Sportswear brand Adidas have released the F50+ football boots, which they believe are the fastest ever and could usher in an era of football super boots.
Described by Adidas as “a big departure from where we were in running shoes”, the F50+ was designed to integrate running shoe technology into the boot.
Adidas director of footwear development Harry Miles likened the shoe to a super shoe – the name given to a generation of record-breaking running trainers created over the past five years.
“From Adidas’ point of view, it’s our first football super boot, we’d say that quite confidently,” he told Dezeen.
“What’s great is that it’s proprietary,” he continued. “We have something sitting in the patent office. It’s our project that we’ve brought to life, which carries a lot of risk because it’s brand new.”
“It was also a risk when we released Adidas Pro. It was a big break, a big departure from where we were in running shoes, and now you don’t see a pro marathon where someone isn’t wearing a super shoe.” shoe.”
With the F50+, Adidas has focused on integrating some of the technology developed for running shoes over the past five years into the boot.
Most notably, Adidas focused on the sole, an area that has seen a great deal of innovation in running shoes.
“Running shoes have basically changed over the last five years from being very low profile, very close to the ground and traditional looking to shoes that are full of science, full of technology, full of the most valuable ingredients we have,” explained Miles.
“But if you look at the trajectory that the boots have had, they all look the same. We haven’t had a lot of innovation, at least visible and radical innovation. And we wanted to put that into the 50+.”
For Adidas, the challenge was to create a boot with track-toe speed that was still suitable for playing football and allowed players to accelerate and change direction with ease.
To this end, Adidas has created a sole that has a layer of high-performance foam sandwiched between the rigid sole plate and the player’s foot. Adidas patented this sole.
“We had this very soft piece of foam that takes the first three or four millimeters of deformation—basically three or four millimeters of bounce—which allows the player to be nimble and kind of have first gear.” Miles said.
“Then once it runs at a higher speed, there’s a bottom edge, which is usually a bad thing. But on a football field, it’s fine because you have grass underneath. The foam sinks, which means the two boards bond to each other and are very stiff , 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 confident these are the fastest shoes it has made, Miles said he was unable to say how much faster they are. This is partly due to the fact that they will not be used in a measured track environment as a running spike.
“We tested it, we measured it,” he said. “I can’t share it.
“There’s never going to be a person on the field with a stopwatch, so I would argue that all the tests we’ve done won’t tell you as much as waiting for someone to run faster or around a defender on the field. “
The F50+ was released recently and according to Miles, some players are already starting to adopt them.
“It’s pretty fresh,” Miles said. “I think athletes are getting used to it at the moment – so they’re in the adoption phase.”
“There are still a lot of good Adidas boots that look traditional, but we hope to convince some of them to wear super boots.”