No more mud on Nike football boots? - ingenieur.de

There's little soccer players hate more: with a thick layer of mud under your shoes, it's difficult to walk and the cleats can no longer grip you. Nike now wants to put an end to this dilemma. A newly introduced football shoe has a special sole that has it all - or rather on it.

Anti-Clog Traction: Here the mud is outsmarted. The sole of the soccer shoe has a special coating so that dirt cannot stick.

Photo: Nike

A steel grate, faucet, brush and catch basin: even small local football teams usually have fixed fixtures that are designed to make it easier to clean shoes after the match. They are often sorely needed.

Because depending on the weather and the quality of the lawn, what gets stuck on the underside of the shoes is sometimes so thick that even the long cleats are no longer visible. There can no longer be any talk of stopping on the pitch. Sporting goods manufacturer Nike has now announced shoes that should let the annoying layer of mud fall off by itself.

Using water

Methods based on mechanical solutions or water-repellent mechanisms have been developed for a long time. But both were the wrong approach, says Dr. Jeremy Walker in retrospect. “At some point we stopped thinking about water-repellent surfaces.

Photo: Nike

Photo: Nike

Photo: Nike

Photo: Nike

Photo: Nike

Nike has introduced a soccer shoe with a primed sole, from which mud comes off again.

Photo: Nike

Job search for engineers

Instead, we wanted to use water to our advantage,” explains the materials researcher from the Nike team. The result is a layer of adaptive polymer on the sole of the shoe that becomes greasy when in contact with water. Mud shouldn't be able to last long like this.

Nike speaks of use at the European Football Championship in summer

Nike describes the development as "Anti-Clog Traction", i.e. as a kind of anti-clogging function. "One prerequisite for being able to develop such a hydrophilic solution at all was to understand the molecular structure of sludge in detail," says Walker.

According to Nike, the shoe has already been tested by players around the world with positive feedback. From mid-April it will be available in a limited number for the time being and could even be used at the forthcoming European Football Championship in France. Whether the latter will be the case remains to be seen.

Should the method developed by Nike actually work as well as promised, those players wearing the boots might not have an unfair sporting advantage. In the sport of swimming, the material battle for ever better high-tech suits was already severely curbed in 2010 through strict regulations.

This shoe laces itself: the Hyper Adapt 1.0. It is scheduled to hit the market for Christmas 2016. price unknown.

Source: Nike

Just recently, Nike introduced the Hyper Adapt model, a self-lacing sneaker as featured in the classic film Back to the Future 2.