McCollum.

How the gesture became the ‘Cold Palmer’ trademark

Palmer Management Limited applied to register the word mark ‘COLD PALMER’ with the UK Intellectual Property Office in November 2024. According to The Athletic, the French winery Château Palmer, which holds the ‘CHATEAU PALMER’ mark for wine, opposed the application in August 2025; in September 2025 the application was amended to remove wine from the list of goods, and the mark was registered — according to The Athletic, in early October 2025 — with protection running to November 25, 2034. In a January 27, 2026 piece, ESPN describes the same events more briefly, saying only that the mark was ‘filed in November,’ without specifying the registration year. A Fox Williams legal analysis (a multi-practice law firm with an intellectual-property team) broadly confirms this timeline but describes the winery’s objection with the caveat ‘according to available information.’

The registration covers only the word mark — the name ‘Cold Palmer’ itself — not the performance of the gesture. Separately, Palmer filed for a ‘motion’ trademark: a short video, roughly 1.5 seconds long, depicting the gesture itself — arms crossed over the chest with alternating rubbing of the shoulders. According to the Fox Williams analysis, the submitted video and description were found sufficient for registering this mark, yet the same piece’s overall conclusions describe its status conditionally, as something that would apply ‘if it is registered.’ ESPN, in January 2026, calls this filing merely ‘reportedly submitted.’ Sources describe the exact current status of this mark inconsistently — confirming it requires checking the UK IPO register directly.

Summer 2026: Rogers at Chelsea, and the gesture becomes shared again

In the summer of 2026, Rogers’s and Palmer’s paths crossed again — no longer at the Manchester City academy, but in Chelsea’s first team. According to Sky Sports, the club signed Rogers from Aston Villa for £117 million, a record transfer fee for a British player, on a seven-year contract. AP and Reuters, in a report distributed by Al Jazeera, add that the clubs never officially announced the fee, but that media reports put it at the same £117 million, with the contract running to 2033. After the deal was completed, Palmer commented half-jokingly on the rights to the gesture — answering a question specifically about the celebration itself, not about the name ‘Cold Palmer’ — saying they had not even talked about it, that Rogers does it, he does it, that he had it patented so bailiffs would show up at Rogers’s door if he tried anything, and that really, they would just do it together.

Chelsea forward Estêvão picked up the gesture earlier, and differently, than one might assume: he began performing it back in 2024, right after signing his Chelsea contract, while still playing for Brazil’s Palmeiras. He told The Guardian, in a quote carried by the Premier League, that the day after signing he scored a goal and celebrated the way Palmer does, because Palmer’s celebration was trending and very popular. Palmer himself describes this without any complaint, referring to Estêvão and another young Chelsea player, Kendry Páez, saying they are not taking the gesture from him, only joining in. In other words, the gesture’s spread among Chelsea players began two years before Rogers’s transfer and has nothing to do with his move.