This month, New York City has given us a masterclass in how to treat sport the way it deserves to be treated. Not as a luxury. Not as a product. As a thing that belongs to everyone who loves it.

I’ve been watching what Mayor Zohran Mamdani has put together around the 2026 World Cup and the Knicks’ NBA Finals run, and I keep coming back to a simple question: when was the last time you saw this level of intentionality directed at regular people, not just the ones who can afford a ticket?

We covered the brands on the pitch and the footwear stories worth following in yesterday’s issue, A Sneakerhead’s Guide to Watching the World Cup. This is a different kind of piece. This one is about the fans. The ones who never make it into the stadium but never stop showing up anyway.

Think about who that actually is. The kid who grew up playing stickball in the street because that’s what was available. The families running pickup games in side alleys and neighborhood parks until the lights cut out. The millions of people who will never go pro but are diehard supporters, who pass that devotion on to their kids, who give those kids something to belong to before the kids even understand why it matters. That is who sport is actually for. That has always been who sport is for.

The World Cup is here. It is happening across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It is historic in scale and, by most accounts, historic in expense. Tickets at MetLife Stadium are out of reach for most New Yorkers. Most World Cup kits run well over $100. The whole enterprise can feel exclusionary in a way that sits awkward against the idea of “the people’s game.”

And then you see what NYC is doing.

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The 2026 World Cup started yesterday in Mexico City, 48 nations competing across the United States, Canada, and Mexico for the next 40 days. For five billion viewers, the question is who lifts the trophy. For anyone who has spent serious time in sneaker culture, there’s a second tournament running underneath the one on the pitch, a brand battle that has been building for four years and lands right here, in our backyard, for the first time since 1994.

Every brand with any serious footwear ambition has been pointed at this moment. And several of them are doing things that have no precedent.

This is your guide to knowing what you’re looking at.

The Scale of It

Adidas, Nike, and Puma collectively dress 37 of the 48 competing nations, roughly 77% of the field. That concentration is the familiar story at every World Cup. What’s different in 2026 is the layer underneath it, because every one of those brands arrived at this tournament with a fundamentally different answer to the same question: what does it mean to win a World Cup off the pitch?

The answer Nike gave involves turning classic football boots into street sneakers using injection molding. The answer Jordan Brand gave involves putting the Jumpman on a national team kit for the first time in history. The answer adidas gave involves dressing Messi for what is almost certainly his last dance.

Those are more than football decisions. They’re also sneaker culture decisions. And they’re happening in front of the largest audience any brand will ever have.

Adidas: The Only Brand That Can Say World Cup

Adidas is the official tournament sponsor, which means they’re the only brand at this event permitted to directly reference the tournament in their marketing. That structural advantage is worth more than any endorsement deal. They’re also dressing 14 nations: Argentina, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Japan, Belgium, Colombia, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Curaçao, Qatar, Scotland, South Africa, and Sweden.

Their boot collection, “Road to Glory,” runs across three silos. The F50 Hyperfast is their speed story. The Predator 26, updated with NANOSTRIKE+ and POWERSPINE technology, is a genuine evolution of a franchise that has been doing football heritage storytelling more consistently than anyone else in the business. The Copa Pure rounds out the lineup.

Two kit stories are worth knowing before the ball drops.

Messi is wearing a boot called “El Último Tango” for what is widely expected to be his final World Cup. The design references the F50.6 TUNiT he wore at his first tournament in 2006, dressed in Argentina’s colors. Adidas has been sitting on that storytelling opportunity for four years, and they’ve built it correctly. When Messi plays this summer, you’re watching someone wearing a shoe that connects his beginning to his end on purpose.

Germany is wearing adidas for the last time at a World Cup. The federation moves to Nike in 2027, ending a partnership that goes back over 70 years. Their 2026 kit draws from the designs worn when Germany won in 1990 and 2014. If you follow kit design at all, that uniform is worth paying attention to every time Germany takes the pitch this summer.

Nike: Two Audiences, One Tournament

Nike dresses 12 nations: the United States, France, Brazil, England, the Netherlands, Canada, Croatia, South Korea, Norway, Turkey, Uruguay, and Australia. Their “Breakout” boot collection covers the Mercurial, Phantom, and Tiempo in bright pink, the dominant color story across the pitch this summer regardless of brand.

On the performance side, the Mercurial received its most significant structural update in years. The Vapor 17 and Superfly 11 are now fundamentally different boots for the first time since the Vapor 12 and Superfly 6 in 2018, with distinct uppers, technology packages, and soleplates. The Vapor 17 is stripped back, built around an AtomKnit upper and FlyLight soleplate optimized for agility and first-step quickness. The Superfly 11 carries Air Zoom and ZoomX foam, aimed at players who create separation in open space. Both Ronaldo and Mbappé are on the Superfly 11.

But the performance boots aren’t what Nike brought to this tournament that you haven’t seen before.

Nike built a project called X2, pairing seven national federations with seven fashion and streetwear collaborators: Palace for England, Patta for the Netherlands, NOCTA (Drake’s label) for Canada, Jacquemus for France, G-Dragon’s PEACEMINUSONE for South Korea, Slawn for Nigeria, and the Virgil Abloh Archive for the United States. Each collaboration includes apparel and a shoe from a line Nike is calling the Cryoshot.

The Cryoshot is worth understanding specifically, because what they did technically is not what you’d expect. Nike didn’t take football boots and swap out the outsole for a flat street unit. They took historic boots from their archive and used injection molding to encase the original stud cluster in a clear TPU outsole, preserving the geometry of the boot exactly as it was, studs visible through the sole, wearable on pavement. You are wearing the boot. The studs are just sealed inside something transparent underneath you.

Each of the seven drops pulls from a different chapter of Nike football history. The Patta collaboration uses the Mercurial R9, the boot Nike built for Ronaldo, the Brazilian one, in 1998, the first football boot ever constructed with a fully synthetic upper. Palace uses the Air Speed M. Jacquemus takes the Tiempo R10, Ronaldinho’s signature boot from 2005, dressed in a clean white upper with the French tricolor encased in the studs underneath. The Virgil Abloh Archive uses Mia Hamm’s Zoom M9, the 1999 boot that became the first women-first pitch performance model Nike ever built, with “MIA HAMM” branding on the medial side. Slawn covers the Striker 1979 in graffiti-style artwork for Nigeria. Nigeria isn’t competing in the tournament. Nike included them anyway, pairing the drop with the Bravehearts Ladies Foundation, a nonprofit supporting young female athletes across Sub-Saharan Africa. A country that didn’t qualify still got a seat at the table because of what they mean to the culture.

To me, the Cryoshot is the clearest signal Nike has ever sent that they understand the World Cup now has two audiences at once. The football fan and the sneakerhead who hasn’t watched a single match but will absolutely buy the shoe. Those two people are increasingly the same person. Nike is building for both, simultaneously, in the same product. That’s new.

Jordan Brand DNA on the Pitch for the First Time

This deserves its own moment (and not just because Infrared and Elephant Print is my jam).

Jordan Brand and the Brazilian Football Confederation announced a partnership that puts the Jumpman on a national team kit for the first time in the history of either institution. Brazil’s away kit for this tournament carries the Jumpman logo. When you see Brazil play in their white kit this summer, that’s what you’re looking at.

Alongside the kit came the Jordan Tiempo Maestro, the first Tiempo football boot to carry full Jordan Brand DNA. Elephant print detailing, Infrared 23 colorway, Jumpman logo on the tongue. The design pulls from the Air Jordan 3 and Air Jordan 6. A second colorway, Sail/Infrared 23, followed in May. Jordan Brand has been in football-adjacent spaces for years through PSG kit deals and limited footwear drops. Putting the Jumpman on a World Cup national team kit is different from anything they’ve done before.

Puma: Betting on Culture

Puma dresses 11 nations: Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Portugal, Paraguay, Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic, and New Zealand. Their approach is the deliberate inverse of adidas’ market-share play. Where adidas blankets the field, Puma went deep with each federation, building kits rooted in the specific visual and cultural language of each country rather than a shared performance template.

Their boot collection is called “Showtime,” covering the Future 9, Ultra 6, and King 20 in Puma’s signature mismatched left-and-right colorway format. Their City Edition pack gives each host city its own tribute boot. The New York edition of the King 20, metallic silver and mint green inspired by the Statue of Liberty, is the one worth tracking down if you’re in that space.

The collaboration story: Puma tapped Salehe Bembury to design goalkeeper kits and travel apparel across all 11 of their national team partners. That is the most significant fashion collaboration at the kit level in this tournament, and the first of its kind at any World Cup. If you’ve followed Bembury’s work on other New Balance releases, you already understand the weight of his involvement.

Morocco’s calligraphic crimson kit and Senegal’s banded green and gold are two of the strongest individual designs in the entire 48-team field. When those teams play, the kits are worth the attention on their own.

New Balance and Mizuno: Doing It Differently

New Balance has been building in football quietly for years. Their World Cup push is the Furon v9, their speed boot, which debuted through a collaboration with Stone Island. If you’ve followed the New Balance x Stone Island work across the 574 and 991, you already know how seriously that partnership takes its references. Bukayo Saka of England will wear the Furon v9 throughout the tournament, a meaningful placement for a brand still establishing its performance credibility at this level.

Mizuno gets underestimated in the US market, but serious boot culture has respected them for decades. Their “Prism White” collection includes the Morelia Neo Beta V, one of the few boots in this tournament built on a kangaroo leather upper at a time when every other major brand has moved to synthetics. Hidemasa Morita is their player to watch on Japan’s squad, wearing Mizuno boots inside an adidas-outfitted team, which is a reminder that kit sponsorships and boot deals are always separate.

Then there’s Skechers, who technically just showed up. Skechers Football launched three years ago, which means this is their first World Cup, full stop. Their “Sunset” pack, inspired by Los Angeles at dusk, covers two silos: the Razor 2 speed boot and the SKX_2 control boot. Harry Kane, a two-time European Golden Boot winner, is their headliner, alongside Mohammed Kudus and Anthony Elanga. A brand that didn’t exist in football three years ago has the England captain on its biggest stage. That's either the fastest credibility arc in the sport’s history, or the story that unravels publicly over the next 40 days. Either way, it’s worth watching.

The Off-Pitch Drop Worth Knowing

One more collaboration that sits outside the kit-and-boot conversation entirely. KidSuper and BAPE built a “SuperBape Cup” collection around the exact scale of this tournament: 48 BAPE STA colorways, one for every competing nation, each in patent leather dressed in that country’s flag colors or kit identity. Ten colorways dropped yesterday at BAPE stores and KidSuper Studio in Brooklyn. The remaining 38 go to pre-order, with production contingent on hitting a minimum order threshold per colorway.

The concept mirrors the tournament’s own expanded ambition directly. What makes it more than a calendar grab: six of the 48 colorways were designed by Dennis Mazur, known as SneakerDenn, a London-based sneaker curator, archivist, and longtime BAPE STA collector who has spent years documenting the silhouette’s history. France, Japan, Uruguay, South Korea, Australia, and Sweden are his. A collector turned official collaborator, on one of the most ambitious sneaker projects tied to this tournament. That’s the story inside the story.

What To Actually Watch For

A few specific things that will reward attention over the next 40 days.

Messi’s farewell run. Argentina are the defending champions, Adidas-outfitted, and Messi is in the “El Último Tango” F50 built specifically for this moment. What he does in those boots will define one of the signature product stories of the summer regardless of how far Argentina goes.

Brazil’s away kit. When Brazil plays in white, you’re watching the Jumpman on a World Cup national team for the first time in history. The chest crest tells the story.

The Cryoshot in the wild. Seven collaborations, all dropping this week. The Patta x Mercurial R9 and the Palace drop are the ones with the most crossover appeal for a sneaker audience. These are not lifestyle versions of football boots. They are the actual historic boots, studs sealed inside a transparent outsole, built to be worn on the street. If you see someone wearing them over the next month, you’ll know exactly what you’re looking at.

Germany’s last kit in Adidas. Whatever happens in their matches, the uniform itself is a historical object. It ends a partnership of over 70 years. That’s worth a second look every time they step on the pitch.

I’ve written before about the larger business stakes of this tournament at the brand level, and the complicated path at least one major brand took to get here. The football and footwear sides of that story kept developing right up until today.

What makes 2026 different from any previous World Cup isn’t just the expanded field or the North American setting. It’s that the gap between football culture and sneaker culture has effectively closed. The Cryoshot is not a football decision. The Jordan x Brazil kit is not a football decision. Salehe Bembury designing goalkeeper kits for 11 nations is not a football decision. SneakerDenn designing six colorways of a BAPE STA around tournament nations is not a football decision.

These are sneaker culture decisions. And for the next 40 days, they’re happening on the largest stage any of them will ever have. More will happen. I’ll be wathcing.

Keep building.

-Nick

I’m Nick Engvall. I’ve worked in the sneaker industry for over two decades. I built the original Eastbay Blog during my time at Sole Collector, led the first dedicated sneaker team for Complex, led the first UGC and seeding programs for Finish Line, employee #9 at StockX, Sr. Director at Stadium Goods.

I host the Sneaker History podcast, with over 600K downloads, and my book, Small Luxuries: Sneakers, comes out October 2026 from Motorbooks.

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People keep asking me some version of the same question this spring. They phrase it differently depending on where they sit in the business, but it always comes back to the same place. How healthy is this thing, really? And the people asking are not casuals. They are buyers, founders, brand-side veterans, the folks who have been reading balance sheets and lacing up samples for twenty years. They feel something good in the air. Running brands posting numbers nobody used to post. Trail shoes on feet that have never touched a trail. A retail merger that, against the odds, actually worked. If you have been paying attention, it feels like the industry is sitting at a 7 out of 10, maybe better.

So I decided to stop guessing and score it.

I have spent a little over two decades inside this business, building, selling, and writing about footwear, and I built a model that rates every major brand, both surviving retail giants, and seven product categories on a 1 to 10 scale. Then I weighted the brand scores by each company’s approximate annual revenue, so the final number reflects dollars instead of vibes. A tiny brand having a perfect year and a giant having a bad one should not count the same, because they do not move the same amount of money. The full scorecard is below. The methodology is below that. I will show you exactly how every brand landed and why.

The industry composite came back at 5.9.

Not a 7. Not the number the room feels. A 5.9, which is to say the footwear business in the spring of 2026 is, on the whole, average. And the gap between what it feels like and what it scores is the most interesting story in the industry right now, because the reason for that gap is a single company.

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This was Dick’s first full quarter with Foot Locker folded all the way into the business, and the top line did what everyone assumed it would. Consolidated net sales came in at $5.16 billion, up 62.7 percent from $3.17 billion a year ago. Almost all of that jump is just Foot Locker showing up on the ledger for the first time. Net income was $319.82 million, $3.54 a share, or $2.90 on an adjusted basis.

The core Dick’s business, the one that was already humming long before any of this, kept humming. Comparable sales grew 6 percent, and Lauren Hobart was quick to note that the 6 percent sat on top of a 4.5 percent increase last year and a 5.3 percent increase the year before. That segment ran a double-digit operating margin. Nobody was worried about Dick’s. Dick’s was never the question.

Foot Locker was the question. And on the surface, Foot Locker answered it. But the truth needs some decoding to understand.

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Today I want to stay in the same neighborhood, because what’s happening right now in skate brand ownership is one of the more instructive things going on in all of footwear, and the timing feels right to say it plainly.

Most of the people reading this don’t follow skate shoes closely. That’s fine, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But the pattern underneath these two stories applies to everything from independent boutiques to the biggest brands in the business.

Two skate brands are in the process of being reclaimed by the people who actually built them, or in the case of one, by someone who at least speaks the language.

Enjoi, the panda-logo skate deck and shoe brand co-founded in 2000 by Marc Johnson and Rodney Mullen, was sold to a corporate holding group in 2019. What happened next is a story anyone who’s watched private equity touch something beloved will recognize: the team went unpaid, the people who made the brand what it was left one by one, and by 2022 Louie Barletta, the last original member standing, walked out. The brand didn’t fold in one dramatic moment. It just drained.

Then Barletta heard that whoever held the IP was planning to license the enjoi name for scooters, roller skates, and rollerblades... to sell at Walmart.

Three years later, on Valentine’s Day 2026, Barletta posted four words that he said took three years to write: we got enjoi back. The recovery took patience, leverage, and a deliberate choice not to speak too negatively in public while negotiations were still live. He didn’t want to destroy the thing he was trying to save. That shows something important about how you protect a brand that actually means something. You don’t blow it up on the way out. You keep the door open.

The Lakai story is messier, and still unfolding. Founded in 1999 by pro skaters Mike Carroll and Rick Howard, Lakai built a reputation as one of the most respected core skate shoe companies in the business. In October 2024, the brand was acquired by Inversal, a turnaround operation that, for context, also owns a weighted blanket company, a supplements brand, and a women’s underwear brand. Carroll and Howard were let go after reportedly refusing to make cuts to the skate team.

The new CEO, Marc Roca, then did something that at least showed some self-awareness: he approached Luis Mora about coming aboard. Mora is a skateboarder, filmmaker, and founder of Erased Project and Aura Skateboards, someone I've watched grow on YouTube for close to a decade, with over 1.5 million subscribers built on actually skating and documenting the culture honestly. He declined the job offer and counter-proposed ownership instead. His reasoning was simple: skaters support skater-owned brands. Roca agreed, and Mora became part-owner, taking over marketing and team direction. In three months under his watch, the brand stabilized, signed Thrasher’s 2025 Skater of the Year, Chris Joslin, and started moving again.

Side note, seeing Joslin celebrate with his kids after finally landing his tre flip at El Toro still gets me emotional.

Now reports indicate Roca is facing financial difficulties and Mora is pushing for full control. The story isn’t finished. But in a category where the ending is usually the same, a brand slowly drained until there’s nothing left to sell, the fact that a skateboarder is fighting for the keys is worth paying attention to. The direction of travel matters even when the destination isn’t settled yet.

And it isn't just enjoi and Lakai. Think Skateboards co-founder Greg Carroll, Mike Carroll's older brother, has been publicly pushing to revive Think after it changed hands through a divorce settlement years ago. Same pattern, different chapter.

Skate shoes aren’t a footnote in sneaker history. They’re where a lot of it started. If nothing else, a parallel universe to learn from.

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Marc Johnson passed away yesterday. He was 49.

I don’t know how to write about death in this newsletter, and I’m not going to pretend I’ve figured it out. What I know is that Marc Johnson mattered, to skateboarding, to skate footwear, to a generation of people who watched …

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People think Nike is broken. Hot takes are everywhere predicting their demise.

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It happens. Someone sees a hot take or some wild numbers, and wants to know what a person who's spent their career in this business thinks about it. I appreciate the tag. I appreciate that people think I have something worth hearing.

But I had to sit with this one for a minute before I responded.

As Daniel-Yaw Miller put it, “there are three truths in this world: death, taxes and people having a hot take on the so-called downfall of Nike.” He’s not wrong. The post I was tagged in — the idea that Nike might go private this year — is probably the hottest of all the hot takes I've seen come across my feed in recent memory. But everyone’s got a right to an opinion. That’s the whole point of the internet. If anything, I'm thankful for every wildly hot take because they usually drive people here to find the truth.

Selfishly, I love the out-of-left-field takes. Even the ones that don’t hold up. If nothing else, they’re entertaining. And I think sometimes the people who’ve lived inside this business for years or decades, and perhaps even the enthusiasts, forget how to think outside the sneaker box. If you've worked at Nike long enough, you start to see the world through Swoosh-colored glasses. You can’t help it. It shapes how you see everything. And on the other side, if you’ve only ever looked at Nike through a portfolio lens, the current moment can read like the beginning of the end for a giant.

The truth is somewhere in the foggy middle. That’s my favorite place to be.

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I was at an independent record store recently. Nothing remarkable about the trip, which is kind of the point. Local thrift stores, record stores… I go pretty regularly. I flip through bins, talk to whoever’s working, listen to whatever is playing, maybe buy something and maybe don’t. It’s the same thing millions of people do at these kind of stores all over the country, in cities where Spotify has existed for fifteen years and every song ever recorded is available for the price of a gym membership.

Nobody thinks independent record stores are a bad idea anymore. And thrift stores have quietly become one of the more consistent community gathering points in any neighborhood, the kind of place where you're as likely to run into someone you know as you are to find something worth buying. At some point the conversation shifted from "why would you open one" to "what kind are you opening." The ones with a point of view survived. The ones that understood they were selling a reason to be somewhere, not just a physical format, are doing fine. The ones that were just distribution nodes for content you could get anywhere else closed.

I keep coming back to that when people ask me about sneaker retail.

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Two things happened this week that nobody covering footwear retail has put on the same page.

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They didn’t.

Footwear was flat. Not down. Flat. In the worst consumer confidence environment in nearly fifty years, with inflation expectations running near 50% and fifteen consecutive months in recession-signal territory, and still counting.

If you’ve been paying attention to the fear around sneaker retail in 2026, flat is genuinely good news.

JD Sports reported full year FY2026 results this morning covering the 52 weeks to January 31, 2026. All figures in the report are in British pounds sterling. I’ve converted to USD at today’s rate of £1 = $1.3621 for context. The headline: total sales of approximately $17.2 billion, up 10.5% reported and 11.7% at constant currency. Free cash flow up 36.3% to approximately $629 million, well ahead of analyst consensus.

Those are strong numbers. But the footwear line is the one I keep coming back to.

This is where the headline ends and the analysis begins. Below the paywall: why JD Sports is the most honest barometer of sneaker retail health, what flat footwear actually means in this environment, what's happening in North America, and the cost pressure coming for every brand on their shelves.

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Maybe it’s a specific shoe you circled. A catalog you kept under your bed like contraband. A phone call you made to order something you’d been saving up for, and the person on the other end actually knew what they were talking about.

For me, it got to the point where me and my two brothers and sister were argui…

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The new colorway, the brand pivot, the earnings call, the collaboration that either makes sense or doesn’t. That’s the work, and I think it’s valuable... understanding the industry from the inside out, with context most people covering sneakers don’t have.

But every once in a while, you have to zoom out.

Not to the 30,000-foot view where everything becomes vague and theoretical, but to the altitude where you can see the terrain sneaker consumers are actually navigating. The economy they wake up in every morning. The cost of groceries they’re thinking about when they’re standing in your store, or scrolling your app, or deciding whether that $160 shoe is a yes or a not right now.

That’s what this piece is about.

This past week, I’ve been spending time with the latest data from The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey, released April 28, 2026, and what it shows has real implications for anyone in this industry. Not panic-inducing... but important. The kind that separates brands and retailers who are paying attention from the ones who are going to be surprised when Q3 numbers come in light.

Let me show you what I’m seeing..

The number that actually matters

The headline Consumer Confidence Index came in at 92.8 in April, up a modest 0.6 points from March. That’s actually the third consecutive monthly gain, and the highest reading of 2026. It also beat analyst expectations of 89.0 by a meaningful margin. On the surface, that sounds like good news.

But the headline number isn’t the number I’d be watching.

The number I’d be watching is 72.2.

That’s the Expectations Index... the component that measures how consumers feel about where things are headed six months from now. Jobs, income, business conditions. And historically, when the Expectations Index falls below 80, it’s a reliable signal that a recession is on the horizon. It’s been below 80 since February 2025. In April it ticked up 1.2 points to 72.2... still well inside recession-signal territory. Fifteen consecutive months below that threshold, if you're keeping count.

There’s something else worth paying attention to here. The same week the Conference Board index edged up, the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index dropped to 49.8. A record low. The weakest reading since the survey began in 1978. Lower than the financial crisis. Lower than COVID. Lower than the inflation spike that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The two indices measure different things: the Conference Board is weighted toward labor market conditions, while Michigan is more sensitive to personal finances and cost of living. The gap between them right now is the widest it’s been in years.

Surveys of Consumers Director Joanne Hsu noted that the decline was universal — across every income level, every age group, every level of education, and every political affiliation. That last part is worth sitting with. This isn’t partisan anxiety. We’re all on the same team right now, whether we realize it or not.

Thhat signals a consumer who still feels okay about their job, but is genuinely scared about what things cost. That’s a specific kind of spending pressure that hits discretionary purchases hard... and sneakers are a discretionary purchase.

Where sneakers live in the consumer’s mind

Here’s the question I kept coming back to while looking at this data and if you’re in the business, I think it’s the question you should be asking too: where do sneakers actually fit in how consumers are prioritizing their spending?

The April survey shows restaurants and takeout holding as the top spending category. Beauty and personal care moved up. Streaming and mobile services remain strong. Utilities and healthcare ranked above hotel and motel for personal travel, which tells you something about how people are thinking about their money.

Sneakers sit in an uncomfortable position in that hierarchy.

They’re not a necessity, which means they don’t have the floor that groceries or utilities have. But they’re also not a vacation or a luxury handbag, which means the ceiling of their aspiration stays within reach for a lot of people. A $130 shoe feels possible when a $3,000 trip doesn’t.

To me that signals the mid-tier sneaker market, roughly $90–$180, is going to hold better than the extremes over the next two quarters. The $400 limited release faces real headwinds when consumers are quietly bracing. The $70 everyday runner is actually well-positioned, which is exactly why GOAT launched Sneakers.com, a platform averaging $70 per order, in direct response to where consumer appetite is right now. I wrote about what this shift looks like from the European retail perspective a few weeks ago. And if history holds, the US follows Europe on footwear trends by about twelve to twenty-four months.

The brands reading this market correctly are the ones already leaning into value without abandoning identity. The brands still planning Q3 around the assumption that heat alone drives purchase are going to feel this data in their sell-through numbers.

The anxiety underneath the numbers

There’s a layer to this data that goes beyond the headline figures, and it showed up in the survey’s write-in responses... what consumers are actually thinking about when they think about the economy.

In April, write-ins about prices, oil and gas, and war all increased in frequency compared to March. The Conference Board specifically noted that the Middle East conflict is driving gasoline price anxiety, even as a temporary ceasefire during the survey period helped stabilize sentiment slightly. Inflation expectations ticked down marginally but remained elevated. The percentage of consumers expecting interest rates to be higher a year from now climbed to nearly 50%.

Read that again. Half of American consumers expect rates to be higher. The share saying a recession is “very likely” grew again in April.

This matters for sneakers specifically because of what’s sitting upstream in the supply chain. Nike produces roughly 50% of its footwear in Vietnam. adidas is at about 39%. UBS analysts estimated earlier this year that offsetting Vietnam tariffs alone would require retail price increases of 10–12%.

Those costs are coming. The only question is who absorbs them and how much gets passed to the consumer who is already telling you, in survey after survey, that cost of living is their top concern.

This is where the macro picture ends and the industry analysis begins. Below the paywall: what the resale market data tells us about where brand heat is actually shifting, what this data means for the three tiers of the sneaker market, and the first details on something I’ve been building quietly that I think is going to be genuinely useful to everyone reading this.

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Net sales came in at €6.6 billion, up 14% on a currency-neutral basis, well ahead of the €6.33 billion analysts had forecast. Operating profit hit €705 million (~$824M at current exchange rates), against a consensus estimate of €647 million, about €60 million better than expected. The…

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But I realized last night that I left something out, and I want to fix that.

For every 10 pre-orders that come in, I’m gifting one annual sub…

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I know dozens of you reading this right now work at Nike. Hundreds more of you work somewhere in this industry... retail, brands, media, tech adjacent to footwear. And yesterday, Nike announced another round of layoffs. 1,400 roles, mostly in technology, part of their ongoing “Win Now” turnaround. It follows 775 cuts in J…

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This is a laughing week.

Lululemon announced this week that Heidi O’Neill, former President of Consumer, Product and Brand at Nike, will become its next CEO effective September 8. O’Neill spent 27 years at Nike. She was there when the company grew from $9 billion to roughly $45 billion in revenue. She oversaw the product pipeline, the brand voice, the consumer strategy. She was, by most accounts, one of the most powerful people in the building.

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