adidas’ Creative Director Explains How Football Boots Will Change in the Next 10 Years

Football boots will always be a hot topic in changing rooms up and down the country. They tend to be an extension of a players' personality on the pitch; some go for the loudest and lairiest - the flair guys who want to twine you into oblivion - while others will pull just about anything onto their feet.

One thing rings true for every player though; the feeling of revealing a fresh pair of boots to your adoring teammates is beautiful, and can only be topped by curling in a 25-yard beauty with said boots hours later.

But have football boots peaked?

In the last decade a multitude of shapes, sizes and colours have been created to rave reviews. Prices and quality continue to be driven higher and higher by the endemic football brands, who relentlessly engineer new performance-enhancing technology for their newest releases, but the question remains: where do we go from here?

Luckily for us, an answer does exist and from a source that we would consider highly reliable, Sam Handy. If you don’t know Sam, he was once the creative director of adidas football and now resides as creative director of adidas running; the man knows what he is talking about. As part of the adidas #hometeam CreatorU content series he sat down to explain how he saw things changing in the coming years.

“Football boots in 10 years will, I believe, continue to help players to play better. So the performance is going to continue to improve, but what we see across the industry is the role of sustainability, which is getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger.  

"I think as much as football is changing and becoming more inclusive and more sustainable, we’re seeing the products within the sport doing the same thing"

- Sam Handy, adidas

"I think as much as football is changing and becoming more inclusive and more sustainable, we’re seeing the products within the sport doing the same thing, and I think that’s what we’re going to see in the future. An amazing mix between recycled, upcycled, sustainable products and elite pro-performances that blow our minds.”

Sam also explained how it felt to be involved with the adidas Predator and revealed what shocked him most about working with the infamous boot.

“What was surprising for me was meeting pro footballers for the first time and hearing from them how in love and obsessed with the Predator they genuinely were.

"For them it was a lot more than a marketing story from a sports brand that paid them, they were as much boot collectors and boot obsessives around Pred as the collectors that we all know. They’re just as obsessed with that boot as regular players all over the world - that really surprised me.”

And finally, what did he think were the best boots of all time? “Predator is of course the best football boot in the world. Always was, always will be.” 

Fairly predictable, that.

CreatorU is the latest content series from the adidas #hometeam. Industry leaders discuss how they got their start, their sources of inspiration and offer a unique look at life behind the scenes. The series will run over the next 6 weeks and kicked off with Jon Wexler, Yeezy GM. For more information please visit https://www.adidas.co.uk/hometeam