Freezing "Ice Cold" Cole Palmer for Topps Match Attax

Topps wanted to create a breakthrough moment to hero the new UEFA Champions League Match Attax collection - a flagship trading card game and a major driver of Christmas retail sales among younger football fans and collectors.

With no access to player appearances, the challenge was to build enough hype, visibility and fandom to cut through one of the busiest moments in the football calendar.

Our job: create something instantly understandable, impossible to ignore, and culturally big enough to break out of the collecting world and into mainstream football conversation.

Our starting point was the product itself. The new UCC Match Attax collection featured its two most talked-about cards:

“Ice Cold” Cole Palmer 🧊 and “Red Hot” Lamine Yamal” 🔥

Two opposites. Two rising stars. One perfect piece of narrative tension. On the 25th November the stage was set perfectly at Stamford Bridge, as Chelsea and FC Barcelona prepared to meet head to head in the UEFA Champions League.

Elevating this moment, we built a creative idea that dramatised both cards in the real world - turning product attributes into physical installations fans couldn’t ignore, scroll past, or walk by.

The two players behind these cards were set to face each other on one of the biggest nights of the season - giving our idea natural cultural momentum and placing it directly into the heart of a global football conversation.

Outside Stamford Bridge, we unveiled a 2-metre block of real ice with a giant Ice Cold Cole Palmer card frozen inside. A literal cold card for Chelsea’s coldest celebration - a disruptive, tactile, double-take moment that stopped fans in their tracks.

Simultaneously, at Fanatics Collectibles London, we revealed the “Red Hot Lamine Yamal”  - a fiery holobox installation designed to contrast the ice and bring one of world football’s hottest emerging talents to life.

Two locations. Two opposing forces. One cohesive narrative engineered for creators, fans, media and clubs to capture, share and amplify - built on product, fuelled by story, and perfectly timed to the biggest fixture of the week.

The activation ignited across social and press - driven first by fans, then creators, then the clubs and players themselves.

Cole Palmer shared the installation to his 8M followers. Chelsea pushed it to 44M.

Coverage snowballed across major football and news outlets including BBC Sport, SportBIBLE and Mirror Online. Matchday search trends were dominated by Ice Cold Cole Palmer, with reactive content spreading across X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.

On the ground, 3,000 Match Attax packs were distributed as crowds formed around the installation, creating a live brand moment that fed the online explosion.

In total, the campaign delivered 400+ combined creator and media pieces and an estimated reach of 318M, making it one of the most high-impact Match Attax activations to date.