Growing up a football-obsessed child in England, I wore football gear at every possible opportunity. A trip to a restaurant? A late-night school disco? An elderly relative’s birthday? Regardless of the occasion, the uniform for me and my fellow football-obsessed mates during the early naughts was astroturf boots and a football shirt. Until, eventually, we all grew up.
That evolution from wanting to always wear turf boots [UK English for flat, cleatless sports shoes] to voluntarily lacing up a pair of ordinary sneakers was a coming-of-age moment.
For one, the older kids at school offered slightly ego-crushing fashion lessons free of charge teaching me that wearing football shoes with casual trousers was a fashion faux pas (a true story, although they worded it a little less politely). But, also, the footwear shift was a sign that I was one step closer to adulthood.
Now, fashion is telling me to regress. Here we are a decade later, and those same studless football boots are walking runways and selling out at fashion boutiques. You can imagine my confusion.
“You’re getting people wearing these [football] shoes who would never kick a ball in them. 10 or 20 years ago, there’s no way I would have thought this kind of crossover would happen,” says Daniel Jones, senior editor at SoccerBible, who shares some of my bewilderment. “But I don’t think many people would have predicted the level of interaction that football culture and fashion currently enjoys.”
He’s right. The beautiful game I’ve watched for as long as I can remember has become unprecedentedly, well, beautiful. Just to a different audience.
By 2022, vintage football shirts and adidas Samba sneakers were unexpectedly accepted as invariably stylish. Clobber once only found in local UK pubs was being reinterpreted by fashion creators often living in countries that call the sport “soccer”. This style was soon given a name that likely infuriates the folks whose wardrobes predate it: Blokecore.
“I remember playing with Sambas, it was my indoor football shoe,” says Samuel Falzone, a New York-based footwear designer and upcycler. “It’s funny [seeing them become a trend], as a kid these were the coolest shoes you had, so you wanted to wear them everywhere.”
I initially dismissed blokecore as another TikTok-fueled micro-trend — surely people aren’t really going to engage in football fan cosplay — until it became impossible to ignore. Instead, fashion’s football fever has only gotten stronger: $500 football shirts are abruptly selling out alongside a seemingly endless string of adidas Samba collaborations, in turn leading to a renewed emphasis on fashion-forward football footwear.
The Samba has now transcended football, perhaps too much for its own good: When the ex-Prime Minister of England is wearing the sneaker with unstylishly slim-fit suit trousers, you know the Samba’s cool-kid days are numbered. What comes next is a regression, one that’s paradoxically even more stylistically progressive than the Samba. Yes, fashion finally came for ’00s-era football boots.
Unlike the Samba, which had a loyal following on football terraces before its Wales Bonner collaborations started reselling for four-figure sums, these football boots with off-center laces and techy fabrics never made a widespread switch to off-the-field wear. Making them stylish is uncharted territory being explored by fashion houses, sneaker customizers, and vintage shops.
Burberry and Balenciaga were early onto the trend, sending football boots with an adidas Predator-esque fold-over tongue down the runway in 2021, skillfully one-upped by Botter layering Predator boots on top of dress shoes.
The weirder football overtures have since swelled: Acne Studios made a $580 dupe of Nike’s Total 90 before Nike relaunched the shoe, itself part of a bigger trend that sees Nike, adidas, and Reebok reissuing legendary football boots mostly made famous in the early naughts as lifestyle shoes. The crescendo came with Pharrell’s Louis Vuitton Fall/Winter 2024 footwear, one shoe looking like $1,000 versions of astroturf boots found in Sports Direct discount bins circa 2004.
Styles of football boots from my childhood have made it onto fashion’s biggest stages.
“Once every Michael Jordan fan who couldn’t afford his shoes in the ‘90s turned 25 or 30, they could afford to go back and buy all the retro pairs. Nike capitalized on that and now you’re seeing this happen with a different sport,” says Falzone. “They’ve got us [football fans] 10 or 20 years later and they’re fulfilling our childhood dreams again.”
The emotional reaction elicited by a revived pair of old boots is something Falzone has seen firsthand: The designer rebirths old football boots, some sent in by customers, with restitched uppers and Vibram soles.
“I’ve created friendships with people that play football religiously. They have boots that aren’t wearable anymore but haven’t gotten rid of them because they have so much sentimental value,” says Falzone. “[When they] discover this project I do and the shift in menswear, where football culture has become a trend, people are eager to throw their boots back on.”
A growing number of cobblers and shoe customizers are offering similar Frankensteined formal shoes made from football boots but for most, the five-a-side-equipped OG football shoes are plenty serviceable.
“We receive so many requests from around the world to source more [retro football shoes],” says Chahrazed Chebel and Nassim Guenineche, co-founders of Parisian vintage store Afterglow. “The reaction has been incredible. The most popular pair is the 2005 adidas David Beckham Predator Absolado. It’s also the rarest one — we’ve only been able to source a few and they sell in minutes.”
Yes, following the footsteps trod by the Samba, early naughts football boots are fostering a growing market of fashionable admirers willing to buy vintage pairs for premium rates.
I am slightly skeptical about recently-retired football boots becoming a fashion statement. Seeing the “tools of our trade,” as Jones, the Soccerbible editor, calls them, flogged at inflated prices when football is rapidly losing its working-class roots immediately got my back up. However, there is another side to the trend that’s more guiltless.
“There’s an unquenchable thirst for nostalgia in football culture,” says Jones. “Everyone loves a throwback shirt design and everyone loves the returning adidas Predator because it’s got a fold-over tongue again.” Fashion’s acceptance of 2000s-era football boots is an opportunity to reminisce over one of the sport’s greatest eras.
Ronaldinho, Zinedine Zidane, Roberto Carlos… we’re bringing back boots worn by legends of the game. As someone who idolized this crop of players — and has sticker books to prove it — I can’t deny that my inner child still gets excited by the prospect of wearing their football boots everywhere, no matter how old I actually am.