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There has been only one narrative about soccer cleats this World Cup, which is about why they are almost all pink. Nike, Adidas, and Puma, which dominate the cleat market, all released fuchsia models that pop against the grass. Players seemingly love them.
Nine of France’s starting 11 in their opening game with Senegal wore pink cleats. One of the dissenters was Michael Olise, who, in his white footwear, was having none of it.
Olise has had an unusual route to wearing the No. 10 shirt for Les Bleus. He grew up in west London, was on the books of several Premier League academies, and eventually signed professional terms with then-second-tier Reading. He excelled and was soon playing in the Premier League with Crystal Palace. In 2019, he settled on representing France (he was also eligible to play for England, Nigeria, and Algeria), and in 2024, he made a big-money move to Bayern Munich.
But since his Reading days, one thing has remained consistent. He has worn only one type of cleat: Nike’s Hypervenom III, which was made between 2017 and 2019. Now extremely hard to find, he has helpers who scour resale sites for unworn pairs.
He then sends these cleats to a man in Edinburgh to customize them perfectly. There, they land in the workshop of Ryan Park.
The 34-year-old Park has always loved soccer cleats (called “boots” in most of the world) and graphic design. He used to black out the trefoil in his pairs of Adidas when he played amateur soccer, as he thought it looked subtly distinctive. “I was never good enough to wear, like, bright yellow boots, so it had to be black,” he tells Front Office Sports.
To pass the time during the COVID-19 pandemic, Park began buying cleats from eBay, refurbishing them, and selling them to fellow amateurs or collectors at a profit. He put his efforts on Instagram, where @bootsnpieces took off.
Within months, professional players were shooting him DMs. He repaired and customized boots for players from his local team, Hibernian, and then word spread around Scotland and England. Some had a treasured pair they wanted refurbishing. Others sought bits of artwork applied to new pairs. But the most common request was for stud conversions.
Most cleats are made with firm ground (FG) studs, typically made of molded plastic or rubber, and good for playing on dry or firm grass. Some players, including Olise, prefer soft ground (SG) metal studs, which offer more grip. Park has gradually upgraded his tools and techniques, and he can now file down a cleat with molded FG studs and replace them with SGs in 20 minutes. These conversions cost about £60; more custom modifications are more expensive.
Park has hit on an obscure but important niche. Just as tennis players seek out specialists to string their rackets just so, players tend to be highly sensitive to how their cleats feel. “They often tell me they prefer the fit and the feel of a boot that has been converted,” he adds. “The soft-ground boots on sale from the manufacturer tend to have a heavier, thicker sole plate, whereas a converted FG boot is usually more comfortable and flexible.”
After 18 months of doing customizations on the side, Park decided to quit his job in financial services. He moved the Boots n Pieces business from his spare room to his garden shed, then to an office on the outskirts of Edinburgh.
Posting consistently on Instagram built an online following, but his work for professional players has largely spread through word of mouth. “Players all know each other. They get a transfer and they will talk in a new dressing room, and it just snowballs,” he says, laughing. The volume of DMs prompted him to hire a social media manager.
Craftsmen like Park feel anachronistic in modern soccer. Clubs take care of most aspects of players’ lives, from nutrition to education to accommodations. But cleats remain an area where players have greater autonomy.
Clubs and international teams earn huge sums from uniform deals with leading manufacturers, in exchange for strict terms on exclusivity. Puma pays Manchester City about $135 million (£100 million) a year, for example, for the right to deck out its teams and produce piles of branded leisurewear. The German national teams will receive a similar sum from Nike from 2027.
But cleats are treated as personal items, and so players can negotiate their own deals directly with the apparel firms. Most professionals have such agreements; soccer’s biggest stars can earn eight figures a year just from committing to a single cleat supplier.
Nevertheless, such partnerships do not guarantee that companies will customize players’ boots on an individual basis—or be as good at it as Park.
This year, Park has provided customizations for tens of players at the World Cup. For Toni Rüdiger of Germany, it was converting his Under Armour cleats to SG studs. Others are looking for personalization such as England’s Morgan Rogers, for whom Park has added custom “MR” logos to his Puma cleats.
France’s Olise, meanwhile, has chosen to eschew a sponsorship deal, opting to leave millions of dollars on the table rather than give up his beloved customized Hypervenoms. “He likes to match his boots to his kit,” explains Park. “Bayern Munich had a black kit for the Champions League last year, so I was blacking out a lot of boots for him.”
At this World Cup, soccer has become its own corporatized financial juggernaut. Olise and Park’s unlikely collaboration is a small token of resistance.
