I bet you can remember more than five different football boots in the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. But how many can you remember from the 2022 World Cup?

Whilst football boots have always had the function of keeping the players sunk into the grass with the metal studs, or blades and moulds as of more recent times, football boots have also served the function of expressing what kind of player you are. 

If you were coming up against a player in the middle of the park with some leather Adidas Copas, you know you might be getting kicked about a bit. Whereas if you saw your opponent in some bright pink Nike Mercurials, you know he might leave you for dead with his flair. 

Football boots have always been a talking point. They are not just there for their utility. 

Sir Alex Ferguson’s strict black boots only policy at Manchester United represented uniformity, it wasn’t a team of individuals and it stopped players becoming obsessed with appearance rather than focusing solely on the game. 

So when David Beckham rocked up to Carrington in his new white Adidas Predators, the Boss wasn’t happy. 

But as Nike and Adidas continued to push out various colour ways of their new football boots, Ferguson couldn’t quite keep the players on the leash he wanted to. He had to allow the likes of Wayne Rooney and Dimitar Berbatov to wear coloured boots because of their sponsorship deals. 

As all kinds of colours and designs were popping up on the pitch through the 2000s, different boots became associated with different traits of players.

It was in the 2010s then that boot customisation became a convention for most players, with their initials and shirt number inscribed minutely somewhere on the boot, in replication of the iconic ‘CR7’ that started in October 2010.

When the Nike Hypervenoms were then launched in 2013 by the rising star Neymar Jr, and Messi was releasing custom boots in his partnership with Adidas, it became almost a decision between which player you were going to ally with as you picked your boots in the store.

As we come in to an era in football now that is already becoming described as robotic because of the evolving play style, which sees teams focusing much more on possession rather than any individual trickery, it seems as though the boot culture has faced a similar deposition. 

There is no popular boot now. There isn’t a boot for the fast player, for the strong player, or the passer of the ball.

Is this a natural conclusion? There is only so many designs, so many colours that Nike and Adidas can chuck in their brainstorms in their respective headquarters. Have they just ran out of ideas?

Or have the priorities of results and profit usurped the idea of football being an art?