Take a moment to study the two photographs to the left.
One was shot in 2000; the other in 2024. The hooded, one-piece body suit immediately catches the eye as a futuristic piece of kit, whereas the Nike two-piece feels generic and unremarkable – it could belong to plenty of past eras.
Look at the shoes, though, and the perception changes. The New Balance Fuel Cell shoe worn by Olympic 400m hurdles champion Femke Bol has the distinctive profile associated with the most powerful sports shoe innovation we have seen since the turn of the century.
In athletics and road running, advances in foam technology have spawned a new generation of ‘super shoes’ that are helping long-distance runners smash world records on a regular basis.
The silhouette of these chunky shoes, with their distinctive bow-like profiles, is now part of the visual language of running and, increasingly, street fashion.
In contrast, Cathy Freeman’s Nike Swift Suit, worn by the Australian 400m gold medallist at the Sydney Olympic Games, never caught on. Designed for drag reduction, the Swift Suit made for iconic images but was universally shunned by athletes that felt confined and uncomfortable. Almost nobody, including Freeman outside of that one Olympic Games, wanted to wear one.
Game-changing sports tech is about combining performance and appealing design – products that work for both athletes and consumers. It remains a challenge even for the two market leaders in sports shoe and apparel over the last 50 years: Adidas and Nike.
These two companies have understood that performance-led innovation in sports, aligned with savvy marketing partnerships, shifts product. But with so many challenger brands now emerging in athletic tech, what’s coming next from the research and development labs? How will it impact performance? And who will be the innovators?
Customised kit
Adidas and Nike each have research and development units embedded into their corporate headquarters, wielding nine-figure annual budgets to come up with the air cushion technology that launched the Nike Air Max brand in the 1980s, or the ridged outer-skin football boots of the Adidas Predator that lifted Adidas from the financial doldrums in the 1990s.
As Marc Makowski, SVP of creative direction and innovation at Adidas, tells The Long Game: “The idea of only the best for the athlete is something that defines who we are as a brand.”
Having held roles in product, brand and innovation over the years at Adidas, Makowski believes that the most important innovations in footwear since the millennium have been driven by the latest wave of lightweight materials, shoe foams and carbon fibre plates.
For the future, however, he sees two standout areas of innovation opportunity: customisation and wearable tech.
Nike and Adidas have battled it out on customisation since the millennium with neither making inroads where it counts as an athlete performance product.
In 1999, Nike began offering customised Air Force One shoes with the launch of NikeID – now repositioned as a service instead of as a product.
Adidas launched its own rival bespoke service with customised features called ‘mi adidas’ in 2000, but terminated the project in 2019, arguing that the “future of customisation lies in co-creation”. This means interacting with consumers, like social media influencers, to create new products.
Makowski himself was behind a now-defunct customisation project called Adidas Glitch: “We built football boots with an inner boot that you could combine with an outer skin, literally within seconds.”
The two parts offered multiple bespoke colour and design variations via an app and by invitation only, but was also ditched at the end of 2019. Undaunted, Makowski believes the next wave of performance-led customisations will endure.
“We’re going to enter an age across sports where people will look to customisation more from a performance perspective, including people who have maybe not been active beforehand and who may require new solutions.”
He points to a recent Adidas innovation where the brand has created custom-fit athletic shoes using 3D scanning technology which “both challenges the convention of shoemaking in its traditional form, and addresses customisation by using different materials and performance propositions suited to the athlete.”
He continued: “You can go down to the level of having a foot scan and building a boot towards that particular foot scan. It will unlock a completely new approach.”
The challengers
In this respect, Adidas will also be keeping an eye on Swiss-based brand On, one of several brands challenging the old guard of athletic footwear.
On has developed ‘spray-on uppers’ technology, a process capable of making seamless and lace-free shoes in minutes thanks to automated robotic production. These, the company suggests, could eventually be made as a bespoke item for each customer.
Coming from a marketing standpoint, former M&C Saatchi chief executive Steve Martin goes further than Makowski to say that personalisation – another term for customisation – is “the biggest Trojan horse in the whole game,” with the “beauty” being that it covers both performance and design.
“That you can personalise products to your feet or to your body or to your particular need is going to become more and more prevalent,” says Martin, a founding partner of MSQ Sport + Entertainment. “You can do it now with colourways, but we’re going to see more performance and design options that will become cheaper over time. It’s expensive now.”
He continues: “You’re almost curating your own product, and the sports brands can open source that to their audience. I can see the personalisation of your own products under specific brands happening over time, and that’s innovation to a totally new level – bespoke innovation, if you like.”
Wearables
Wearable technology is the other area where today’s offering is expected to become more deeply integrated into sports apparel and footwear.
Location-tracking and biometric wrist devices are already commonplace, as are GPS tracking blocks on the back of rugby shirts and radio frequency identification (RFID) cards embedded in NFL player uniforms to generate performance data.
Embedding these materials in other sports apparel without impacting performance is the key challenge, according to Makowski.
“From an innovation perspective you can get carried away with applications from other sports, but these may have completely different requirements,” he said. “Some sports, for example, will require lightweight [material] and flexibility, whilst in other instances, you can work with heavier things that are much more rigid.
“That’s definitely one of the key things that we’re looking at. How we create the right application for something like smart tech is absolutely crucial and relevant.”
Adidas is currently getting around the problem of wearable tech on football’s lightweight shirts by trialling the sale of football boots in both Benelux and France that contain a device that reveals performance metrics such as distance covered, running speed, ball striking speed and how many ball contacts the player has achieved.
Marketers also see a future revenue opportunity in the current generation of high school sports stars in the US – who have gotten used to wearable tech – opening up the market for greater innovation once they become adults.
Phil de Picciotto, president and founder of the Octagon agency told The Long Game: “More and more, we’re seeing it [wearable technology] as part of the kit, whether it’s the arm wing sleeves or the undergarments where every athlete can now be tracked with an instant heat map of where he or she has been on a pitch.”
“We’re seeing a dramatic increase in prevalence in youth sports but that also carries through all the way up and down […] you’re getting buy-in from a generation who are already technologically aware, so it’s a very good opportunity for companies to test that innovation and eventually refine it to the point where all the top athletes are wearing some kind of tracking devices.”
He continued: “This can have an immediate effect on an athletes’ performance, and secondarily, which is probably more important to the ecosystem of sport, there is the impact [of data] on injury prevention and injury recovery.”
Badging the kit
The biggest piece of the puzzle yet to be solved by the sports industry is: who will be the innovators, and who will badge the kit?
Martin says the innovation battle between Nike and Adidas that propelled sports tech into the mainstream is now a much wider battle, as new entrants steal market share.
When it comes to innovation, Martin says, “you’re now talking about 10 different brands rather than one or two.”
“What’s happened in the last three or four years is probably the most interesting move in the sports product innovation area […] the competitive set has tripled,” Martin added.
“It’s not just Adidas versus Nike, as well as Puma. Nike is not at the top of the tree anymore in terms of that perception. In fact, I think their share price reflects on them being very bland and their products have become quite samey. Whereas you look at the new entrants to the market, like On and Hoka, and they’re absolutely eating up their market share. They’re running very, very hard at innovation.”
The ideas coming out of the sports labs from On and the California-based Hoka are “quite incredible” he said.
“On launched a Cloudboom Strike shoe which is almost like running on air, like bouncing. They’re extraordinary and, by the way, these shoes cost £200-plus so the market is shifting so much.”
As for apparel, he said: “What you’re finding is that product is coming from the gym, lifestyle, yoga and fitness areas, so it’s all much better fit, much better fabrics and higher performance. We’re starting to see the likes of Lululemon create a bit of a dent, eating into market share, going from female yoga to a much broader men’s product based purely on fit and style and performance. And again, you’re talking about 10 different brands now rather than one or two.”
Octagon’s de Picciotto agrees that technology is a “great equaliser” in allowing new entrants into the market but expects some of these to get swallowed by the bigger brands who are under threat.
“Somebody who has a very good idea and comes from a particular combination of backgrounds can innovate just as well in a small environment as in a big environment […] and some of the bigger companies got to be big precisely because of that ability.
“I think you will see that no company is going to own all the innovations; they’re going to be spread far and wide. Many of them may be commercialised independently but many of them, just like in the broader business world, may be acquired by the bigger companies, just like in all the other tech spaces where the bigger brands, in order to continue to propel their growth, have acquired the small companies as they’re developing.”
As the newcomers eat into their market share on athlete apparel, Nike and Adidas are leaning even harder into their back catalogue of culture-defining fashion.
“Nike has obviously stolen the show in terms of the scale of things when they’ve gone into the broader lifestyle area. Adidas are playing there as well, but that’s not about innovation, that’s about nostalgia,” Martin concluded.
“What they’re doing is going into their archives and bringing out old products from the 60s, 70s and 80s and even into the 90s that their target audience hasn’t experienced before. The Adidas Samba, for example, is the biggest selling shoe in the world at the moment. It’s positioned as a lifestyle shoe, that’s not about innovation.”
Five years from now, we may see athletes choosing from a pick-and-mix selection of customised wearables, with the legacy sports brands struggling to put innovation genies back in their bottles. It’s a battle that may only be won when, as history shows, a star-driven brand helps one rise above the rest.
