Football Shoe Technology Innovations
The game of football has had many innovations introduced into it over the years. One of the biggest has been in the technology that is used in the footwear of the players. The shoes a footballer wears have over the years become sleeker, lighter and give the player the ability to kick a ball better and with more speed. Over the years, we will continue to see so many more innovations in the shoes that footballer’s wear that they will stop resembling shoes and look like something all together different.
It seems the history of football shoes starts with one of the most controversial kings of England; the religion inventing, wife divorcing, head chopping Henry the VIII. Apparently, in 1525, the court dress maker produced a pair of football boots for the king that were made of leather and were much heavier than normal shoes. It isn't known whether Henry the VIII played football but if he had football boots made then he obviously liked to kick a ball around in his spare time. The modern variation of the football shoe was first seen in the 1800s when football was still played as a pastime and wasn't a formal sport yet. The factory workers and villagers would gather together and start a game. The shoes they wore were the same boots they wore to work; heavy leather boots with steel capped toes and they hammered makeshift spikes into the bottom of them to increase the grip of their work boots.
Slowly over the years, changes were slowly introduced into the humble football shoe and the one big significant change that happened was that companies started producing football shoes. As the decades moved on, changes in football shoes kept occurring until the moment Adidas introduced the greatest football shoe ever made.
The Adidas Predator was a unique innovation in shoe technology and changed the way players saw their shoes. These shoes are nothing like normal football boots. First of all the top of the line models that the world's best footballers wear are made from kangaroo leather. This special leather makes the shoes extremely flexible and gives them superb elastic properties. The shoes also have some very innovative spikes at the bottom of them, to give the players better grip and more flexibility. It seems all footballers care about is comfort and the ability to have the shoe move the way they want them to move. They do not care about durability, with the money they make them really do not have to care about that aspect of them.
There is more science to be found in the shoes footballers wear than in a school science lab. Scientific experts are employed to investigate exactly how people run and then mould the shoes around this fact, while making them extremely stable, very elastic and increasing the density factor in them as well. Materials like the exotic sounding kevlar will be used in the future because it is extremely strong, while being very flexible and light at the same time. This property of the material makes it an ideal candidate to be used in football shoes because footballers need their shoes to be able to bend and turn quickly, while being strong enough to handle a lot of pressure that kicking a ball or ending up in a tackle exerts on the shoes. Kevlar is interesting because it is also used in protective gear used by armed forces and police personnel.
Football shoes will continue to change and innovate as the years go by. With Adidas, Nike, Puma and other companies continuing to strive ahead with shoe technology, we will see many more unique shoes being produced in the very near future. New shoe technology will allow footballers to curve the ball better and score more goals, which will be great for the spectators. With advances in the game of football, football shoe technology will move on as well, until a time will come when football shoe technology will become so advanced, that regulations against shoes giving players advantages will have to be set in place by the governing bodies.
Until then though we can all be excited by the latest football shoes that our favourite players wear and attribute the goals they score to their shoes aiding their skills.
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