In 2025 the UK Intellectual Property Office did something that sounds like it belongs in a schoolyard kickabout. It granted Cole Palmer commercial ownership of a shiver. The gesture of trembling with arms raised — the one the Chelsea forward repeats every time he scores — became the first motion mark ever registered by a footballer in the United Kingdom. A man pretending to be cold, turned into an intangible asset with a file number. Welcome to the least discussed business in modern football.
The argument is uncomfortable for purists. A goal celebration is no longer an act of euphoria; it is a business unit. And any player who fails to register theirs is giving money away. Not wages, not boot-sponsorship money, but an entire layer of income that exists separately — in shirts, video-game animations, Instagram filters and limited-edition trainers. Mbappé grasped this earlier than almost anyone when he registered his crossed-arms-under-the-armpits pose with the EUIPO between 2018 and 2019. Gareth Bale did it in 2013 with the heart he drew with his hands, his famous eleven of hearts. These are not collector's anecdotes. They are assets.
The counterintuitive part comes next. Registering your celebration does not stop anyone from copying it on the pitch. That is the detail that throws people when they hear it for the first time. The trademark protects the commercial use of the sign, not its execution. If an opponent scores and crosses his arms in imitation of Mbappé, there is no infringement, no lawsuit, nothing. A fan in the stands can shiver like Palmer until he genuinely freezes and it is perfectly legal. What the trademark prohibits is printing that gesture on a hoodie and selling it, putting it in an advertisement, or embedding it in a video game without going through the till first. The property is over the pocket, not over the movement.
That is where the elegance of the idea lies. The gesture remains public, almost folkloric, while its commercial exploitation is locked down. It is the difference between singing a song in the shower and releasing it on an album. The forward earns free visibility every Sunday in front of the cameras, and when that visibility translates into market demand, he holds the key. That is why the jurisprudence that matters is not that of the pitch but that of the trademark offices. The United States has been recognising motion marks and sound marks for years. The European reform of 2018 opened the door to multimedia marks — that short video clip of the gesture that can now be filed as if it were a moving logo. Copyright, by contrast, almost never works here. A simple gesture lacks the creative originality that intellectual property law demands. What works is the trademark, cold and mercantile.
The ecosystem that builds up around it is richer than it looks. Clothing manufacturers want the sign for limited-edition lines. Video-game developers need it so that the avatar celebrates like the real player, and when a registered trademark is involved, EA Sports or Konami have to sit down and negotiate a specific licence separate from the general agreement they already pay to FIFPro. Sponsors integrate it into their campaigns. Social media amplifies it for free and turns it into a viral challenge. Cristiano Ronaldo's siii already lives inside video games and advertisements as one more asset of the CR7 brand — the same acronym the Portuguese registered years ago and which today is worth more than some entire squads. Lamine Yamal is circling the same logic with his own personal symbols and the idea of wringing them into clothing lines. The gesture as the seed of a textile empire.
The costs involved are laughably small compared with the potential return. A Community trademark costs around 850 euros for the first class and roughly 50 euros for each additional class. In the United Kingdom it runs to about 170 pounds per class. Add the fees of a specialist lawyer and you have an investment of a few thousand euros for a player who moves eight-figure sums. The trademark lasts ten years and is renewable. For a global footballer with merchandising sales across four continents, that bill is settled with the first batch of shirts. The problem is not the cost; it is laziness or the absence of proper advice.
It would be wrong to sell this as free money, because it is not. Protection is geographical, and that is a serious crack. Registering in Europe does not cover you in Latin America or Asia, and that is where most of the counterfeit merchandise is sold. Cristiano's siii can be used with impunity in markets where no prior registration exists, and chasing fake shirts across fifteen different jurisdictions is expensive, slow and often pointless. The WIPO Madrid System helps extend the trademark, but it multiplies the costs. There is also the distinctiveness filter. An office can reject a gesture that is too generic, and if the sign has questionable parentage the whole thing gets complicated. Many of these celebrations are born as copies of another player or another sport, which raises questions about who invented what. Bale had to revise his application after French vineyard Château Palmer objected to the use of a mark for beverages. Originality, in this business, is slippery ground.
And then there is the reputational cost, which appears on no invoice. There is a point at which monetising every bodily gesture starts to smell like the commodification of sport, and the public catches the scent quickly. The player who patents his euphoria risks making that euphoria look calculated from the opening whistle. There are also real disciplinary limits. IFAB sanctions political, religious or offensive gestures, so not everything that gets celebrated can be celebrated, let alone sold. The balance between protecting the asset and not looking like a cynic on a retainer is finer than any marketing manual suggests.
Even so, the direction of the wind is unmistakable. While clubs fight over television rights that are plateauing, footballers are discovering that their bodies in motion constitute intellectual property with a market of their own. The next generation will grow up designing their celebration with the same cold calculation they bring to choosing a squad number, already thinking about class 25 of the trademark register before they score their first professional goal. The day a kid invents a gesture in the playground with the EUIPO in mind, we will know that football has finished becoming something else entirely.
