Nike Laboratories Solve the Problem of the Sweaty English Football Player

As we’ve seen in everything from the wearable tech craze to the planned future “bionic Olympics,” technology is playing an increasingly large role in sports gear. So when an invite landed in my inbox from sports giant Nike for an event on World Cup tech, I thought I’d check it out and see what England's sponsor had woven up their sleeves.

The event was pitched to me as an informal evening hosted by the Global Creative Director of Nike Football, Martin Lotti, to discuss the latest innovations leading up to the World Cup in Brazil later this year. I was curious to find out more about the use of technology in a game that on the surface uses very little gear—players running and kicking a ball—and what that might mean for the future of the beautiful game. And I wanted to find out more about those weird sock-included knitted football boots.

However, I’ll admit that I’m not really a follower of football. I'll get into the World Cup as much as the next English person (i.e. quite a lot), but I’ve never donned a football jersey—or indeed any kind of sports jersey—in my life. As such, I hadn’t clocked that the invite coincided with what must be pretty much the four-year highlight in the British sportswear calendar: the unveiling of the England team’s World Cup kit.

So that’s what I actually ended up at. Far from an informal chat, it was a decidedly flashy PR affair held in a posh dining room at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, with the first shirts on show against a backdrop of huge portraits of footballers including what looked like a veritable shrine to Wayne Rooney, and decorations in the colours of the St George’s Cross. The majority of journalists present seemed to be sports writers, or specifically football writers. Needless to say I felt a little out of place—even though I realised halfway through that, with red hair and a white blouse, I’d inadvertently dressed to match the strip.

When the new shirts hit the news earlier that day, most people’s attention focused on one thing: the price tag. The shirt will cost £90 (close to $150), with an alternative version—different to the one actually worn by the athletes—at £60 ($100), and a kid’s one for £42 ($70). That’s drawn criticism from many quarters, with some Twitter users suggesting a cheaper option of just buying a white Nike shirt and sewing on a crest, to mimic the minimalist look of the home shirt (the away kit is similar, but red).

In light of the controversy, I was intrigued to find out what was so special about the latest kit. It was apparently partly inspired by the kit worn in Mexico in the 1970—how much could it really have changed? As a football writer said to me at one point in the evening, “At the end of the day, it’s just a shirt.”

So when I finally got chance to speak to Lotti, I asked him how important technology really was in football. “It’s critical,” he said. They’d been working on this shirt for four years, he explained, with a main goal being to create a material that felt nice but performed well in terms of thermal regulation. In his words, “How can you get the feel of the cotton but the benefit of the polyester?” That’s Nike’s much-hyped “Dri-FIT” technology, which Lotti said “draws up the moisture and pulls it out and brings it to the outside surface of the garment, where it evaporates more quickly.”

This, along with some laser-cut holes in the sides of the shirt, are the main innovative features the brand's pushing this year. Those ventilation holes, Lotti said, were developed using research from Nike Sport Research Lab. The lab has chambers that simulate different temperatures and humidities for testing the garments, and they were able to map where people sweat the most in order to inform the design. They also used a 3D laser body scanner to get a perfect fit for the athletes.

All in all, Lotti said, the kit was developing to keep up with the sport. “The game has evolved rather radically over the last four years. In fact, if we looked at the data, they are covering so much more distance and ground currently than they were four years ago,” he said. “So if the game is changing, the uniform has to change accordingly as well.”

In mind of the kind of high-tech gadgetry shown off at the likes of CES, I asked if he thought wearable tech might be incorporated in a future World Cup design. “Absolutely, I think it’s only a matter of time eventually,” he said. The problem was identifying data that was actually useful. “So for example we’ve developed a shoe that measures how high you jump. That’s maybe cool for the first ten times, but after the eleventh time you’re like, ok, do I really need to know?”

At Motherboard we’ve written about the concept of “technology doping” before— the idea that using high-tech gear could at some point be considered cheating. Unsurprisingly, Lotti didn’t share this view, arguing that “technology is there to elevate the athlete endeavour.” He did say, however, that he thought the players wearing his shirts in the World Cup would have an advantage. “I believe so. I think the key element here was minute one and minute 90, they will feel the same way,” he said. “We have definitely shown in our labs that when you keep the body cooler for longer, you will perform better, hence why thermoregulation was such a key element for us.”

Of course, they’re not the only ones aiming to improve performance; Adidas launched its lightweight “Adizero” range of boots and clothing with Leo Messi, and Puma boasts compression technology and athletic tape that will apparently give the Italian team “micro-massages” while they play.

Aside from performance, tech comes into play in the shirts in terms of sustainability, which led to the strangest fact of the evening: According to Lotti, each set of the new England kit is made up of 18 plastic drink bottles, which are recycled in the polyester yarn. “I’m very proud of the fact that we were able to divert four billion—not million, billion—water bottles from the landfill,” he said. “That equates to 2,800 football fields if you line them all up.”

They didn't have that in the 70s, at least. But for all the effort, will these high-tech tweaks really boost performance on the pitch? Ask me in a few months' time.