How Soccer Shoes Became the Biggest Thing in Sneakers | GQ

Oct 17, 2024

You have been told, perhaps, that soccer had a big summer in America. You certainly didn’t hear wrong. Alongside the simultaneous Euro 2024 and Copa America tournaments, you had Lionel Messi’s continued dominance in the MLS, the USWNT reclaiming Olympic gold in Paris, and the rise of star-backed clubs like Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s Wrexham and Tom Brady’s Birmingham City. After decades of false starts, the world’s game has really, truly cemented itself stateside.

That includes, of course, the sport’s continued relevance in the world of style, with blokecore—the trend that encompasses vintage footy jerseys, Umbro short shorts, and, yes, Adidas Sambas—remaining very much a thing in 2024. “Soccer’s influence on fashion isn’t a new concept,” explains Lucas Capozzi-Shanks of Scenes NY, a brand specializing in vintage football wares and original designs that draw influence from the sport’s history. “Soccer is a creative, free-flowing, stylish sport, and soccer players specifically have been some of the most stylish athletes in history. And because it’s the world’s game, it’s a wonderfully diverse population of people pulling from a wide range of cultural and style influences.”

Capozzi-Shanks notes that on its own, a full football kit looks great. “A full kit is a good outfit—a heavyweight, boxy shirt (possibly with a collar), a short, breezy pair of shorts, and complementing socks. It's perfect, unlike basketball jerseys and American football jerseys, which all look like costumes.” There’s an ease of wear to soccer jerseys that allows them to permeate throughout fashion in a way that you don’t see with other sports. They can bridge the gap between high and low, pairing just as well with Patagonia Baggies as they do a full Loewe or Fear of God fit. The vintage jersey market is booming these days, with retailers like The Football Boutique in Los Angeles and Saturdays Football—with locations in New York, LA, and Miami—becoming bonafide hangout spots, with customers congregating for watch parties and summer rec leagues. It’s not uncommon, at either of those shops, to run into an MLS or NWSL player when you stop by to cop a vintage Bayern Munich kit.

When it comes to soccer’s place in the sneaker game, however, it’s long lagged behind sports like basketball and tennis in terms of pure collectibility. Yes, the aforementioned Samba—which Adidas debuted way back in 1949, a groundbreaking model designed to allow players to train on hard surfaces rather than grass—has remained a steady, understated classic for decades. But soccer shoes have hardly ever generated the kind of hype that, say, a hot Air Jordan release or a retro of Andre Agassi’s Air Tech Challenge might have—which makes sense, when you consider that the shoes megastars like David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo wore on the pitch all came with, you know, cleats.

The Adidas Samba “Messi,” splashed in Inter Miami's signature hot pink.

And then suddenly, a few years ago, the Samba shot up from standby staple to the shoe of the moment, popping up on the feet of cool people and famous folks everywhere from New York Fashion Week to hot new restaurants to airport TSA lines. The low-cut, low-key silhouette’s continued success has caused massive ripple effects throughout the sneaker industry.

The Adidas Predator 24 League Low Freestyle, a street shoe inspired by David Beckham's iconic cleats.

The Adidas Gazelle “Manchester United,” part of a wider series of club-homage kicks.

At Adidas, that’s meant nonstop iterations on the Samba itself, like Wales Bonner’s buzzy collaborations and the recent Messi-ified pink spin; a slew of soccer-inspired colorways for other classic models like the Gazelle; and, inevitably, new street-ready versions of iconic Three Stripes football boots, like Beckham’s famed Predators. Competitors like Nike and Reebok, meanwhile, are now getting in on the soccer act too. The Swoosh recently added a soccer-boot-esque foldover tongue to its beloved Cortez model and announced a sneaker-ified reissue of its 2000s-era Total 90 III cleat for early 2025. Reebok, for its part, has revived two Samba-like soccer sneakers in the form of the Hammer Street and Campio X. There are even some designers—like New York’s Samuel Falzone—who are taking things a step further by resoling vintage on-pitch cleats for everyday wear, bringing an even greater level of footy authenticity to your casual fits.

The Nike Total 90 III, the sneaker-ified version of the boots once worn by Wayne Rooney, Luis Figo, and many more.

Reebok's Hammer Street, an indoor soccer shoe originally released in 1993.

The rise of soccer sneakers does, of course, call into question basketball’s place in all this. Basketball has long been the sport that drove the sneaker game in the States. Five years ago, anybody even remotely in the know was setting their alarms to enter SNKRS draws for Air Jordans designed by high-visibility names like Travis Scott, Off-White, and Union. Their footwear notes came from NBA tunnel walks and courtside snapshots of celebrities decked out in the latest hot collab. The Golden State Warriors were in the midst of a dynasty run, LeBron James and the Lakers were gearing up for a title run, and the superteam era had yet to burn out, with Kyrie and KD, Harden and Russ, and Kawhi and PG still looking like the next half decade of NBA Finals (or conference finals, at least). The culture’s eyes were fixed on the sport.

Lately though, that fixed gaze has lost focus a bit. It’d be nonsense to claim basketball doesn’t still command substantial sway over sneakers and fashion. But the NBA is now in a transitional era, with megastars like LeBron and Steph Curry now entering the final acts of their careers. The league still has an abundance of young superstar talent like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Nikola Jokic, but from a signature shoe perspective at least, none of them have yet to capture the zeitgeist like the previous generation. And on the retro hoops side of things, the Resale Era of sneakers has finally burst, with secondary sales of Jordans in particular down in a big way and many hotly-anticipated collabs going for hardly above retail on sites like StockX.

Basketball will be fine, obviously—transitional periods are natural. But in the midst of this one, a window has opened for soccer to tighten its always-present grip on the culture. While the NBA figures out who its next generational superstars will be, soccer’s heroes are already here and ready for the moment—M’Bappe, Jude Bellingham, Vincinius Jr., Bukayo Saka, Phil Foden, and Marcus Rashford (among others) seem primed to carry the torch as Messi, Ronaldo, and Neymar prepare for their final bows. Will the sport fully supercede basketball in America? Capozzi-Shanks doesn’t think so—but also doesn’t believe that’s the point. “We’re a very fragmented sporting nation,” he observes, “Soccer only needs to keep being the beautiful game, the most popular sport in the history of the world, and if it becomes everyone's second or third-favorite sport in America, it'll be massive.”

Soccer may have always been here but its growth in recent years is undeniable. It’s easy to say it’s having a moment in the worlds of both sport and fashion alike, but perhaps the more accurate way to put it is that it’s ascending. If there’s one metric that stands out amidst all of this, it might be the 40% increase in traffic that Adidas has reported to their youth soccer page since Messi’s debut with Inter Miami in 2023, with a marked increase not only in jersey sales but youth soccer gear as well. Look at the long game, not the short one. A new It Sneaker will eventually knock the Samba off its throne, but the grip soccer has on the culture right now is multigenerational. Where once kids in America grew up with posters of Jordan, LeBron, and Curry on their bedroom walls they’re now tacking up photos of the beautiful game’s GOAT. Basketball shoes might eventually reclaim top spot in the sneaker hierarchy, but the next generation is forming core memories on the pitch. Trends come and go. The beautiful game is forever.