Adidas’s first female football boot is here to enhance performance

I’ve never found shoes like sneakers to be very comfortable.

When they fit well around the back, the width of my toes are uncomfortably compressed. But if I size up to accomodate the toes, the rest of the shoe is far too loose.

I thought this was simply a “me” problem. I never realised it was a deeper, feminist issue.

“The foot shape of a man and foot shape of a woman is different,” said Dr Kat Okholm Kryger during a talk on women’s football with Adidas. Dr Okholm Kryger is not just any medical specialist: she has a PhD in football boots. Or “mens football boots,” she clarified, explaining that this was all that was available at the time.

I was genuinely surprised as I sat through the talk to discover that female feet are actually vastly different than male feet.

“The foot is a complex shape. It’s not a square or a circle, right? We [females] have differences in the length of the bones, differences in the width of the forefoot relative to the length, higher arches, different heel shapes,” said Dr Okholm Kryger.

Of course, historically, sneakers, running shoes, football boots and most athletic shoes had been designed for the male foot. When it came to adapting these shoes for women, the solution was to just “pink it and shrink it”.

For one of her research papers, Dr Okholm Kryger visited 16 of the top women’s football clubs around Europe. Speaking to the players, she asked them if they had pain and discomfort on a daily basis when wearing their football boots – 82 per cent of them said yes, they experience pain in their boots, every single day.

When this paper was published in 2022, it was in top one per cent of most read scientific papers across all scientific disciplines. To this day, it remains in the top five per cent most read. It shone a bright light on undervalued and overlooked anatomical differences between males and females; and the ways these continue to affect sports performance, safety and longevity.

It seems as though a female sports star tears their ACL every other week. One of most recent is none other than Adidas ambassador Mary Fowler. In fact, female athletes are up to eight times more likely to suffer ACL tears compared to their male counterparts. And while this particular issue is deeply complex and can not be tied to one single factor, it is evidence of that placing females into environments engineered around male biology and preferential male bias can have widespread consequences.

From these flickering flames of change, the F50 Sparkfusion was born. It’s Adidas’s first ever football boot designed specifically for female anatomy. And it’s a design that goes farther than other pieces of sports equipment ever have to bridge the gap.

Adidas’s journey to create a football boot for females began more than three years ago. Adidas Global Category Director Mahsa Aryan recounted a conversation she had with football superstar Alessia Russo about three or four years prior. Aryan asked Russo if she thought she needed or wanted a pair of female-specific football boots. But Russo said she didn’t have the answer to that question. Instead, she threw it back, asking “aren’t you supposed to tell me what I need?” It was the cauterising moment that turned research into action.

Designing the F50 Sparkfusion was a process that involved a decade’s worth of foot anatomy data, extensive analysis and detailed feedback from world-class teams like Arsenal Women, Real Madrid Femenino, OL Lyonnes.

“What we really looked into is analysing the match game data, and really looking at, how does she move differently across the pitch versus him,” said Franziska Eaton, Senior Product Manager at Adidas.

“Her game has become much faster, and she’s doing a lot of these agile manoeuvres. It’s all about quickly changing directions, much more so than we would see in the men’s game,” said Eaton.

The result of this analysis? A football boot with a fit and form that can truly enhance performance at the elite level. There’s more room in the toes, a narrower fit in the heel, higher arches, and more volume in the midfoot for increased comfort and a locked down fit. A new soleplate has been optimised to facilitate quicker turns and a better push-off. The studs have been adjusted for ease of rotation, with a semi-conical shape and a configuration based on the pressure point data of the female body. Interestingly, an additional fourth stud was added to the outer side of the boot. This allows for evenly distributed pressure, and for natural grass to artificial grass compatibility.

“We’ve done the tests with the best of the best. They performed agility drills, one the unisex model and then this model. And what we saw is they were faster in those quick changes of direction when they wore this,” said Eaton. “This is so characteristic of her game, and therefore a massive performance benefit for her.”

It’s undeniable that the womens game has transformed over the last five years especially. Empty stands have turned into packed stadiums and strings of sold out games. Womens sport is not just receiving the recognition it deserves, but it’s becoming faster and more competitive. It can be the smallest, and yet most important changes that yield that edge at the elite level. And this is the magic formula, the X-factor that makes it so thrilling to watch the power of human greatness.

“You see the viewerships rising, constant attendance records breaking,” said Eaton. “For us, what’s beautiful is that translates into grassroot participation. After last the Euros, 50,000 more girls in the UK signed up for football after what the Lionesses achieved. It draws more and more girls into the sport.”

Adidas’s F50 Sparkfusion football boot is available in a hero midcut model, as well as a lowcut laced and laceless model. The F50 SPARKFUSION adult range can be purchased from 17 June 2025 across four tiers – starting from the entry level model all the way to the elite model.

*Editor’s note: in the context of this article, we use “female” to denote people with anatomically female sex characteristics. We use “women” to denote gender and to refer to people who identify as women. There may be exceptions when language is taken from a direct quote.