Pressure-activated micro-grip from an insect's foot ended up on World Cup cleats

When Spanish midfielder Pedri sprints down the pitch at the 2026 World Cup, microscopic pillars on the Nanostrike+ fabric of his adidas Predator cleats help him control the ball. The technology came from Bill King, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who spent two decades on microstructures inspired by insects: on an insect's foot, thousands of tiny spines called the tarsus grip into a plant as the bug walks, leaving the plant unscathed.

The trick is that the surface behaves like a switch without any mechanism. Dribbling with low pressure produces a low grip level; striking the ball activates the microstructures' grip, so the same shoe is slippery when light and grippy when forceful, and stays that way in rain, shine or mud.

King's lab did not start with football. Work began for electronics, fabrication and micromechanical devices, with projects for the Department of Defense and microstructures inside engines and pumps for the Department of Energy. What excited King was manufacturing the microstructures at huge scale and bringing them into consumer products — which is how defense-adjacent surface science ended up on a World Cup boot. No sales or performance figures are in the material.

Passive pressure activation means no tuning by the player: the physics decides when grip engages.

Consistent grip in wet and muddy conditions comes from surface geometry rather than coatings that wear off.

The biomimetic origin gave the project two decades of government-funded validation before it met a consumer factory.

Borrow mechanisms from bodies that solved the problem over millions of years — an insect's tarsus grips a plant without damaging it — and let the user's action do the switching.

The cleats reached the pitch on players like Pedri at the 2026 World Cup. The same microstructure research continues to trace back to electronics, engines and pumps; no performance or sales results are recorded in the material.