We scanned every pair of boots in the AFL — 741 players, 27 models, seven brands — and mapped them to how those players run, kick and score. The picture is fascinating. The one thing it can’t do is tell you a boot made anyone better.
Boot dominance in the AFL is remarkably concentrated. Nike is on 38.5% of feet — the default supplier the whole competition gets measured against — with Asics right behind on 34.1%. Between them, those two brands cover 73% of the league. Puma and adidas split most of the rest; New Balance, Concave and Mizuno together account for barely one player in forty.
Set the whole league at 100 and one brand pulls clear. adidas wearers gain 318 metres a game — 16% above the league average, the highest of any supplier. Nike sits just above the line; Asics, worn heavily by rucks and key defenders, sits below it. Remember the rule: this is a story about the kind of player who laces up adidas — running mids and mobile forwards — not about what the boot does to your legs.
Strip out sheer volume and the pattern sharpens. Among the 50 biggest ball-movers in the competition, adidas holds almost twice the share you’d expect from its size — a ×1.9 concentration — while Asics, the second-biggest brand overall, is barely a third as common at the very top. The elite runners pile onto a small handful of models. Again: they chose them; the models didn’t manufacture the running.
Gate the leaderboard to players with at least 25 scoring shots — so a lucky cameo can’t top it — and the straightest kicking in the competition belongs to two adidas models. The Predator Elite and Copa Pure 2 both sit at 61.8% goal accuracy, seven points clear of the 57.7% league mean. Nike and Asics fill out the rest of the top group. The honest reading isn’t “buy a Predator and kick straighter” — it’s that the league’s most reliable set-shot forwards happen to favour a small set of models.
Position is where a boot model finds its real customer. Nike owns the midfield — nearly half of all mids lace up the swoosh. But the sharpest split is in the ruck: two of every three ruckmen wear Asics, a near-monopoly you don’t see anywhere else on the ground. Defenders are the league’s most evenly-shared feet; forwards tilt Nike, then Asics.
The performance splits track the roles, not the leather. Midfielders cover the most ground (337m a game, 22% above the league); key defenders are the cleanest kicks on the park (78.3% efficiency); rucks are their own market entirely — accurate near goal, but bottom of the league for metres because their job simply isn’t to run.
Loyalty is where a sponsorship dollar compounds — and where it looks most fragile. Melbourne is the league’s most concentrated boot room, with 57% of the list in Nike; Collingwood and Sydney aren’t far behind. At the other end, the Western Bulldogs spread their feet across the widest range in the competition. The figure on the right is each club’s goal-accuracy against the league (100 = average) — a reminder that how a club kicks has nothing to do with the badge on its boots.
It’s the first question anyone asks of a dataset like this, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a scary one. The overwhelming majority of the injuries carried across the league are knees and hamstrings — the parts of the body no boot brand is built to influence. The one category footwear could even plausibly touch, foot/ankle/Achilles, is a minority of the toll.
Which is the whole point of a project like this. We can map every boot in the competition and line it up against everything those players do with the ball. What we can’t do — and won’t pretend to — is turn an association into a cause. The boots don’t make the footballer. They just tell you a little about the footballer who chose them.