I flew to Germany to see the future of football boots and it was… foamy

‘Wait a minute, we can take pictures of this?’

FourFourTwo are at Puma’s Headquarters in Herzogenaurach holding a prototype football boot that Marty McFly might wear if he played Sunday League. Eye-catching as they are, clearly this boot is still in prototype state. You’ll need a flux capacitor to see the finished version.

One hour earlier we had signed a 15-page non-disclosure agreement before being given 20 minutes to browse a space the size of a car showroom which contained all of Puma’s products for the 2025-26 season.

You can appreciate we’re now mildly confused that Romain Girard, Head of Innovation at Puma, is actively encouraging us to photograph and video a product that is at least three-seasons away from being mass manufactured. “We want you to leverage this. This is how we work, this is who we are and this is where we are going.”

Romain speaks in a hushed, French, ASMR-like whisper, as if he has just discovered time travel. The night before, one of his colleagues described him as a “mad football boot scientist” so it’s fitting that before we can even shake his hand and sit down, Romain wants give us a physics demonstration in the corner of the room.

“I want to do a little test because I think my words are actually useless compared to this.” Carefully placing a small metal ball into a tube, FourFourTwo watch as it drops onto a piece of foam and bounces. “You see the light?” He says, gesturing to a small digital reader. “We have an energy return of 48 per cent”.

He performs the same test on another a different, bright orange piece of foam. This time the ball drops and bounces almost twice as high, ‘86 per cent’ flashes on the screen. “This is what we have been developing for the last three years. It's our latest recipe – the Nitro Elite Foam”. Commonly seen on Puma’s running shoes, Romain and his team are experimenting with the foam on football boots with a view to “turbocharging” their Ultra and Future boot franchises with this innovative material.

“What you need to understand is, today between the lab situation, the engineering capabilities we have now at Puma, we are looking at it [the foam] on a special microscope and engineering the cells inside to maximize the rebound.

“The Nitro Foam is between the sole plate and the studs to give a little separate spring on each stud, giving you the ability to adapt much more to the ground. It's engineered by science taken out of space. These are prototypes, these are part of our process. Now, the process is testing, validating, learning.

“We are very sure that those shoes will never see the light of the day like they are now. But that's why also we wanted to open that process with you because normally you never have access and you never see this.

“There is a lot of things that have been built and tried before we go to market. So you have a snapshot that Puma is fully dedicated to really building the best performance boots on the market.”

Though they refrain from saying it directly, FourFourTwo gets a sense that inside the walls of Puma’s global headquarters, there is a feeling they are the only brand truly pushing the boundaries of football boot technology. Showing us prototypes earmarked for the 2027/28 is a bold move designed to get attention, and it certainly has mine, and FourFourTwo’s resident boot expert and tester, Lolade Jinadu who is with me on the trip and starring wide-eyed at the boots he will later test outside. One of the first people to ever do so.

“Technology in football boots is at its best when it makes you feel like you are wearing something completely new,” explains Jinadu. “The carbon sitting on top of what felt like a thicker layer the foam made it feel almost as if the boots were propelling me forward as I was running. The only question mark in terms of something like this being released would be safety.

"The soleplate for the Ultra in particular didn’t feel the most stable in terms of balance and running in straight lines was fine but I would be curious to see what it would be like when trying to change direction quickly. If Puma are able to get this right though, it is something that could take the boot world by storm.”

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