In 1996, adidas Power Soccer debuted on the PlayStation. Sponsored by the Three Stripes and positioned as a rogue alternative to the popular FIFA and Actua Soccer franchises, it was absolutely terrible, even by the standards of an era when (in hindsight) pretty much every video game looked awful.
Power Soccer’s most memorable feature was the 'Predator Shot', a special move tied to adidas’ latest release, the Predator Touch. After building up enough momentum, you could smash the shoot button and watch your grainy 2D player unleash a strike so violent that the ball caught fire, leaving a trail of orange sparks as it blasted the hapless goalkeeper off his feet and into the back of the net. An image of the silo then flashed across the screen, making sure the marketing message hadn't been lost.
The game might have been eminently forgettable (although, incredibly, it wasn’t even the worst sportswear-backed football title on the PS1 – that dubious honour goes to Nike’s , a quite literally unplayable abomination based off the ), but it perfectly captured a wider fascination with the Touch. Such nonsense seemed somehow justified the moment you got your hands on the real thing.
Anyone lucky enough to unwrap a pair will know the feeling. With their unique fold-over tongue, those menacing rubber fins – the embryonic stages of StrikeSkin – and never-before-seen Traxion blades, the Predator Touch wasn’t so much a football boot as a highly advanced toy for committing serious on-pitch damage.
It's not that their predecessors, the Original and Rapier, hadn't already caused a stir. But the Touch felt like a catalyst, transforming the Predator from ‘Okay, these are cool football boots’ into a transcendental cultural curio.
They possessed an otherworldly quality, as though they were capable of things that ordinary footwear simply wasn’t. Watching a curtain-haired David Beckham score a physics-defying halfway-line goal in them on Match of the Day only fed the illusion.
That’s visceral design at its most formidable: think the 1961 Jaguar E-type, the iMac G3 or the Perrier water bottle. Objects with such aesthetic heft that their functionality almost becomes secondary to the fantasy they inspire. With the Touch, those fins – more pronounced and angrier than the ones on previous editions – were a visual sledgehammer, more compelling than any promise of improved ball contact and swerve. Whether they worked at all (they did – but more on that later!) became an afterthought.
In the 30 years since, the Predator franchise has undergone countless reinventions, the silhouette undulating as technologies and design philosophies have come and gone. Yet the 1996 model retains a mystique that few of its siblings have ever matched. Following the previous Mania project, adidas have finally given the Predator Touch a second life, adhering stringently to the OG DNA with modern performance lurking below.
To mark its return, we caught up with Nick Roche, adidas' category director for Predator, to discuss the boot's enduring legacy, navigating nostalgia, and the art of gonzo experimentation.
After three decades, how is the Touch viewed not only within adidas Football, but the wider brand?
I think Predator as a whole has seen a pretty big resurgence since 2024, with a lot of football enthusiasts around my age yearning for this silo to come back.
Ever since then, we've picked a model each year that we want to focus on from the archive portion of our limited collection business, as we call it, to bring back a little bit of historical homage to the purists of the sport.
So there's a distinction between bringing something back for the purists and creating a boot for today's players?
If we were to release that boot and have it be an inline boot where loads of players are wearing it, the Max Dowmans and Martin Ødegaards of the world would be like, 'You can't do that. That's crazy.'
But there's a massive section of football enthusiasts and lovers at that intersection with sneakers, who've been asking for something like this.
We haven't brought it back ever. And when it happens, too, we can't create moments, as much as we try. Nobody can. To be tied in with Beckham against Wimbledon, that halfway-line shot, in not even his boots – in , which is quite hilarious, that's a cult-classic story – and so Predator Touch having such a fandom makes a lot of sense.
We don't want to just do limited releases and hype bringbacks over and over again, like in the sneaker industry, where it loses its impact.
The Touch arrived in the era of the Spice Girls, Britpop, Kate Moss and Cool Britannia, with David Beckham scoring his famous halfway-line goal against Wimbledon. Football was right at the heart of that ‘Cool Britannia’ explosion, and the Predator became one of its defining symbols. Looking back, how do you view its cultural legacy?
I'd pretty much repeat what you've just said. It's one of those things that has been frozen in time because we haven't remade it in 30 years. It's getting harder and harder to find a pair online or on eBay. You might come across one in the back of a mom-and-pop store somewhere.
People have been asking for this kind of moment. It's not dissimilar to a song or a movie from that era that people can look back on.
Most people, quite honestly, don't really know or care. But if you know, you really, really know. It's a key part of that football era for a lot of reasons.
It's no different from drawing an analogy to a really big handbag from that time, or a jacket. If it had never been rereleased until 30 years later, there would be a cult following for that, too. These things become amplifiers of those key moments in time.
There's a huge appetite for nostalgia in football right now. How do you tap into that without oversaturating the market or risking nostalgia fatigue?
It's becoming more and more of a coin flip, because we build stuff anywhere from eight months – that's our closest quick-strike crash project – up to three years in advance. The world changes dramatically. Even on these bringbacks, we were getting the first samples a year ago. There are things we can't control, including the cultural moments that make a boot iconic in the first place.
I'm using wired headphones, and I see young kids here in Bavaria wearing low-rise, loose pants, bigger Campus 00s. You see all these things coming back in this Y2K nostalgia cycle. People yearn for the past, even those who weren't alive then.
So this bringback appeals to two demographics: people who remember the original, and a younger generation discovering that football heritage for the first time. But nostalgia fatigue is real. We see it. We're trying to create, within Predator specifically, a boot that a Max Dowman wants to wear. At the same time, we want a boot that a dad wants to wear in the Sunday league.
Looking back at the original Predator campaigns, the storytelling felt very different to today’s elaborate rollouts. What was the thinking behind that approach, and how has adidas’ approach to advertising changed over the years?
This is a crazy tidbit: the designer of the Predator Mania still works at the company. He works in rugby now. And Jürgen [Rank], who works in apparel, was involved in the original Teamgeist design.
There are people here who were part of those moments. When we have conversations with them, they're like, 'We just wanted to do something through the design, or go-to-market or comms, that the consumer we wanted could identify with.'
Whereas now, you've got five or ten seconds to grab someone in an advert. You’ve got Jude [Bellingham] kicking a ball, and that’s the whole thing. It's not to knock it now, but we have to build product, go-to-market strategies, comms and adverts that the consumer is ready for.
The rubber fins came from Craig Johnston experimenting with a table tennis bat. Is that sort of unconventional experimentation still part of football boot development these days, or is it a lot more process-driven, on computers?
It is. There are still purists who want to get their hands dirty in the trenches. It’s a lost passion and kind of craft, I would say, because of the efficiency of digital creation and building digitally.
But we've got the Predator 26 out right now. A lot of that is a new-age approach to applying, in its simplest form, rubber elements onto a football boot to impact the swerve of a boot, right? You need to make that for today's game, for today's player, for today's consumer.
So yes, to answer your question simply, it is harder to try these things. We've also got a crazy archive here. There's an old Craig Johnston sample that had literal sharkskin on it. That's totally nuts, and would never fly in 2026.
And bringing a boot from 1996 back isn't quite as simple as dusting off the original designs.
I think the big challenge on this rerelease was that we had the original boot here. It was like 400 grams! It was an SG boot, with massive metal studs. That boot was not light. You go and buy an inline Predator now and it's 200 grams. About half the weight, you know?
The biggest thing was, how do we create this boot that's as close to that OG as possible, with the new bottom plate, so a purist isn't going to go, 'Ah yeah, but that's not really it, huh?' You can't drop the ball the first time you rerelease it. During development, it was about getting with people who really know their boots, those OGs who are the target consumer, and keeping an ear to the street about what they actually want. Trying to stay as true to that as possible while also delivering something that actually works – something you can move in.
How functional were the fins? How much did they work?
They were incredibly functional. But back then you were going up against a full-grain leather Copa Mundial, a World Cup or a PUMA King. They were kangaroo-leather football boots without anything stitched onto them. So it was an immediate ‘plus ten’ in terms of performance. And then everyone got better. We got better, and now we're trying to create more and more.
Is there a plan for pros to wear them?
We don't push players to wear these because they’re so radically different. I was scrolling through training pictures, looking at what some of the players were wearing, and was wearing the Precision bringbacks.
I don't know if he'll play in them. He probably won't. But there's a space where a lot of these players will go back and, in training, maybe on an easier training day, wear them – because they love that boot, they love that moment. That's their moment to have fun and try something, you know?
Jürgen Klopp got to debut the new Touch in his first training session as Germany manager. Did you get any word back about his reaction to them?
Oh, he loves it. A lot of coaches won't wear boots in training, but guys like Klopp and Mourinho do, even if they’re not moving around.
We've got a partnership with Jürgen, and it was like, 'Yeah, what do you think? Would you wear these?' 'Hell yeah. That's sick.' Love it. It's like boot-spotting a trainer at a German national team training.
One other fantastic detail about the boot is the 'Made in Germany' stitching. That label was originally intended as a warning to the British about supposedly inferior German products, but German manufacturers turned it into a mark of real quality. It’s both a sick callback and a beautiful aesthetic choice, to see it front and centre.
We make all of our bringbacks in Scheinfeld. We have less volume on those, and because of that lower volume we can focus on a really crafted feel. A lot of those boots, including the Precisions and Touches, were made in Scheinfeld back in the day, so it feels authentic to make them there again.
Again, it's a 360 story, right? We're trying to get back to the player who was there, recreate that moment, and wherever possible, even return to where the boots were originally made.
The history is on your doorstep.
Some of these people at Scheinfeld, we get emails celebrating 55 years with the company. Some of them, or their parents, were on the line when the originals were made. It's nuts to think about.
It's the same factory – the only one making Copa Mundials right now. They're making the Copa Mundial, then a Precision bringback or a Predator Touch bringback. We've done all these boots, including Manias this year. It adds to that crafted feel, recreating what those teams were doing back then. It's a no-brainer.
You touched on the soleplate as well. Was that the most challenging aspect, adding modern technology without losing the spirit of the shoe?
It is difficult. We hold on to tooling – the steel moulds used to create the bottom unit – for five, maybe seven years if we're using it. And then we have to decide whether to keep it on the shelf, literally, or destroy it.
If it's 30 years old, there's no chance we still have the original mould. So we have to create something new. When we do a bringback, we use the modern version more or less, as long as it works. It's iteration after iteration of what we call 'pull-over', where you take the upper and put it on the soleplate to see what needs adjusting. How does it look? Is it serving the look of the original boot or doing it a disservice?
It's difficult. Not impossible, because we got there in the end. But it's review after review after review.
What’s your favourite thing about the boot – the personal thing that you love about it?
I think, with this specific drop, there are two answers. One on the boot itself, and another about what it represents.
On the boot, it's how close to the original the upper is. That's a difficult, complex boot, and to be able to remake that on the first try is quite awesome.
And then beyond the boot, it's the reaction. Honestly, we talk about how it brings people back to a moment in time. People our age or older have these memories of certain players, and then suddenly remember the boots they were wearing. It transports people back to a previous time in their life, and the impact of that is super awesome.
In other news from Herzogenaurach, the adidas Springblade is on the comeback trail.