How Soccer Conquered the US Sneaker Market

Since the release of the first Air Jordan shoe in 1985, the American sneaker market has been synonymous with basketball. Many of the category’s greatest hits, including Nike’s Dunks and Air Force 1s, Converse’s Chuck Taylor All Stars and even modern classics like Adidas AE 1s, were built for use on a basketball court.

But recently, the market has experienced an identity crisis. Consumers have increasingly yearned for silhouettes beyond the oftentimes clunky, high-top models associated with old performance basketball models re-released as “retros” by major sportswear brands. This gave rise to the performance running boom, and stylish hiking and trail footwear popularised by the gorpcore movement.

The next sport that appears set to dominate sneaker culture is football, with the football boots players wear on the pitch — or the soccer cleats they wear on the field, as its newest fans call it — poised to take over the streetwear scene.

Sneaker giants, luxury brands and fashion cool kid consumers are increasingly becoming fixated on this style of footwear. The popularity of Adidas’ Samba, a retro football shoe which took the sneaker market by storm over the past two years, played a key role in opening the door for global awareness and appreciation of the sport’s footwear.

Recent months have seen a flurry of activity from brands looking to get ahead of this trend, releasing not just actual football boots ready for the pitch, but also modified, fashion-forward versions for everyday use. Spanish singer Rosalía surprised viewers ahead of the Met Gala when she arrived wearing a billowing white skirt with a pair of $134 New Balance 442 football boots, complete with luminous green studs. The brand also recently teased a collaboration with rapper Jack Harlow for a limited edition design of the same silhouette (but unlike the pair worn by Rosalía, adapted for everyday use), inspired by his high school colours. Nike relaunched its T90 franchise, an iconic line of football boots from the 2000s immortalised in football fan culture by all-time greats such as Ronaldinho.

At Louis Vuitton, Pharrell Williams recently released the LV Footprint Football Trainer line, a £885 ($1,200) football boot-inspired shoe first revealed to much fanfare in the brand’s spring/summer 2025 show, complete with an intricate rubber footprint outsole with the LV initials and a floral monogram design to imitate where the studs would usually be placed.

“Football has gained more of a cultural platform itself, thanks to its US audience growing and the increasing international profile of women’s football,” said Lauren Cochrane, a fashion and sports journalist and writer of the Style of Play newsletter. “The football aesthetic is now more familiar to more people.”

Still, the football boot is an unexpected silhouette to gain popularity among everyday fashion consumers, not least because these are shoes which traditionally have studs fixed to the sole to give players traction while in motion on turf pitches. As anyone who has worn football boots before can attest, such footwear is not exactly conducive to use on any surface other than grass, let alone for tasks such as walking to the grocery store or even running between shows at fashion week.

Regardless, wearing football boots as fashion items, which appears to have been spurred on by the “boots-only summer” TikTok style trend and anticipation for next year’s FIFA World Cup, hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico, is catching on fast.

“Basketball [footwear] has been on the street for years, running [footwear] has been on the street for years,” said sneaker marketing expert Bimma Williams, founder of the Collab Lab platform. “I believe a lot of the adoption of soccer footwear is related to a desire from the consumer for something very different from what has been pushed on them for decades.”

Boots-Only Summer

In recent years, football has become a consistent source of creative inspiration to brands across the fashion spectrum, from streetwear labels like Corteiz, Kid Super and Aimé Leon Dore to luxury designers and brands such as Martine Rose, Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton. New brands like American Football, an LA-based streetwear label launched earlier this year, are springing up to meet growing demand for products inspired by the beautiful game.

Up until recently, this was largely confined to apparel design, a trend that saw edgy vintage football jerseys become a must-have item among fashion consumers, and spurred countless collaborations between football teams and brands.

But the sneaker market loves a nostalgia play. And that’s exactly the opportunity that the “boots-only summer” moment presented.

“It’s just another way that football culture is being mined by fashion,” said Cochrane. “If basketball has long been part of fashion aesthetics, football is relatively new and fertile ground.”

The trend itself began with people poking fun at how as kids, especially in the UK and Europe, it was a fashion statement to wear their favourite players’ football boots with jeans and normal outfits during their day-to-day activities in the 2000s. Those kids — now adults — decided to bring the style back.

Brands such as Adidas and Nike, which had increasingly leaned into the football-fashion movement with designer collaborations and bespoke capsules, were well placed with products to meet the demand. The former had spent the past year relaunching iconic and nostalgic football boot models such as the Predator and F50, synonymous with legends of the game such as David Beckham, while the latter has begun to give old football models from its archive the retro treatment usually reserved for its basketball sneakers. Other sportswear brands with rich football heritage, such as Puma and Japanese sportswear giant Mizuno, have delved into their archives in recent months to stake their claim to the trend too.

The more diminutive, narrow silhouette of football footwear also tracks with the broader sneaker industry shift away from clunky, basketball-style high-tops, Williams said.

North America’s Soccer Style Awakening

With the Club World Cup tournament kicking off across the US this week, a high-budget (albeit underwhelming) precursor to next summer’s FIFA World Cup across North America, soccer culture is in focus among consumers in the region like never before.

“Soccer culture here is becoming more mainstream,” Williams said. “You have celebrities, athlete-investors and fashion brands all pushing this forward.”

This has presented Nike with a well-timed opportunity to strike gold on home soil. Where the Swoosh has long dominated its competition in basketball, Adidas has always been ahead in football, having made products for the sport for over 70 years.

Nike spent big on the relaunch of its T90 III model — one of the most iconic and nostalgic football shoes of all time, which crossed over into street culture in the 2000s — enlisting its football-loving ambassador Travis Scott for activations at major cultural events such as Coachella in the lead-up to release earlier this year. It has proved a hit with sneakerheads, already amassing 4,200 trades on StockX since March, at an average 17 percent premium above its retail price, according to data shared by the resale platform.

It also engaged Gafffer, a London-based creative agency specialised in football culture, to work on a campaign to evoke the footballing heritage and nostalgia of the shoe, featuring football icons who wore the shoe in its original heyday like Edgar Davids, alongside stars of the new generation like Real Madrid player Eduardo Camavinga.

The brand has also been working on an all-new silhouette designed to cater to this wider trend. Later this year, it will release the Cryoshot, a line of fashion-forward footwear that takes direct inspiration from Nike’s most famous football boot lines (with studs and all, but encased in a transparent midsole) and that the brand revealed ahead of the Champions League final in Munich last weekend. Nike athlete and German national team player Jamal Musiala posted a picture of himself wearing the new footwear alongside Corteiz founder and Nike collaborator Clint, who also had on a pair of Cryoshots — an insight into how the brand is seeking to position the shoe as a fashion play, rather than a purely sporting one.

The football boots trend has been a big hit among women too — another factor which could fit neatly in Nike’s ongoing mission under CEO Elliott Hill to better connect to and serve its female consumer base.

“Women are typically more likely to experiment with fashion than men, so an extreme shoe style like this appeals,” said Cochrane. “As Rosalía wears them, they are perhaps the ultimate in the ‘wrong shoe theory’ and fit into the ‘ugly shoe’ look.”

For brands to really capitalise on this moment, proving they’re truly investing in football culture will be critical.

“The key to this becoming more ingrained in culture beyond the trend is for there to be a maintained engagement strategy [in the lead-up to the 2026 World Cup and beyond],’ Williams said. “New faces, fresh activations, creative marketing approaches and collaborations.”