With a slower week due to Origin commitments and very little happening on the NRL front, it’s the perfect time to look at a very important rugby league topic. Namely, cataloguing which brand and colour of boots every NRL player was wearing during Round 15 and comparing them to prior seasons.
Yes, Bootwatch is back for the third installment, as possibly my favourite post to do of the year. Not just because I’m a sneakerhead AND a rugby league tragic, but also because I like to see how much content I can get out of something so irrelevant as how many players are wearing Nike, or which colours are the most popular.
For new readers, the concept behind Bootwatch is this. Using a combination of match footage and the very useful pre-match footage on Fox from the sheds, I catalogue the boot brand and colour of every player who stepped on the in Round 15.
That’s over 270 different players and their boot/colour combinations. Which might sound like a lengthy process but it’s becoming easier each time. Having now completed three seasons of this I’ve developed a strong understanding of the design language used by each of the major brands.
For example, trying to pick Isaiya Katoa or Kyle Flanagan’s boots is extremely hard during certain lighting conditions as they wear a triple white colourway of an adidas boot. The easiest way of identifying them is that they have a distinct heel counter that you can pick up on other colourway of the adidas Speedportal.1 (the model they are wearing) or CRAZYFAST.1. This is the sort of tiny detail I know my readers are interested in.
Additionally, with Asics starting to dominate NRL players feet it’s a lot quicker when half the NRL is wearing a variant of the Lethal Testimonial 4 IT. With most players sticking with what they know and rarely changing brands, eventually I’ve been able to associate players with their boots. Cameron Munster is a Puma guy, Jarome Luai is an adidas guy, Reece Walsh is a Nike guy (even if he was sadly absent from this analysis).
And just how much is Asics dominating the NRL? The results from the past three seasons are below.
They now represent 59% of all boots worn on field during an NRL round. That number is up almost 20% from 2021 when they had a share of 42%, and up nearly 8% from last season’s majority at 51.5%. That’s approaching NRLW levels, where they have a 65% share.
It seems to be coming at the expense of Nike and Puma, who dropped 4.9% and 3.6% respectively. Nike is down 9% in share of boots since 2021, and Puma is almost a similar amount. adidas, which had seen a drop in the 4% range in 2023, steadied the ship slightly with a 0.5% increase this year.
Concave, an Australian owned brand, had started to pick up steam in the NRL during 2023 with a number of players changing to them after Ben Hunt and Jake Granville led the way for the brand. Alex Johnston and Jack De Belin looked to be wearing variants of their First Nations and Polynesian inspired collection in Round 15.
Speaking of Concave, in another piece of minutia that will only interest me, they were nice enough to fix Nick Meaney’s name on their website this year.
They’ve not seen the same growth in share they had last year, but their unique design is quite noticeable (at least to sickos like myself), especially during slow motion when Johnston crosses the line. However, they have added a few new ambassadors this season, with Max Plath, Naf Whyte and Harrison Graham joining the brand to offset some players who have moved elsewhere.
Splitting the above chart into forwards and backs also highlights just how strong Asics is with bigger players.
73% of forwards were wearing Asics in Round 15, up from 56% in 2021. Both Puma and Nike have seen their share of forward boots nearly halved in the past three seasons, with almost all of it going to Asics. Part of this may be due to Nike having a tendency to produce footwear on a narrower last, which would be extremely difficult for larger forwards to wear. If there were more wider versions of Nike boots available, that might shrink down the gap.
There’s less of a domination in backline positions, as Asics only has a 5% lead over Nike, at 37.5% to 32.1% for the swoosh. Puma has decline for backs as well, with adidas and Concave picking up some small share increases since 2021. Interestingly only backs show up as wearing Mizuno boots, but this is due to Havili not playing this weekend.
This brings me to part of the reason why didn’t I choose Magic Round for the Bootwatch again this season? I had wanted to make it a regular thing at Magic Round, but for a few reasons I chose not to. The first was the Sharks beating the Roosters and looking like a legitimate contender (oops).
The second was quality of Suncorp surface resulting in players wearing boots they weren’t usually wearing. An example of this was Selwyn Cobbo, who wore a black Nike version of the the usual Mercurial version he has worn all season.
The first picture is Cobbo wearing the black boot during Magic Round, and the second is him wearing the white (off-white or lemonade as Nike calls it) as he came from the field in Round 15. From what I can tell both versions have the same stud depth and pattern, so I’m not sure why there was the change here.
The other one I had noticed was Tom Burgess, who had been wearing Oxen boots all season, but didn’t during Magic Round. For the Bunnies clash with the Cowboys in Round 12, Burgess was wearing a pair of Nike boots.
Above you can see Burgess wearing the Oxen boots first, then wearing the Nike boots under a trio of Cowboys from Magic Round. Again, not sure what the reasoning for this was, but I would guess the Nike boots had a better stud depth, or at least a hybrid screw in/moulded setup which would have been better on the Suncorp surface.
I wanted to profile the Oxen brand so that’s another reason I waited. Burgess started wearing the UK brand last year, and they had put together a limited edition boot to raise awareness and charity for Motor Neurone Disease (RIP Rob Burrow).
Oxen also have their own Bootwatch on social media, something I am a firm proponent of. A challenger brand doing challenger brand things.
The other thing I’ve noticed this season, and you might pick up from the above chart is that Lachlan Miller was ahead of his time.
I had inadvertently thought that the Japanese brand Mizuno would be out of the NRL this year with the former Knights back headed to England. During the prior two incarnations of Bootwatch, no other player had worn Mizuno boots.
Little did I know that Mizuno representation would (technically) be up 400% this year, with four NRL players now wearing the Japanese brand. The first I noticed was Siliva Havili, who moved across from Concave, with Chad Townsend, Dylan Brown and Solomona Faataape also wearing their boots during Round 15.
From reading some online reviews, Mizuno has a reputation for superior craftsmanship and the quality of materials used for retail boots is apparently much higher than any other brand. They are more prominent in other codes of football, and they’re not cheap either, with Townsend wearing the $380 Moreila, Brown and Faataape wearing some variant of the Alpha Elite ($360).
For other under represented brands, Eli Katoa still the only Under Armour athlete in the NRL, a claim he’s had for the past few seasons.
We do say goodbye to New Balance, with Jason Saab, the only NB athlete last year who has been sporting Nike boots this season. It is interesting to see a brand with such a dominance in casual sneakers, especially in NRL players’ age groups, be completely absent from the league. They’re also quite a big proponent of wider sizes, which again makes their absence more bizarre.
One thing that did slow me down was on the colour front. Asics have produced a Voyager Pack for their boot range, which “has been designed alongside Māori and Pacific athletes and the colours and design is inspired by their heritage”.
I had struggled whether or not to class these as a coloured boot or white, but the Asics site lists them as ‘WHITE/WHITE” so I’m going with that.
And this is how the breakdown of boot colour looks for the past three seasons.
Black boots are as dead as scrums won against the head and kicking duels. Just 3% of player wore a predominately black boot in Round 15, and most of them had generous dashes of colour on them. The only players wearing all black boots were Kobe Hetherington, Tohu Harris, Shawn Blore, Liam Henry and Tyson Frizell. That is down from 12% of boots being primarily black in 2021.
Majority white boots now make up three quarters of all boots worn this season, up from 68% in 2023 and just 51% in 2021. Coloured boots are down to 22% of share, from a high of 36% in 2021.
Forwards are more likely to wear white boots, but that’s mainly due to the dominance of Asics for these positions.
Backs are twice as likely to wear a coloured boot as forwards, with most of the non white or black boots worn by forwards coming from edge backrowers wearing Puma.
We noted Dylan Brown before moving to Mizuno. He was previously wearing Nike, and his move is probably for obvious reasons. Havili as well noted above moved from Concave to Mizuno, with Townsend moving from adidas to the Japanese brand.
Here are some of the other notable players to change brands this season:
- Heilum Luki – Puma to Nike
- Jack De Belin – Nike to Concave
- Jai Arrow – Nike to Asics
- Jaydden Campbell – Nike to Asics
- Justin Olam – Puma to Asics
- Philip Sami – Nike to Asics
- Tolotau Koula – Nike to adidas
- Brian To’o – Puma to adidas
Lastly let’s take a look and see the breakdown of brands and colours by team. First up, brand share by team.
As much as Asics dominates the league, team by team it’s a different story. Both the Gold Coast and Warriors had over 80% of players wearing Asics, while the Roosters and Dolphins had just 41% of players wearing them. The latter two were part of a group of just four teams that had less than half their players wear Asics.
The Roosters were the only team to have a share of another brand even close to Asics, with 41% of their players wearing Nike. The next closest was Manly or Brisbane at 29.4%.
And lastly the share of boot colour by team.
Brisbane were the only team on the weekend that I didn’t spot a player wearing a predominately coloured boot. You can also see just how few players were wearing black boots, with ten teams having zero players wearing the old standard.
And as a final chart, here’s a breakdown of boot colour by age.
It’s not just the younger generation wearing mostly white, but even players into their 30s are doing so. It’s probably more a factor of which colourways are made available by the brands than a fashion statement.
I said we’re done but there’s a bonus stat for the sickos. Here’s the average Supercoach score by boot brand from Round 15
Obviously this is skewed by brands with fewer players and which position, as Nike performed well due to having so many outside backs.
I enjoyed this way too much.
Same 😐
I wonder if it is something to do with Sizes available. Son has a size 15/16 foot, and the only shoes we can get easily are Asics
Great article! I’m curious to know what are the obvious reasons that Dylan Brown switched from Nike to Mizuno though?
The legal issue he had last year, I was going to include a link but forgot.
Okay, I thought that might have been it, but wasn’t sure if there was something else I was missing. Thanks!