2022's football boots of the future? New Balance are taking an all-sport approach

Have you ever been inside the depths of a football boot manufacturer's HQ? Well, 90min has now, after a trip to The Track at New Balance, to check out the new Furon v7 and Tekela v4 boots.

As a relative newcomer in the football (or, in the local parlance, soccer, ahem) boot space, the Teleka and Furon silos might not be one of the most familiar products coming into the 2022 World Cup, even though some of the biggest names in the English-speaking world are going to be wearing them in Qatar next month.

Those names? Raheem Sterling, with his 'Route to Success' Furon v7s, Arsenal homegrown hero Bukayo Saka, and even the US Men's National Team's Timothy Weah. That's right, all of those in one group, and more in the overflow.

Speaking to senior creative design manager Luc Fusaro at The Track at New Balance, the three-year design process was laid...if not bare, then at least scantily clad.

"The plate design is one element of the Tekela," Fusaro said, "but if you take the boot overall, we talked about three things. Amplified traction, which comes with creating plate technology to prevent slips at aggressive leg angles. Amplified sensation, more on the upper, to work out what kind of package can we create for something a little softer and thinner for the player. Finally, a visual shift; how to we take the features that give the Tekela its identity and elevate that in a way that allow the new boot to stand out from its predecessors."

On the pitch at the incredibly American (yes, overblown, hard-rocking, astonishingly competent) Track at New Balance HQ in Boston, we lucky guests got a rare sight into what makes a New Balance boot. There's a hundred and one load-testing machines, a frankly terrifying number of cameras around penalty spots (which a certain writer sincerely hopes haven't been recorded), and then the pitches, where the new generation of Tekela and Furon boots will be put through their paces.

You want the quick answer? Yeah, they feel like really good football boots.

You want the more in-depth analysis? Well, let's start with the tight-knit, close-cut Tekela. For the record, it feels astonishingly good for direction changes, and you can take that as someone who tested it out as a (bad) forward and a goalkeeper.

New Balance's Tekela v4 and Furon v7 boots are available to buy now in the US and the UK

As Fusaro explains, the innovation started the best part of 15 years ago, when a study was conducted on the 'slip incidences' at the 2006 World Cup. As it goes, there were 845 'slipping events' in 63 games. The trick? Borrow some tech from the lacrosse family to add some 'outer' studs around the bottom plate of the boot.

"Out of those slip instances," Fusaro explains, "80% were happening at aggressive leg angles, more than just cutting movements. We kind of already had a solution at New Balance, because sometime that's more prevalent in lacrosse in the US, so they had the model with the rim stud placed 360º around the plate.

"We had the technology and we knew it worked, but then we had to translate it to football. We did some consumer research and asked potential consumers if they thought it would work, and if they understood it. The insight we got was that people didn't want a 360º rim stud placement, but more around the front.

"The other insight was to not make the boot visually too bulky, but to make the boot look lighter. All the rim studs are angled 30º out, so when you're really engaging at the angles which engage those studs, you don't normally catch a lot of traction."

When it comes to the most visually simple of New Balance's offerings though, don't assume no thought has gone in beyond the lacrosse – ahem – lacrossover.

"On the upper, it's a laceless boot. All of our work has been on the hyperknit upper, the collar area, which meant a lot of work on ease of entry. The other thing was going back to the research lab, looking at high speed video and seeing where the ball contact was being made, higher on one side than the other.

"The second point was around the instep. That's a little more elastic than the rest of the upper, a bit off-centred so it doesn't go across the peroneal nerve, which means you have less pressure on the top of the foot. You rely on the elasticity of the upper to give a custom fit for your foot type, and we leave the top of the boot fairly free of texture."

After some writers of medically concerning fitness put the Tekelas through their paces, without slipping a single time despite a near Wacky Racers-level of sporting competence, it was time for the new range of Furons. After, at least, a chat with New Balance's creative manager for football footwear Adam Lyon.

Having played around with the design team, a massive science lab which would have filled the dreams of nine out of any ten supervillains left on the each, and a humbling 'speed of strike' measuring device, The Track's secrets were about to be revealed. How Sterling makes his strikes so effective. How Bukayo Saka dribbles past defenders around Europe.

Except, not that. Let's not play around, the Furons provide one of the cleanest struck balls on the market. But the boot performance is...well, it'd be a lie to call it 'only half the story'. Product is King, of course. However, making something to put on your foot is only the first section of a three-year process.

"What we've tried to do in the last 2-3 years with New Balance," explains Lyon, "given that we're a challenger in an established marketplace, is ensure that we get the basics right. We build a world-class product that's validated on the feet of elite level players. We want to be gimmick-free, authentic, credible product technology."

More specifically, designer Fusaro explains, "The question was, what construction could we create to bring the ball cleanly to the foot. The next was substractive and lightweight. How could we engineer the material to be as lightweight as possible? [The New Balance Furon v7s are listed at 180g per boot].

"We wanted to extend a really clean strike zone. The offset lacing, plus a floating canopy, is something the athletes like Raheem Sterling really enjoy, they really appreciated that we remove all the distractions from the strike zone.

"We engineered the hyperknit upper using a lot of yarn properties and patterns which we learned from our other categories [in New Balance] like running. In the forefoot you have what we call the semi-hole knitting technology, and that's taken from a high-speed performance running shoe."

Let's not screw around. The new range of New Balance Furon v7s is one of the best boots in the world to lace up. It would've made this feature much more interesting if they were just fine, but no. The ball pings off the canopy – not the laces, off-set to the outside as they are – better than pretty much any pair of boots in the world.

The Tekelas are a pair of boots which will make a good player better, enhance the touch, stop an embarrassing (and accidental) splits manoeuvre down at Powerleague. That's not the Furons. A pretty poor footballer went to The Track to check them out, and that same player was belting shots into the far top corner five minutes later.

You already know which of these shoes you want to wear. You knew as soon as you heard about the Tekelas' increased grip, or the Furons' off-set laces. There's never been a one-size-fits-all pair of shoes, so why should football boots be any different?