Its hard to ignore the fact that over the last few years soccer cleats have certainly changed a great deal. Sensible black and white has been replaced with eye poppingly bright colors with names like “slime” “electricity” “warmth” and “chill”. Otherwise rather macho soccer stars are now unafraid to take to the pitch in pink soccer cleats and the shoes themselves are made of the kind of materials that sound like they would be more at home on Star Trek than they would on a soccer pitch.
Now though adidas, who make a great percentage of the soccer cleats worn by both professional and amateur soccer players all over the world, have taken another step. If you but a soccer cleat from their adidas f50 line you will find that it is compatible with something called miCoach, a tiny device that once inserted into the sole of the adidas f50 can measure all kinds of stats about your on field performance and then deliver them right to your iPhone.
Used by the likes of Barcelona and Argentina’s Lionel Messi (who is sponsored by adidas) the miCoach can measure your speed, heart rate, time on the pitch and a number of other functions. The idea is that you then keep track of all of these using the free iPhone app (although there is also a PC/Mac version as well) and use the information to train harder and better.
Soccer technology like this is not particularly cheap – the adidas F50 miCoach bundles runs between $150 and $200 depending upon which adidas F50 shoe you choose. However that is a lot cheaper than hiring a personal trainer, one of the reasons that the adidas F50 and miCoach combination is selling very well.