[ The 18th Project ]

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

اللهم صلي على محمد و على أل بيته الطيبين الطاهرين

السلام عليكم و رحمة الله و بركاته

منذ الأزل .. و أنا مهتم بشكل جنوني ..

بكل ما يخص كرة القدم ..

و من أهم هذه الأشياء .. هي الأحذية الكروية ..

التي و بكل فخر أقولها .. أصبحت خبيراً يعتمد عليه فيها ..

أشارك في العديد من المنتديات التي تهتم بهذه الأمور ..

لكنها كلها و ليست أغلبها .. كلها غربية ..

ليس لدينا أي منتدى عربي يهتم بمستلزمات كرة القدم ..

طوال فترة دخولي لـ هذه المواقع و المنتديات ..

لم أشاهد أي تعليق .. أقوى من هذا الرد ..

موضوع النقاش .. الذي فتحناااه كان بعد نزول الـ AdiPURE ..

الجديد .. و كنا نناقش .. عن جودة الشركة من ناحية أحذيتها ..

و انتقلنا من النقاش العام .. إلى نقاش شامل و مفصــــل عن الشركة الرائعة

Adidas

 و ما شدني إلا متابعة نقاشنا .. كان هذا الرد الشامل ..

أحب أشكر :

Jc18star

التعليق عبارة عن معلومات رائعة تحليلية عن أديداس ..

إليكم بالتعليق :

My point about Adidas being behind the times, stems from their current general business model and image. They owned it on a soccer level of about 45-50 years. They made break through after break through in terms of functional design, concepts, and marketing. A short list would be as follows. 

1) Screw in studs….Although there is debate that the Puma Atom was the first screw in boot developed a year before that now famous defeat of Hungry. Adidas built their legend of innovation around that win. Even if they were the second company to make them, they were the first to claim them to be a game changer, which was smart marketing on their part. 

2) PU outsoles, when rubber was still the name of the game Adi Dassler moved to a stronger and lighter outsole with more flex. 

3) Player endorsements, Der Kaiser, and various others were getting their names on products before it become the insane post Jordan endorsement world we live in now. It was so effective they had to cook the books because Adi would have flipped if he knew how much of a cut Beckenbaur was really getting from his sales cut.

4) The World Cup and Copa models (to a lesser extent the Profi). Honestly IMO the greatest creation to ever come from Adidas and the only true quality boots they still offer to the public at large. These shoes are so perfect that other than some stitching changes and the addition of extra leather around arch area they have been the same of 31 and 26 years. The innovation and pure genius of Dassler can be felt here, these are the last boots he personally created. It stands true to what the man was able to do if he could make 2 pairs of shoes that 99.9% of the mid-level to pro-level playing world has worn at some point. David James even said off the record most pro’s in the world will tell you that is the boot they would wear if they had to buy them on their own. 

5) The Predator. Not that it’s a great boot in terms of durable quality (anymore anyway) but it still is awesome until it breaks down, and it was the first big time boot to usher in the era of “skill enhancing boots” which is the entire market today in terms of design and marketing trends. They have gotten a bit too gimmicked IMO but they still offer the option to have a normal insole and functional upper for us that know powder in the bottom isn’t going to really do much to your shot. 

6) The Velez. Their first boot to use blades, now their was the CICA Blades before the Velez but the Velez was Adidas, so people bought into it and what happens? Next season they are on the Preds and then pretty much all their top of the range boots are blades and everyone follows suit from Nike to Kelme. 

7) Their old ads. The best one I ever saw was a totally blank white page in a soccer magazine. At the bottom in bold black it said, one of the only pages in the magazine that someone will not be wearing our shoes. That is honestly the best print ad I have ever seen for a boot maker. For one reason, at the time in the mid-late 90’s it was the honest truth, almost every player worth his salt had on World Cups or Copa’s from the college level to the pro ranks in Europe. 

Not only was Adidas innovative, they were cool. Ice cool, everyone wanted Adidas because they made the best shoes and they were soccer. Then 1994 happened, which lead to 1998 then to now. 

Between then and now Adidas lost the plot across all sectors. Part of it had to do with taking the company public and the botched buyouts, management changes and so on but it also had to do with not keeping up with the guys they thought would never beat them, the Americans, Nike. 

Without doing a total history lesson I will list some mistakes from a design and marketing standpoint Adidas has made since around 1998 which has led to the company we see today.

1) Quality control, Adidas if anything use to be dependable, you knew they were well made boots where Nike’s would usually fall apart. Well the shoe is on the other foot now, Adidas started slacking and not only made tons of boots with structural design flaws (split outsoles is a major one), they can’t even glue the outsole to the upper so there isn’t a compromised area for the shoe to tear away after a few uses. 

2) Late to the game…with everything! David Beckham, love him or hate him, should have had his own boot and product line in 2000, not 2005. Zidane was never promoted right, if Nike had a player with his skills they would have put it into a marketing blitz that dropped jaws (see Ronaldinho for proof), what did they do? They gave him gold shoes in 2006, as a send off, then didn’t release them to the public, way to go guys. Another is the speed boot market, they were 8 years late on that after the debut of the Mercurial, then still 2 years behind the Vapor. I know they didn’t want to make plastic junk but they could have created the F-50’s way earlier. Not to mention when they did sell their soul and make a plastic shoe, they made the biggest joke in the world in the Tunit. That shoe is the best idea and worst execution I have ever seen and everyone behind that boot should loose their job. It’s crap in quality and it stinks of them trying to be Nike-ish but having an epic fail. The answer to the Legend/retro boot craze? At first, the 7406 and now the Pure. I know for a fact the 7406 was a bomb of epic scale because not only was the AdiPure ushered in a year later, but no one endorsed it, Adidas took return credits from retailers on the dead stock and there were lots of fit issues.

3) Marketing. Man, overall they suck. How many really cool tv spots, viral videos, and ads do you see from them? Zero! They have players like Messi and Kaka and had Ziadne who can do things the rest of the world only dreams of and these skills, are they in great add ads? No not really, they are stuck with little Jose his Mom and some computer generated images of Paltini and other guys. Here is the point they are missing, shoes are well and good, but kids these days think the skill is in the boot not the player. Take an ad of Kaka killing it in his AdiPure, chop it up in sections of him megging guys, scoring goals, making people look foolish with close ups of the Pure in action and you start creating buzz about the shoe The Vapor is built on that concept. When I see Nike I think fast, skillful, on the edge…C.Ronaldo When I see Adidas I think slow, boring, basic…Frank Lampard. Adidas doesn’t even exploit the market they created with skill enhancing boots when doing stuff with the Preds. Take Ballack’s free kick in the Euro’s, where was the viral video of that? It was Adidas’s main team, one of their main players, even their ball. I mean its a no brainer, that should have been everywhere. Messi is another shining example, right now, the best player on earth, they fought Nike for him in court they wanted him so badly. He could make a blind man clap with the things he does yet there is not one Messi-centric ad out there showing him destroying people. These are the things people want to see these days! Like I said, kids for the most part think that the speed and skill is in the boot, Adidas doesn’t exploit that at all. Where were the viral vids pimping Villa’s hatrick at the Euro’s in all Adidas Spain gear and Tunits? Nike had vids out of everyone in the orange peel Vapors scoring left and right the weekend they debuted the boot! The vids were up the same Sunday night the all games finished. That is the difference I am talking about, here. It’s like they lack the brains and/or the guts for war, and that is what it is now, war, plain and simple. 

4) Innovations that are past it or just aren’t innovative and an inability to admit their mistakes. They keep putting stuff out there that is awful, products that fall apart and not taking steps to correct that. Examples are the 7406 and the Tunit, which I already discussed. The lacing system on the new AdiPure, you would think they would have been able to see that not only did they come 4 years late with that uni-tongue garbage, it wasn’t something people liked to start with. How hard is it to do a little market research and listen to the response? These are just two things, anyone remember the DX-3? Or the first go at the X-TRX removable blades? 

A lot of people here think I hate Adidas, that is far from it. I love Adidas, my first great pair of boots were Copa’s and I was the first kid on my team to have them. The Copa started my love affair with boots that has brought me to you as a mod. I still play in Copa’s, Mundial Team’s and Copa Indoors more than any other shoe. They are old faithful and I go back to them with fondness and comfort like I would my first love. What I hate is what Adidas has become, a brand lacking a true identity and totally unable to right the course even though they have all the means to do so. They are all over the place these days, and it’s sad to see them like this, that is where my distain and venom comes from. They are in serious need of a major overhaul, and if they don’t get it together they will pay the price. I feel like at one point they were above all this, they stuck to their principals and made a good products. They avoided things like the uni-tongue because they knew it was junk and wouldn’t work well, now it’s like they just want to be Nike and they will throw crap at the wall just to see if something sticks. 

It took Puma to the point of near bankruptcy to drop their stodgy, german-centric, old school ways and become a force in the market again, Adidas might want to look across the river and see what happened to Puma because those who ignore history and doomed to repeat it.

Final thing….It’s not that they are using something from the past that makes me think they are behind. I think most boot makers should open the archive and take a look at what made the boots from the 70’s up to the mid 90’s great and we would be in a better place. It is the fact they are using a concept that is well known to be a dud, and one caused various fit issues with out making a change to it that bugs me. Even more so considering that their smaller company Reebok had a boot a year ago with the same tongue and neither of their sponsored players liked it or wore it and most reviews of the boot were bad because of the tongue fit.

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تحياتيـــ

Mad Reds