With Nike now falling way behind Adidas and Puma on the weight scale and speed boot market, the question ponders, “What is next for the Superfly?
An obvious first step Nike can/should take is to shed A LOT of weight. The Nike Mercurial Vapor Superfly’s II weighs 2.5 ounces more than the Puma v1.10 SL and when the new Adizero Prime comes out, they will be ever further behind. I believe that the Nike development team have to come up with something completely new for their next speed boot. It may be the Superfly III or something new all together. I’m expecting a big design change; new materials, new boot shape, new graphic and a new name all together, as for the past couple of years the design has basically stayed the same just with minor differences and new little gimmicks on the way. Maybe even scrapping the carbon fiber sole plate could be for the benefit of Nike, as it ups the price of their boots way up. Right now, the Superfly II has a carbon fiber sole plate and it costs $400 USD. If Nike want to be competitive on the speed bot market once again, they’ll have to slash their prices. We all know Nike have what it takes to pull off something big, and if they want to compete for the speed boot crown, they definitely have to. I am very excited to see what Nike have in store for us, hoping its something new and impressive.
(Besides the slight change of placement of the Nike Swoosh, they are all very similar, take away a few features and the lace cover for the Nike Mercurial Vapor SL)
When do you think that Superfly III are coming? I guess it won’t be soon because there are still a few colorways of Superfly II that are to be released.
nike should look back at the early mercurial vapors 1-3 they were really light for their time and great boots aswell, just go back to basics no silly carbonfibre or nikesense studs
Being an advocate of the mercurial range for some time (I have owned several incarnations from the Mercurial I, Match Mercurial, Mercurial Vapor II, Mercurial Vapor IV, and Mercurial Vapor V), I have to admit Nike need to change things up a bit as the design is getting a bit stale (a simillar situation that Porsche find themselves in the autotrade). No amount of colours will help change this.
The DNA of the Mercurial range can certainly be traced back, though the silhouette of the boot hasn’t changed since the first Mercurial Vapor in 2002.
Where do Nike go from here?
Who knows, but you cannot back against them doing something special. With the latest incarnation I feel the sense stud is a bit gimicky proven by the amount of custom soleplates we have seen in the World Cup and in top flight domestic leagues across the world.
As for Adidas, they finally have a speed boot that looks good and delivers in the AdiZero (the AdiZero Prime looks good also from what I’ve seen), though what many people have failed to point out that that the leather versions appear to be the boot of choice for many top pros over it’s synthetic brother (a 0.2oz weight gain I believe for the leather version).
Even Puma have released K-leather versions of their V1.08 & V1.10 in the past.
Maybe Nike need to go back to leather (or at least K-leather) in their quest for speed boot superiority, or at least offer it up as an option.
Hey NP9,
We don’t have any specific dates, but if the Supefly III is released (even though I hope it’s not and a whole new range is introduced), it will probably be around March or April as that’s when the other Superfly’s were released.
[...] a recent SER Opinion, we discussed how we wanted something new for the Superfly or an altogether overhaul of the speed [...]
superflys are still better than puma 100X cause of the nikesense stud and bespoke mixed stud and adidas its pretty much the same.
[...] and Victory 6′s are anything to go by they are still good boots. Many people have been calling for Nike to completely redesign the Mercurials and from these images it’s apparent that they haven’t [...]