Nike’s most ambitious sneaker play at the 2026 World Cup is a project called X2, which pairs seven national federations with seven fashion and streetwear collaborators. Palace took England, and the result is one of the drops with the most crossover appeal for a sneaker audience.
To understand the Palace drop, you have to understand the Cryoshot, the shoe line at the center of X2. Nike did not take football boots and swap the studs for a flat street sole. They took historic boots from their archive and used injection molding to seal the original stud cluster inside a clear TPU outsole. The geometry of the boot is preserved exactly, studs visible through the sole, wearable on pavement.
Palace built its England entry on the Air Speed M, pulling from Nike’s archive and dressing it in the label’s own visual language. For a brand whose whole identity is built on football terrace culture and British irreverence, an England Cryoshot is about as on-brand a collaboration as Nike could have lined up.
The X2 roster is stacked: Palace for England, Patta for the Netherlands, NOCTA for Canada, Jacquemus for France, G-Dragon’s PEACEMINUSONE for South Korea, Slawn for Nigeria, and the Virgil Abloh Archive for the United States. Each pairing includes apparel and a Cryoshot shoe drawn from a different chapter of Nike football history.
The Palace and Patta drops are the two with the broadest pull for sneakerheads who may not watch a single match. That is the entire point of the Cryoshot. Nike is building for the football fan and the collector at the same time, in the same product, and increasingly those are the same person.
