Studs Up

With Nike and adidas dropping gabillions of pounds into football marketing these days, it seems to me that Umbro is taking the Nintendo approach of positioning their brand and company in the market place. When Microsoft and Sony were fighting to see who had the biggest, baddest, most powerful video game console Nintendo simply avoided the whole concept and went after the rest of the world who wanted fun, simple games that could be enjoyed by groups of people. They killed it.

Having watched Umbro’s recent moves quite carefully, they seem to be doing the same (deliberately or not, I can’t say for sure) but while Nike and adidas are trying to bring football up to some kind of spectacular, dramatic, movie-esque level of entertainment Umbro seem to instead be focusing on a more playful, grassroots level of passion. The track that plays when you hit their official site pretty much sums it up. It’s a clear difference from the look and feel you get from its competitors and it’s certainly memorable and a bit left of what I’m used to expecting from an ultra-traditional brand like Umbro.

They’ve also just launched their latest project – customisable soles for their signature Umbro Speciali boot. Again, they’ve seen where everyone else was playing (boot uppers) and gone the other direction. They’ve kicked things off with a very cool Customise Your Speciali online tool that allows you to upload your own image to slap onto the boot. If you submit one, it may be displayed on-site and eventually Umbro-sponsored players like Gael Clichy, John Terry and Michael Owen will pick their favourites to actually wear in a match this season. Not bad at all.

Definitely give it a whirl and check out the other submissions so far as there are some great designs and an expected number of novelty ones (giant pics of vegetables seems to be popular for some reason).

I did one of my own, choosing a favourite shot of mine. The Transfer Window Shaman scaring the hell out of a sleeping victim: