For a footballer to break out of the game-centric circles and bewitch the public consciousness, they’ve got to be more than just a baller. They could be aggressively good looking and dating a pop star (see: how David Beckham rose to fame) or wholesome beyond belief, like Bukayo Saka, or have a celebration so iconic that it’s still a point of reference almost 20 years on, like Peter Crouch.
Playing good football alone is not enough, because why would a non-football enjoyer care about converted penalties or a player’s heat map tracking?
Cole Palmer has become the latest footballer to cross that rare threshold in national treasure-dom. Despite being distinctly unaligned with the fashion world, the England player and current Chelsea top goal scorer recently featured in a Burberry campaign alongside fellow British and Irish icons, Olivia Colman, Barry Keoghan, Little Simz and Cara Delevigne. What a lineup!
Of all the promotional videos posted to the fashion house’s YouTube channel for the campaign, the nine-minute video of Palmer fishing in silence, barely moving, has by far the most views.
And his cultural appeal extends to more than just Great Britain. Jamaican rapper Likkle Addi and his father Vybz Kartel released a song this month entitled M.O.T.M (meaning “man of the match”), with an accompanying music video, in which Addi and his back-up dancers are all wearing jerseys bearing Palmer’s name from his former club, Manchester City, and are mimicking his now-iconic ‘ice cold’ celebration.
This marks a full circle moment considering one of Palmer’s many viral videos is a clip of the young footballer rapping to the Vybz Cartel song, Clarkz.
Of the other viral videos, many involve Palmer simply acting like an average 22-year-old lad from Manchester. Last week, for instance, a video of his sister making him explain beauty products (poorly) did the rounds, racking up 734,000 views on a single TikTok.
Other compilations of Palmer being funny on camera — failing to understand interview questions, standing open-mouthed or giving relatively basic answers — have reached over three million views.
A term has been invented for this, ‘Palmercore’, with hundreds of thousands of views on videos of Palmer under this search term. In the comments, there is an even split of football fans and non-football fans. Many aren’t even English, nor Chelsea affiliated.
At first it was mockery, with Palmer being relentless rinsed for seemingly not being smart. But recently something has shifted. More and more people are becoming protective over Palmer, defending him, or declaring that they find him attractive.
So how did Palmer break out to go from standard baller to beloved British icon?
Firstly: he’s bloody good at his sport. “In football, like all sports, people's fame is predicated on their ability on the pitch,” says Morgan Allan, art director at football publication Versus. “If he was s***, none of us would care about him, but off the pitch, people love him.”
In an age of ultra-controlled media presences, Allan highlights Palmer as a breath of fresh air. “There's more opportunities for players to take control of their own image and reap the various rewards of that than ever before,” he says.
“But [Palmer] just doesn't seem ars*d, which is quite refreshing. He's so regular off the pitch, and it's just contrasted in the extreme with his otherworldly ability on the pitch. And I think that's very appealing for a lot of people.”
This is an opinion also held by Snake Denton, a presenter, model and Chelsea fan, who thinks Palmer has unknowingly separated himself from the average star players by just being himself. “As his profile has become bigger and bigger, his social media presence is still cracking people up,” he says.
One memorable instance of this was during the Euros, when Palmer commented a quote from the current season of Love Island — “WHO’S EMMAAAAAAAAA'”, screamed by concerned Islander Nicole Samuel — under Declan Rice’s Instagram post, while the other England boys were commenting clapping emojis and standard “Congrats mate” platitudes.
“It makes him endearing in a way that players like Bellingham maybe aren’t,” Denton says. “Bellingham is way more charismatic than Palmer, he’s conventionally good looking, really articulate. But Palmer is just unapologetically himself. There’s something really relatable about him.”
Denton notes how his popularity is currently far exceeding someone like Erling Haaland, at Manchester City, who is an equally good player, but has none of Palmer’s personality. “With Haaland, it’s like he's been created in a lab. He's part of a science experiment to create the perfect footballer,” he says.
Whereas Palmer? “He looks like he’s spent his entire life playing FIFA [...] He looks like your mate who's just been thrown onto the stage and then is having the game of his life, but it’s every game.”
Ultimately, it’s just nice to have a football legend-in-the-making who feels so… normal. And for as long as that stays the case, he will continue to win hearts, as well as trophies.
“The fact that someone like Cole Palmer, who doesn’t look like he's going to be a gifted athlete at all, can be arguably the best player in the Prem right now, that's amazing,” says Denton. “And I think people buzz off that.”
