If you find yourself shouting, 'How the $@#%! did you miss that?' at the TV at any point over the coming weeks of the World Cup tournament, it might be worth clinging on to some wise words from the design design curator Eleanor Watson in our new book Nike Football Boots.
In conversation with a former member of the Brazilian national team some years ago, Eleanor asked them what they thought was the hardest part of being a professional footballer.
"Without hesitation he told me that the only real difficulty was that it is the one job in the world that absolutely everybody believes they can perform better than you," Watson writes in the book. The issue, the former footballer explained, lay in the game’s simplicity.
Total 90 Laser IV, 2011, Wayne Rooney promotional shot. Image: Courtesy and
© Nike, Inc
"Football is a sport with very few rules and minimal equipment, allowing for people to understand it almost intuitively. It is, consequently, also a sport that invites an unusual degree of self-projection. We know that we are not elite athletes, yet, when watching a beautiful run of play, we believe, somehow, that we could do it too. It appears simple and so we believe it to be."
As befitting a book that draws on the design elements of the boots that changed the beautiful game, Watson draws some smart parallels between a football field and the field of life.
"A similar sleight of hand is also at play across much of the designed world, where objects and services that we use in our day-to-day lives are perfected to such a degree, are made so simple, as to seem inevitable. It is rare to pause and consider how the object in our hand got to be the way it is, and how it made its way to us, yet even the most innocuous item is the result of some sort of design process and embodies a material knowledge far outstripping its status as a commodity."
Pages from Nike Football Boots - Image: Courtesy and © Nike, Inc
"It becomes the task of the design historian (amateur or professional) to pull these objects away from their usual context and to make them strange, the shedding of familiarity revealing any number of the complex issues and entanglements that each item contains. It is a gratifying game to play, and one that works especially well when grappling with the multi-layered world of football."
"At once a school yard game and a complex global industry, football is arguably one of the most significant cultural expressions of contemporary society. It operates across an incomprehensible number of scales, a fact exemplified by the incredible variety of specialists working across the field of football design today: aerodynamics experts, material scientists, groundskeepers, graphic designers, and nutritionists all have their part to play in shaping the sport and spectacle of football as we know it."
Pages from Nike Football Boots - Image: Courtesy and © Nike, Inc
As Watson points out, the ground zero of football design is, of course, the football boot.
"The entire history of the game is available to those who might take the time to examine how this piece of sporting equipment has developed over the years," she writes.
"The ongoing relationship between the design of the boot, the quality of the ground available to play on, and the style of play produced has propelled much of the advancements in the professional game that we have seen in the past one hundred years, and will no doubt continue to do so in the future."
Pages from Nike Football Boots - Image: Courtesy and © Nike, Inc
"It is the hard, dry earth of Latin American pitches that allowed their players to be the first to wear leather boots cut at the ankle, and it is these boots that allowed footballers on that continent to develop the fast, acrobatic style of play that they are universally acclaimed for. It is now the job of sports manufacturers to design boots that meet the demands of an increasingly fast-paced game, and so the cycle continues. We design things that end up designing us."
Watson's writing is one of many brilliant essays in the book which is a lavishly illustrated homage to the beautiful game and the legendary footballers who bring it to life – and, of course, the boots they wear. Created in close collaboration with Nike, it charts the history of the brand’s football journey, from the all-black leather boot introduced in the early 70s – the first of any shoe to feature the famous Swoosh – to the present day, through four key product lines that encapsulate Nike’s design ethos: Tiempo, Mercurial, Total 90, and Phantom.
Along the way, readers will discover stories behind the boots worn by football’s greatest names, including Brazilian striker Ronaldo, Portuguese phenomenon Cristiano Ronaldo, US Women’s National Team star Megan Rapinoe, and French icon Kylian Mbappé, among others.
Acclaimed novelist Caleb Azumah Nelson distills the nostalgic magic of growing up a football fan in southeast London across four illuminating essays, discussing how the culture and style of the period informed the evolution of Nike’s iconic footwear. Meanwhile, Thomas Turner, a historian and lecturer at London College of Fashion, delves deep into the materials, form, fit, design, and technology that makes these boots special. Watson's accessible introduction provides an overview of football design more globally, while an afterword by ELLE Mexico Editor-in-Chief Claudia Cándano de la Peza discusses athletes as style icons. Take a closer look at Nike Football Boots.
(Main image: Tiempo Legend IV, showing All Conditions Control (ACC), circa 2012.
Image: Courtesy and © Nike, Inc)
