Could soccer take over for basketball at the center of sneakers and streetwear?
The 2026 World Cup might prove the marker. As evidence, consider the push in crossover product that exceeds what’s ever been done before for the sport’s premier tournament.
Thus far, Adidas has enlisted Bape and Willy Chavarria in collaborations tied to the American, Japanese and Mexican National Teams, and Puma tapped Selehe Bembury to design the goalkeeper kits and travel apparel for all 11 of the federations it sponsors at the World Cup.
Most prolific has been Nike, which this week unveiled its X2 collection consisting seven different collaborators each tied to a different nation and community organization. The product in each capsule touches pre-match attire for each time, lifestyle apparel and a new series dubbed Cryoshot in which historic Nike football boots see their studs encased in a transparent TPU shell to preserve their original appearance while allowing for wear away from grass.
“We just wanted to make a rounded approach,” Hami Delimi, global senior brand director of Nike Energy, told Footwear News. “It’s not the usual Energy way of doing things, but football is the most popular sport across the globe. The fact that it was here in North America identified it as a big moment for us, but we didn’t just do it for that reason.”
U.S. players in the Virgil Abloh Archives x Nike polo shirt.
Dakota Graf
Delimi first began working on the project three years ago by linking with Drake’s brand Nocta for a collection with the Canadian National Team. Him and team quickly questioned why it should just be limited to Canada and began compiling a roster that would be finalized with Palace for England, Jacquemus for France, Patta for the Netherlands, Slawn for Nigeria (the lone nation not at the World Cup), PeaceMinusOne for South Korea and Virgil Abloh Archives for the United States.
Each collaborator was instructed to make a pre-match top and Anthem Jacket, as well as Cryoshot sneaker, but outside of those three products was given free reign on both what to make and how to approach it. Jacquemus went clean and vintage for its slate — which also adds a goalkeeper shirt, soccer shorts and tracksuit — while Virgil Abloh Archives employed the logo- and text-heavy look its late founder was known for for an assortment that added a rugby shirt, staff jacket, polo shirt, backpack and Dri-Fit hat.
Patta’s lineup is the most restrained in size, only adding a TechFleece set and socks to the three requisite products, but also one of the loudest for the baroque print on its shirt and jacket. A close examination reveals easter eggs for both the Netherlands and Suriname, as Patta’s two co-founders are descendants from the African nation, including a traditional Ala Kondre necklace, baobab tree, the Hand of Fatima, Ditch Lion and shields for the villages where players on the Dutch National Team grew up.
“We really wanted to keep it close to oursleves and show what the company stands for, like the background of the founders and the people who work there,” said Patta creative director Vincent Van De Waal. “And then while searching we found quite a few similarities in the Dutch National Squad, which is the coming together of many cultures and backgrounds.”
Patta’s Nike X2 collection.
Counter-balancing the intricate print is the TechFleece set, which appears in black with Dutch orange zipper pulls and lion embroidery that co-founder Guillaume Schmidt said is more detailed than anything Nike has ever done on the material.
“I don’t actually see a difference between performance and sport,” Schmidt said. “People mix it up these days, so it’s more like we just made five pieces, and people will wear them as lifestyle and performance.”
All seven collaborators then chose a different soccer cleat from Nike’s archives, including Ronaldo Nazario’s Mercurial R9 (Patta), Nike’s first product for the sport in the Striker 1979 (Slawn) and the Air Speed M (Palace), the first Swoosh boot to break through in England’s top flight.
This first wave of shoes marks the first wave for the Cryoshot series, which will be followed up with in-line releases later in the year. It’s was passion project of Nike Energy expert designer Enrico Carbonere, who came up with the idea while researching Nike’s archive of football footwear four years ago. Rather than simply taking the historic uppers and adding new sole units without studs, he was dogged in figuring out a way to preserve those elements from the pitch while still allowing them to be worn on the streets.
“In order to get the purest expression, we had to do something that was representing 100 percent of the original design of the shoes, including the outsoles,” Carbonere said. “Including the colors, the materials, the lines, everything is a 360-degree masterpiece that had to be preserved in its entirety.”
Enrico Carbonere with a Nike Cryoshot sneaker.
Different solutions were played with in rubber and TPU before an optimal formula of the latter material was found that was lightweight and flexible enough without getting any cloudiness. Nike filed a patent for the technology, and Carbonere can envision it being used later for other shoes not suited for daily wear, such as track spikes or even ice skates.
For those paying attention, Nike has been teasing both Cryoshot and some of the collaborations over the past year. Schmidt and Corteiz founder Clint Ogbenna were photographed with the Patta and inline versions off the Cryoshot R9 at the 2025 Champion’s League Final, and the Virgil Abloh Archives take on Mia Hamm’s Zoom M9 was shown in the fall at the Paris “Virgil Abloh: The Codes” exhibition. In April, Dutch captain Virgil van Dijk then appeared on the cover of Fantastic Man in the Patta shirt.
Delimi said the Champions League Final was the perfect moment from a sporting perspective, and there’s something to be said for planting a flag well ahead of a World Cup bringing the best out of its competitors. But the timing just so happened to coincide with a particularly funny soccer trend called “boots only summer” in which people stubbornly wore actual cleats in their daily life.
If anything, Carbonere was scared consumers would think Nike was responding to a trend when in fact it was already years into the process required to make Cryoshot a possibility.
Call that the part of the risk of anticipating the market so well, but now that they’ve arrived X2 and Cryoshot are taking the sport to an even deeper level fashion resonance.
