Soccer flamingos: why there are so many players in pink cleats at the 2026 World Cup

The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicked off with a lot of scandals, incidents and innovations. However, many people noticed an unusual oddity during the World Cup — the vast majority of players go to the game in pink cleats, which surprises viewers around the world. Random fashion, the choice of football players, or a corporate conspiracy? All the answers are in the Izvestia article.

Which brands have pink cleats?

Almost all the major manufacturers came to the tournament with variations of the same idea: Adidas has a Road to Glory, Nike has a Breakout, Puma has a Showtime, Skechers has a Sunset, and New Balance brought its bright Pure Ambition to the tournament cycle back in March. That is, we are not talking about spontaneous fashion from the locker room, but about a pre-prepared decision.

When large companies make similar identical decisions, it usually means one thing: this is not a whim of designers, but a simultaneous calculation of marketing, product teams and trend analysts.

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Why did brand analysts come to the same color?

The most accurate explanation was given by Odinga Nimako, one of the heads of Nike's global soccer shoe business, in a conversation with The Athletic. According to him, Nike proceeded from the demand for bolder, brighter colors, because both athletes and buyers associate them with confidence.

Nimako separately emphasized that pink works especially well against the background of a green lawn, both from the stands and on TV. In other words, the brand did not come from the romance of color, but from a very applied task: how to make the boot as visible as possible at the moment of world attention.

Hence the paradox of the tournament. All these companies read about the same set of signals: brightness is trending, players need that brightness, and the cleat models themselves need maximum visibility in the field and on the screen. They wanted to stand out, and that's why they came to almost the same decision.

In this sense, pink at the 2026 World Cup is not a coincidence, but a classic case of market convergence: different brands independently chose the same "correct" answer.

Pink turned out to be almost the perfect color for the World Cup-26

The World Cup always has two games at the same time. One is on the lawn, the other is in a TV shot, cuts, vertical videos, promos and a social media feed. Pink won precisely because he turned out to be strong in both. On a green background, it really catches the eye instantly. These cleats were designed to stand out both on the field and through the screen, and ProDirect magazine, in its analysis of the summer trend, reduced the formula to a simple thesis: pink color allows players to be visible.

From this, it is quite easy to draw the following conclusion: if a detail is better visible on TV and "through screens", then it works better in short digital content, where the struggle takes place literally in a split second of attention. This is no longer just an outfit, but almost an advertising billboard embedded in a football player's leg.

One more detail is also important. Most national teams do not play in pink equipment as in the base color, so a pink boot almost always contrasts with both the grass and the uniform. For manufacturers, this is the ideal geometry of visibility: the color does not argue with club or national colors, but lives as a separate marker of attention.

Everyone wanted to be more visible than everyone else and eventually became similar to each other.

The irony of the World Cup is that in terms of sales and recognition, the plan almost worked perfectly, but in terms of brand identity, it didn't quite. Adidas, Nike, Puma, Skechers and New Balance came to the summer tournament not just with bright, but suspiciously close to each other solutions.

Brands wanted to highlight their fresh cleats, sell new lines of models, and be the first to go on the air and make viral videos. As a result, the color itself stood out, not the specific brand. The manufacturers calculated the trend correctly, but they went too far with its unification. They aspired to be different leaders of the same race, but they became participants in an almost identical pink parade.

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There are still exceptions.

The tournament is not complete without the "anti-pink resistance". The most notable example is Lionel Messi, who plays in a special adidas F50 "El Último Tango" — a blue and white model with gold accents, clearly referring to the colors of Argentina and his last World Cup. This is not just a different color scheme, but a separate plot gesture: in a world where almost everyone is trying to shout the same color, Messi has received personal shoes that work not on a general trend, but on his own legend.

Another striking counterexample is Christian Pulisic. Puma has released an exclusive ULTRA 6 Ultimate for the USA national team winger: a white base with blue stars. That is, instead of dissolving into the general "pink stream", Pulisic received a separate visual story tied to the World Cup at home for the USA.

There are other exceptions. The white models of the Shadow Elite 4 line became the boots of Fermin Lopez, Ferran Torres, Pedro Porro and Ollie Watkins. The German pre—tournament training also had its own "dissidents": Antonio Rudiger had black cleats, Malik Thiau had turquoise ones. So pink became the dominant background of the tournament, but it did not completely destroy the personality.