Sportswear brand Adidas has released the F50+ football boot, which it believes is its fastest ever and could usher in an era of football super shoes.
Described by Adidas as "a big departure from where we've been in running shoes", the F50+ was designed to integrate running shoe technology into a football boot.
Adidas footwear development director Harry Miles likened the boot to a super shoe – a name given to a generation of record-beating running trainers created over the past five years.
"From Adidas' point of view, this is our first football super shoe, we would be pretty certain to say that," he told Dezeen.
"What's cool is, it's proprietary," he continued. "We have something, which sits in the patent office. It's our project that we brought to life, which comes with a lot of risk because it's brand new."
"It was also a risk when we released the Adidas Pro. That was a big escape, a big departure from where we've been in running shoes, and now you don't see a professional marathon where somebody isn't wearing a super shoe."
With the F50+, Adidas aimed to integrate some of the technology developed for running shoes over the past five years into a football boot.
Most significantly, Adidas focused on the sole, an area that has seen large amounts of innovation in running shoes.
"Running footwear over the last five years has basically gone from very low profile, very close to the ground and traditional-looking to shoes that are packed full of science, packed full of technology, packed full of the most valuable ingredients that we have," explained Miles.
"But if you look at the trajectory that football boots have had, they all look the same. We didn't have a great deal of innovation, at least visible and radical innovation. And we wanted to put that into the 50+."
For Adidas, the challenge was creating a boot with the speed of a track spike that would still be suited to playing football, allowing players to accelerate easily and change direction.
To do this, Adidas created a sole that has a layer of high-performance foam sandwiched between the rigid outsole plate and the player's foot. Adidas has patented this sole.
"We had this very soft piece of foam, which takes over the first three or four millimetres worth of deformation – the three or four millimetres worth of bounce, basically – which allows the player to be nimble and kind of have a first gear," said Miles.
"Then once they're running at faster speeds that bottoms out, which usually is a bad thing. But on a football pitch, that's fine because you've got grass underneath. The foam bottoms out meaning the two plates connect to each other and they're very rigid, so have a much higher gear," he continued.
"That's what's in the patent, and that's what we hope will make players run faster."
Although Adidas is certain that these are the fastest boots it has made, Miles said he was unable to say how much faster they are. This is partly due to the fact they will not be used on a timed, track environment like a running spike.
"We did test it, we did measure it," he said. "I'm not at liberty to share it."
"There's never going to be a person on the pitch with a stopwatch, so I'd argue all the testing that we did isn't going to tell you as much as waiting for somebody to run faster or around the defender on the pitch."
The F50+ was released recently and, according to Miles, some players are already beginning to adopt them.
"It's quite fresh," said Miles. "I think athletes are currently getting used to it – so they're in their sort of adoption phase."
"There's still a lot of good Adidas football boots that are traditional-looking, but we hope to convince some of them to wear the super shoe."
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