A 30-minute drive from Nuremberg - the Bavarian city known as much for its medieval castle as its war trials - is a different type of building. In the small town of Herzogenaurach, the adidas Future Lab employs close to 1,700 people. Inside, it develops new products that take the heritage of an iconic German brand and re-imagine it for the future. It's an airy, seven-storey building that's intersected by a 30-metre-high atrium. The office space - called Laces, inspired by the concrete supports that cross overhead - is the equivalent of eight football pitches.
The grey, unadorned basement of the secretive Future Lab has a range of equipment designed to test products in a wide variety of conditions. A climate chamber simulates temperatures from -30°C to more than 50°C - humidity and wind speed can be adjusted to test various scenarios. Inside the room-sized chamber, a product tester is about to start a 45-minute session on a treadmill.
She'll be running in conditions designed to simulate a pleasant spring day, while engineers monitor her vital functions in real time to measure how the fabric in her clothing is performing.
Next to the climate chamber is a 22-metre-long stretch of artificial turf. At one end is what adidas describes as the best football player at the facility: a flywheel with an artificial foot at the end, known as Roboleg. Its shots travel at 160kph - 40kph more than the average speed of travel of a ball from a professional player. Not only is Roboleg more powerful than a human, it can reproduce each of its shots exactly. Sixteen cameras in the ceiling of the lab record the trajectory of every ball, taking 3,000 pictures per second, analysing its flight using Hawk-Eye - the tracking technology used at Wimbledon for line calls and in the Premier League for goal-line decisions - which offers real-time data.
The lab measures everything. For instance, the stresses exerted on the upper surface of a boot have been determined by collecting data on how the foot moves inside a shoe: at a normal walking pace, a foot will move up to one centimetre from side to side. At the same time, a person's toes move upward by up to six millimetres. Knowing that enables the team to establish at what points a boot requires stability and where flexibility is more important. This data is extrapolated so the designers can understand the forces and influences that affect joints and the musculoskeletal system.
Adidas has long considered itself to be an innovator. In 1954, the West German football team won the World Cup, beating heavily favoured Hungary in the final during a torrential downpour. The unlikely victory was partly explained by the West Germans playing with screw-in studs - the lengths of which could be changed - that offered them an advantage on a soggy pitch. The kit man that day was Adolf Dassler, the founder of adidas.
In 2016, the company introduced something else new: the laceless boot, which executives say the company spent three-and-a half years developing (usually new products take two years).
"The starting point was the sock - the idea was to get a genuine feel for the ball, as if playing barefoot," says Marco Müller, a senior product manager at the Future Lab. The wiry Müller carries a large sports bag containing various laceless models in different stages of development. The product team's most significant challenge was the sole: initially a regular version was attached to a sock, which offered the player a strong feel for the ball, but not enough support. It was decided that a material was needed that could be stretched, but also offered a high degree of stability - particularly at the points where the laces should be.
To this end, the Future Lab developed a material it calls Primeknit - a yarn that's digitally printed in a single unit. Traditionally, boots are made from pieces of leather that are stitched together; the new technique means that a boot fits an individual's foot while remaining rigid at specific points - like a hardened piece of leather - by means of fusing the yarn. "Boots used to consist of a base material over which further layers were packed; now we are working with only a single layer," Müller says.
Holger Kraetschmer, head of Football Future at adidas, who was once part of the German under-15 team, sees the evolution of the boot as part of a bigger picture. He's interested in how urbanisation is altering football, with street games becoming a focus for new product development. "We need to understand what is relevant for the consumer," he says. "It's not always about making a shoe five per cent better here and there. Rather it comes down to the question: how do we trigger emotional reactions?"
"The Copa Mundial is the best football shoe ever, for me - if you ask someone to draw a football boot, it would look like that," says Sam Handy, the vice president of design at adidas Football, citing the black, leather boot that debuted in 1979. Worn by players from Diego Maradona to Eric Cantona, the Mundial is the best-selling boot in the world, and is still available commercially. Handy is convinced that one of the key challenges of designing new boots is to grasp the emotional attachment consumers have to products like the Mundial. To this end, Handy spends time on Instagram looking at how amateur players customise their footwear.
Football has changed significantly since 1979 - players are faster and more athletic, and the game is much more complex. The challenge for the Future Lab will be to use science and technology to research and design new, meaningful products, while ensuring it keeps half an eye on the innovation of the past.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
