Four hundred and forty thousand, fifty-five dollars, for a pair of Shohei Ohtani’s game-used New Balance cleats from the Tokyo Series. It made the rounds, broke a game-used footwear record that had belonged to Michael Jordan, and put an exclamation point on something I wrote a while back, that baseball was quietly the most overlooked market in sneakers. A baseball player, in cleats, taking a number off of MJ. That story tells itself, which is exactly why it traveled as far as it did.

So I am not going to spend your morning relitigating the gavel. It is settled, it is loud, and it is the easy read. Also, my prediction of $444,444 was almost spot on.

The story I keep thinking about is the one that did not trend.

A few weeks before that auction closed, Jordan Brand did something much quieter, and if you were not watching Japanese baseball or a couple of deep-cut accounts, it slid right past you. They put the Yomiuri Giants, the Tokyo Giants, in player-exclusive Air Jordan 11 cleats. A floral bandana print across the mudguard, a ruby Jumpman on the heel, worn on the field at the Tokyo Dome. Not a general release. Not a hype drop with a countdown. Player exclusives, for a baseball team, in Japan.

The auction is what the timeline is chewing on. The cleats are what I would tell you to actually watch.

The interesting part was never the price. A one-of-one game-worn artifact from the best player alive was always going to be expensive. What tells me more is a decision that had a boardroom behind it. Somebody at Jordan Brand looked at the 11, arguably the crown jewel of the whole line, and decided the right place to put it, quietly, as a player exclusive, was on the feet of a team in Tokyo.

Brands do not put their best silhouette and their scarcest tier where the money is. They put it where the influence is.

That tells us where this story goes next…

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I paid for them with money from a freshly cashed check from umpiring little league games.

While I was there I bought a matching Nike shirt, store brand basketball shorts, and black socks with a royal blue Swoosh. First “fit” I ever bought as an outfit, unless you count a matching Dickies shirt and pants, which I do not, that’s my uniform.

I knew one person who worked at that store, in a different department. They weren’t working the day the check came in. It didn’t matter. Nobody there made commission and I had no patience.

Thirty years later I can tell you the size, the socks, the shorts, where the money came from, and exactly which shoe I settled for. I cannot tell you the name or the face of whoever walked to the back and came out with the box. I don’t remember who rang me up.

That is not an indictment of the Gart Sports in Colorado Springs. It never stocked the shoe I actually wanted, but it sold me the one I could afford, and the transaction worked.

But look at what happened after. The Lambaste has become the shoe I want back in retro form more than any other, with the Air Gone sitting second if you’re curious. People in this community know it well enough that I get texts when a pair surfaces on eBay. My friend Andrew even found a Lambaste 2 in my size and surprised me with them.

So the shoe took on a whole life. The store made a receipt.

For a lot of us the catalog was the other version of this. A stack of pages kept under the bed like contraband, circles around shoes were (almost) as good as purchases when it came to sharing with friends. No need for an order form, a phone number, or another person in the whole transaction at all. We couldn’t afford a single one but we were still a part of the story.

Plenty of you have the same story with a different model number. And plenty of you have the second half of it too, the part where you cannot picture the person who handed you the box. In an oversized store that is normal, and for most of the last thirty years it was fine.

In 2026 it is the opposite of what people want when they are about to spend $150 on shoes.

Which is why the most interesting thing any large retailer did this year happened on a Saturday morning on Slauson Avenue, and almost nobody covering the earnings wrote a word about it.

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Because I asked them to. I wanted to shoot photos of this pair, and I wanted to write this.

Collaborations have taken a beating over the last few years, mostly because there have been so many of them. The “collabs are dead” take shows up in my feed every week. I don’t buy it for a second, and I have not for a while.

What people are actually tired of is the same person telling the same story on a different shoe. That is a real problem and it deserves the criticism. It is also not the same thing as collaboration being finished. Any time somebody declares a part of this business dead, it is worth asking whether they are describing the whole category, the four accounts they follow, or their own interests.

Years ago I watched an influencer say that full camouflage should never be used on sneakers, in a post about another brand’s collab. A little over a year later they released a full camouflage shoe with a competitor.

This collection landed in early July. The GEL-Nimbus 28 at $180 in a sunset orange, and the GEL-Challenger 15 tennis shoe at $130 with FP Movement’s paisley across it. It is FP Movement’s first footwear partnership. It sells through FP Movement, through ASICS, and through select Dick’s stores, which is how the pair ended up on my table.

If FP Movement is not a name you carry around, that is sort of the point. It is Free People’s activewear arm, which makes it part of URBN, the same company that owns Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters. It sells leggings and sports bras and tennis skirts to a customer who came in for the clothes, and it has been opening stores at a pace most footwear brands would envy. Until this summer it had never put its name on a shoe.

The sneaker read on something like this is usually dismissive. No local shop attached. No hype name. Nothing to line up for.

I look at it and see the most useful kind of collaboration in the business right now, and the reason has nothing to do with the shoe.

It has to do with which of these two companies is actually the small one, and I had that wrong until I went and looked.

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I was at Complex when Complex acquired Sole Collector, my former employer. So I got to watch a company I had bled for become a line item in somebody else’s org chart, from inside the company doing the acquiring. Later, at Stadium Goods, our parent company Farfetch was acquired by Coupang. Different scale, different decade, same feeling in the building. There is a version of that news that gets written up in an afternoon, and there is a version the people living it understand, and they are almost never the same story.

That is most of what I have been thinking about this week.

The facts first. On August 25, Dick’s reported its second quarter, the thirteen weeks ended August 1. Consolidated net sales of $5.59 billion, up 53.2 percent, which is what happens when a company the size of Foot Locker shows up in your reporting for a full half. The Dick’s business comped up 4.9 percent. The Foot Locker business comped down 3.6 percent on a proforma basis and posted a $31.9 million operating loss for the quarter. Full year guidance for the Foot Locker segment moved from a profit of $110 to $150 million to a loss of $40 to $80 million. The stock fell more than 30 percent that day, the worst single session in the company’s history.

That does not look good. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and neither did they.

The dominant take showed up before the call was even over. Dick’s overpaid for a mall business in decline, the $2.5 billion they closed on last September was a mistake, and this quarter is the proof.

I don’t see it that way. I think they bought it at a good price. I also think they bought it at one of the hardest moments in thirty years to own a business like this, and those two things are not in conflict.

Go back five months. In March, Dick’s publicly pulled back on the store closures it had planned, because an eleven store remodel pilot called Fast Break was outcomping the Dick’s business and improving gross margin while it did it. Ed Stack said out loud that stores he had been prepared to write off could be made very profitable instead. By spring the plan had scaled toward roughly 250 remodels by back to school, with assortment cut about 30 percent to focus the wall. In the first quarter, Foot Locker returned to comp sales growth and to profitability, up 0.6 percent, and the company raised its full year outlook on the strength of it.

That is not a business coming apart. That is a business that had finally started moving.

So something changed between March and August, and it was not the real estate, and it was not the operators, and it was not the remodels. Part of it Stack named on the call. The rest of it I paid for at the grocery store this week.

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The brief came from Michael Jordan, and it was one sentence long.

He wanted the shoe to look like it was in motion while standing still.

Leo Chang, senior creative director for basketball and sport at Jordan Brand, told me that’s what they were working against. Not fast in the way a spec sheet is fast. Fast to look at. Sleek, cle…

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On the flip side of that, a lot of you reading this have heard me preach about how much opportunity there is in taking the skills, the strategies, and the mindset you have naturally honed in the sneaker world, and applying all of it to brands and businesses outside of this industry.

Today I want to walk through a real world example of that. Arc’teryx sent me the Konseal Trek, the most expensive shoe the brand has made. And as I was cutting the tape and lifting the lid, I noticed I wasn’t really thinking about the boot at all. I was thinking about why it was in my hands. (Here's the full unboxing if you want to see the boot in hand before we get into it.)

I am not a mountaineer. I live on the California coast. Arc’teryx proves its gear on the granite above Vancouver, cold and vertical and the kind of terrain that ends your day if your feet quit on you. So the obvious thing to do with a $280 mountain boot is send it to someone who lives on a mountain. They sent it to a guy who spent two decades inside sneaker companies.

The groupthink narrative on Arc’teryx right now is the one you’ve probably heard. Gorpcore went mainstream, the dead bird became the logo on every tech worker in the city, luxury outdoor is having its run. We’ve seen this before. You know the take. You have probably read a version of it. And there is nothing wrong with it, except that it stops exactly where the interesting part starts.

Because as I was photographing this boot, the thing that I kept thinking was not that a climbing brand crossed over into fashion. It is that a climbing brand from 1989, one that started making harnesses and chalk bags before it ever made a single piece of clothing, has quietly adopted the entire operating system that sneakers built.

To me that is the real story of the last twenty years, and almost nobody frames it this way. We keep asking whether sneakers are up or down, whether the resale market is cooling, whether the hype is over. Wrong altitude. The more honest question is what sneaker culture exported to the rest of the footwear industry while everyone was busy arguing about the scoreboard.

I’ll start with how this boot got to me, and then get to the real reason I am talking about it today…

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It showed up today. Not a proof, not a PDF, not a cover mockup in an email. The actual book… in my hands.

My first book. I have written a lot of words over the last two decades, but holding this one is a different feeling entirely. And it is real now.

My editor at Motorbooks, Jordan, left a note inside the f…

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While I was out, I kept seeing the same story cross my feed, so I wanted to address it. The trend of everyone declaring that resale is dead in 2026.

That’s shortsighted.

Yes, maybe the make-a-quick-buck-because-you-got-lucky-on-an-app version isn’t as prominent in sneakers right now. But that was never really what it was about for most people. Even the people we call resellers. Businesses ebb and flow because of thousands of tiny things that come together and push and pull apart, like waves. You can ride a wave in any business, whether it’s sneakers, or resale, or any other trend, but just like surfing, nothing lasts forever. The people who stay in business, aka the ones stubborn enough to get back up and paddle out for the next one, they know the game of selling or reselling was never about a single wave. It’s about staying in the ocean long enough to ride a lot of different ones.

The headlines don’t see it that way. Newsweek is asking if the whole market is crashing. Every reselling forum has a “should I even bother anymore” thread pinned to the top. The number that used to double overnight now sits at retail, or under it, and everybody who showed up in 2020 to flip a pair of Dunks for rent money is writing the eulogy on their way out the door.

I’d get a lot more clicks if I told you reselling sneakers is dead. That’s the post everyone wants to share right now, the clean little obituary you can nod along to on your way out. It’s also wrong, and I’ve been in this too long to write it just because it would travel.

What that crowd is missing is the same thing they missed on the way up. The spike they’re mourning was the anomaly. Not the baseline.

I was employee #9 at StockX. I had a front-row seat to the exact machinery that everyone now blames for “killing” resale, and I want to tell you what it was actually built to do, because it did its job, and the result looks a lot like what people are calling a crash...

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I keep taking photos in the dark, trying to catch the glow. Then turning the flash on to find the reflective hits I would have walked right past in da…

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I was a kid in the back of my grandparents’ Oldsmobile, headed from Sacramento to San Francisco with my dad and my grandparents for a Giants game. That drive is normally ninety minutes, maybe two hours if the traffic on the way into the city decides to be difficult. We left early on purpose, because the plan w…

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This is one of those thoughts that showed up while I was doing something completely unrelated, refused to leave, and eventually earned its way into your inbox. No big thesis today. Just a thing I keep turning over, and you’re the people who’ll actually get why. I guess, if you don’t think about sneakers obsessively and in this way, congra…

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When I wrote about the Memphis warehouse case yesterday, I figured I was done thinking about people stealing from Nike for a while. Then this one landed, and it wouldn’t leave me alone, because it’s the same disease showing up at the complete opposite end of the building.

If you read the Memphis story, you’ll remember the shape of it. Warehouse workers, a floor manager, hourly people surrounded all day by more product than they’d see in a lifetime, and a shipping label as the only lock on the door. The temptation there was structural. I said as much. When the value moving past you has nothing to do with the wage you take home, the math gets loud.

This one is different, and that’s exactly why it’s bothering me.

Prosecutors have charged John Griffith, who ran Nike’s global brand marketing for music supervision, strategy and licensing, a role he’d held since 2007. Alongside a licensing consultant named Brad Mosher, he’s accused of inflating the prices Nike paid for music licensing work, then routing roughly half of the overpayments back to himself through a shell company. More than a million dollars, across about two and a half years, through at least eleven transactions. Each man is facing two dozen felony counts, from racketeering to aggravated theft to money laundering.

Think about that for a second. This wasn’t a man surrounded by product he couldn’t afford. This was a man who controlled a budget, picked the vendors, set the prices, and had done it long enough to be trusted completely. Almost twenty years in the role. The keys weren’t stolen. They were handed to him.

So the question the Memphis case raised quietly, this one asks at full volume. Why. When you are already that high, already that established, already that successful by every measure the industry hands out... why reach for the thing that can take all of it away?

I’ve been in and around enough rooms in this business to have a theory… and it isn’t a flattering one.

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It’s hard for me to understand how someone who actually loves sneakers... loves being around them, loves the people in this community, loves the people in this business, loves the work itself... ends up choosing to do some of the things the people in this story chose to do. I’ve been building things in this space for decades, and if there is one thing I know for certain, it’s that there are no shortcuts to putting in the work. I say that as someone still building it right now, through the ups and the downs. You just keep moving forward.

So I didn’t want to write this one. I’m writing it anyway, because the part that matters isn’t the crime. It’s who ends up paying for it.

I’ve spent a good chunk of my career inside the buildings where product actually moves. Distribution centers. Authentication floors. The back rooms of shops, back before reselling sneakers had back rooms worth naming. So when this one crossed my desk this week, I didn’t read it the way most of the timeline is reading it.

Most of the timeline is reading it as a heist.

Federal prosecutors just indicted twelve people for allegedly diverting more than two million dollars in Nike product out of the company’s Memphis distribution center between July 2021 and June 2024. The mechanism was almost insultingly simple. Insiders on the warehouse floor identified cartons worth taking, put unauthorized UPS labels on them, and let Nike’s own logistics network carry the boxes to addresses that had nothing to do with Nike. Roughly 3,119 labels over three years. UPS was the unwitting mule. The shoes just... left. Through the dock door, on the truck, the exact same way legitimate product leaves every single day.

Look at how the roles break down, because the shape of it matters.

According to the indictment, floor manager Michael Perkins allegedly distributed labels to four warehouse employees who attached them to cartons. Two men outside the building manufactured the labels at volume... Roy Lee Harvey Jr., operating as RHJ Global, is accused of creating around 1,860 of them, and Keith Cannon, working under the name Valid Kixx, another 1,259. Then the product needed somewhere to land. That’s where the resale layer comes in. Bereket Abraham, 39, a co-owner of CoolKicks on Melrose, allegedly paid $215,275 for shoes and let his store’s UPS equipment get used early in the scheme. Joel Deluna of Chicago Emporium allegedly moved $492,000 to Cannon. Jorge Cuellar, operating as Horhead Investments, allegedly sent $696,700 to a Cannon food truck business. And the merchandise was resold through GOAT and StockX and out the front of the shops, right alongside everything else.

The whole thing came apart because of weather. A 2024 snowstorm slowed things down enough that a Nike employee noticed fraudulent labels sitting on cargo that wasn’t supposed to be UPS. Supervisors called LAPD detectives they knew, flagged the LA addresses, and investigators started dropping tracking devices into shipments. The trackers walked them straight to the storefronts.

So that’s the anatomy. Twelve people, three years, three thousand labels, a two-million-dollar forfeiture demand, and a snowstorm as the accidental hero.

Everybody is going to fixate on CoolKicks. I understand why. It’s a name people know, a shop that built real goodwill in this community, a place that felt like ours. Watching a storefront like that show up in a federal indictment stings in a specific way.

But the boutique isn’t the part I keep coming back to.

What I keep coming back to is how easy the last mile of this crime was. Because stealing has never been the hard part of cargo theft. The hard part, historically, was always the selling. And the selling wasn’t hard at all.

If you've been in this game a while, this tension should feel familiar. Insider access rubbing up against the resale market is not new, and it hasn't only happened on warehouse floors. It reached the executive suite at Nike five years ago, in a story a lot of you know by name. Nobody there was accused of a crime. What happened next is the part I still can't stop thinking about.

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The person who finally did lives about as far from…

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I don’t write much about running. I leave that to my friends Cole Townsend and Raz Rauf, who cover it better than I could. So understand that I’m not here to break down splits or spike plates. I’m here because Kerr’s mile is the loudest note in a song that’s been building for weeks, and the song is about something bigger than any one sport.

Look at what just happened. The New York Knicks won their first title since 1973, ending fifty-three years in the most-watched building in basketball, in a Finals that kept coming down to the final possession. The World Cup is one match from finishing, Spain against Argentina, and as of this writing I’d almost guarantee we look back on this tournament as the greatest of all time. The Tour de France ran so hard that the peloton averaged 50.9 kilometers per hour for an entire stage, shattering a speed record that had also stood for twenty-seven years. The Formula 1 championship is led by a nineteen-year-old, Kimi Antonelli, with forty-one-year-old, seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton now up to second, chasing him in the best form he has shown in years. Even baseball got in on it, when Jordan Walker hit six home runs on his final six swings to steal the Home Run Derby 12 to 11 from Kyle Schwarber, in Philadelphia, which is roughly the most hostile place on earth to try to steal anything. And underneath all of it, women’s sport keeps setting the kind of records that used to be unthinkable, with the WNBA posting the biggest audiences in its history.

Sports are having whatever the opposite of a publicity crisis is.

And if you build shoes for a living, that sentence should stop you cold. Because I have spent years in this newsletter talking about how cyclical this industry is, how the energy sloshes back and forth between performance and lifestyle, athlete and celebrity, the court and the feed. Right now you can see the wave forming in real time, and you can see exactly which brands are already standing where it’s about to break.

Here’s the part that makes it personal for me. Ten years ago, I argued we were moving the other way, and I had a friendly public debate with my friend Matt Welty about it.

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It has come and gone in many variations, but it has stayed in the hearts of the people who remember it as a counterweight to the countless Chicago Bulls colorways that ran through the original Air Jordan line. For me it was the True Blue 3 and the Military Blue 4 that became the objects of desire back then, because they stood out against the black and red that every other kid seemed to reach for.

It returns today, Saturday, July 18, for $230, and by now the return of a shoe like this runs on rails. We know the year. We know Tinker. We know the elephant print and the Jumpman and the whole origin story by heart. It even lands on a Saturday, the way the ones we used to line up for did, and maybe that’s feeding the nostalgia, too. Which is exactly why the most interesting part of this release isn’t the shoe.

It’s the radio show.

This week Jordan Brand and Apple Music launched Retro Sounds, a series that ties each iconic release back to the music and the culture around it. The first episode is built around the True Blue, with Chase B and Manny Peralte Jr. pulling the era back up through the songs that were playing when it dropped. Reggie Saunders, who runs global entertainment for the brand, said the point was to revisit the product through the lens of the culture that surrounded it.

Sit with that for a second, because it’s a smarter move than it looks.

It’s a sign that someone at Jordan understood the trap of retroing a shoe this famous. A name this big gives a brand permission to be lazy, to hand us the same 1988 story we could recite in our sleep and let the Jumpman do the rest. They didn’t. They put the shoe back inside the thing it actually lived in.

That choice is small. It's one of those basic, brick-building, fundamental decisions I was talking about yesterday. I think it’s a signal of something more substantial.

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The first is the Deftones Nike Dunk High. Black and green, forty-three pairs, made in 2003 for friends and family of the band to celebrate the self-titled album. Not a retail release. Not a raffle. No campaign. Just a simple design that was never supposed to leave a small circle of people. But they’d be my grails even if they were mass-produced.

I’m from Sacramento. The indomitable city. The always slept-on underdog that never gets counted until it has to be. Deftones are from there too, and they’ve been my favorite band for longer than I can remember. I’ve seen them more times than I can count. I cried when Chi Cheng passed. So when I tell you that a friends-and-family, forty-three pairs made, sneaker is my grail, understand what that actually means. The five-figure resale value has nothing to do with why I want them. Given where I’m from and how long I’ve been in that orbit, there’s a real chance I could have ended up with a pair if that friends-and-family run was pushed to a friends-of-friends, too. Or even if it was released in a different time. I don’t say I was a fan first to sound cool. I say it as a reminder of how that band has shrugged off every label and every naysayer for decades, and how they’re having this almost born-again moment right now with a new audience that was always there but never paid quite enough attention.

I say it because I feel the same about this chapter of my own life. Finding my way through the sneaker business. Writing a book (hopefully the first of many!). Writing this newsletter to some of the sharpest minds in the industry. The decades I spent studying, connecting with people, learning the game, stacking the skills and the relationships until I had a foundation solid enough to finally build things that are mine. Things that feel like validation of years of intentional, unglamorous progress. Same shrug. Same slow turn. Same audience that was there the whole time.

The second grail lives on a site most of you know I’ve got history with. The Sole Collector x Reebok Question, the one a community member named Chris Pardo designed after the lines of a Honda Fit. Grey suedes over a neon midsole that had never been done on the Question before. It came out of a design contest in 2009. Thousands of entries, ten finalists, a public vote. Fewer than twenty pairs were ever made.

I’m a Honda guy, through and through. I make videos about my Hondas. Sole Collector matters to me more than most, so much that when the community lost its home, I built a site to keep that memory alive. And the Reebok Question is one of my all-time favorite sneakers, because Allen Iverson is to me what Michael Jordan is to everyone else. I come from a family that struggled. I was under-sized to play basketball. I was never built to be the greatest of all time. But like Iverson, I’ve got it in me to be better than the best in brief flashes... the kind that make people take a step back and go, wow, I underestimated him. So yeah. Maybe that shoe is the perfect intersection of everything I care about and everything I’ve done, wrapped into one story I didn’t design.

And that’s the thread. I don’t own either one. Odds are I never will, and I guess that’s part of what makes them grails for me... the nearly unobtainable, not the merely expensive. But if either ever surfaced in my size, I’d hardly hesitate to trade away a stack of the pairs I swear I’ll never sell to get it. That’s how I know what these two actually mean to me. Neither one was ever trying to be a grail.

The dominant way we talk about grails now is as a target. Something you engineer. You see it in the way releases get built... the pre-written story, the seeded narrative, the influencer list locked before a single sample exists, the pressure loaded onto a launch to become the thing everyone needs. A young athlete gets a signature shoe and the expectation is that it detonates on day one. Nike is expected to script its comeback like a season finale. Everyone reaching for the shiny object, the new north star, the viral moment.

In my eyes, we’ve got the causality backwards.

You cannot walk into an ideation meeting, a design review, or a marketing plan and decide you’re making a grail. It isn’t yours to decide. A grail is a verdict, and the jury is the culture, the community, the collective energy of a lot of people over a long stretch of time. The Deftones Dunk didn’t know it was a grail in 2003. It was a thank-you gift. The Reebok Question didn’t know either. It was a contest prize for a guy who liked a Honda. What made them grails was everything that happened after, none of which anyone in the room could have manufactured on purpose.

So if you can’t design the outcome, what can you actually control?

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The quick take on Saucony right now is some version of “the heat is real.” Westside Gunn steppingin where Jae Tips left off without the collab program losing a step. The Minted Pro 5s. Crystal Caves trading at four hundred dollars on the secondary market. Every account previewing whatever came out of Paris. The collaborations are the story almost everyone is telling.

The numbers tell a different one. Saucony did $533 million in 2025, up 31 percent, and it followed that with another 20 percent in the first quarter of this year, across every region and channel, performance and lifestyle both. Two years before that, the brand was in an inventory hole deep enough that Wolverine liquidated tens of millions in end-of-life product and publicly rebuilt the entire company around two names. That’s not a hype cycle. That’s a turnaround, and turnarounds are made of decisions that never trend.

Faustino spent an hour walking through those decisions without once calling them strategy. He thought he was talking about shoes, and friends, and Paris. What he actually did was narrate the operating model. Three moves that make Saucony genuinely hard to copy, and not one of them is a collaboration.

This is the part worth paying for. If you’ve watched enough brands mistake a hot collab for a healthy business, you already know why these three things matter more than the roster.

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Not the standings. You can get those anywhere. The one I have been keeping tracks something the rest of the industry keeps talking around… whose product is actually on the feet of the players putting the ball in the net?

The dominant take this summer writes itself. Nike is winning the World Cup. The ads are everywhere, the campaign was built for a home crowd, and by the time the first group-stage match kicked off, Nike had already built the loudest campaign of anyone in the room. Fortune framed the whole tournament as Elliott Hill’s next big test, and on the marketing side, the noise is not especially close.

Side note: adidas and Nike both put out incredible videos for this year’s World Cup. Nike’s Rip The Script has been viewed nearly 80 million times. The adidas Backyard Legends, over 8 million. Both gave me goosebumps while watching them. Nike went deep on YouTube views. You can’t watch a match without seeing the adidas spot during breaks. More on this in a future issue of the newsletter, but important to keep in mind when reading further.

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But impressions are not goals. A marketing win and a pitch win are two different tournaments played on the same fields, and we have spent this entire summer letting one stand in for the other.

So I built the second scoreboard.

Over at becausesneakers.com/world-cup there is a live Boot War tracker counting goals by the boot on the scorer’s foot, a Kit War tracker doing the same for the kit makers, and kit points running right alongside the actual table. It updates through the tournament, all the way to the final. This is the first time I am telling the newsletter it exists.

I built it because the question underneath all of this matters more than the ad-spend leaderboard. This is the first men’s World Cup on US soil since 1994, and if you have been in this business long enough, you know what 1994 did to Nike. A home World Cup convinced a basketball and running company to take football seriously, and a few years later, we got the Mercurial. Home soil does not just move jerseys for a summer. It rewires what American kids grow up wanting on their feet.

Which is why the boot count and the ad count telling different stories is the part I cannot stop looking at…

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