Inside New Balance’s World Cup: Testing, inventing and supplying players’ families with kit

It was late in 2023 when Brazil international Endrick and his family arrived at New Balance’s headquarters in Boston to put pen to paper on a multi-year deal with the sportswear brand.

As they watched a special montage of their teenaged son play out on a big screen at the company’s training facility, his mum, Cintia Ramos, wiped away tears. She turned to those in the room and offered them candy, bringing smiles to the faces of those present on what was a momentous day not just in the Brazilian’s young career, but in the brand’s 120-year history.

Chasing Endrick proved quite the task for New Balance, but they successfully fought off competition from Nike, Adidas and Puma to land the prodigy who was six months out from his impending €60million ($68.39m at current exchange rates) summer transfer to Real Madrid from boyhood club Palmeiras, having signed an agreement with the Spanish giants at 16 to move to the Spanish capital when he turned 18.

Fast forward to the summer of 2026, and Endrick is at the World Cup, expected to be Brazil’s next great star, described as an “extraordinary talent” by national team boss Carlo Ancelotti, and one of New Balance’s poster players.

At the TRACK, New Balance’s state-of-the-art training facility where that montage and those signing-day tears played out, Endrick is back on the big screen again. There are images of him everywhere.

Also on the walls are England and Arsenal winger Bukayo Saka, who was a marquee signing for the brand when he joined in 2020 at 18. A commercial featuring Endrick, Saka, Eberechi Eze (Arsenal, England) and Tim Weah (Marseille, USMNT) plays on repeat above where a 200-meter indoor track usually sits but has been replaced by a full-sized artificial turf pitch for the World Cup.

Located across the road from New Balance’s main offices in Boston Landing, Brighton, which has its own nearby train station and is a 15-minute drive from downtown Boston and an equally quick drive from Boston Logan International Airport, allowing their athletes easy in-and-out access from around the world, is the TRACK.

Found behind heavy-set entrance doors adorned with giant red lettering, it is an impressive, futuristic multi-sport venue built across 455,000 square-feet (roughly a little larger than Wembley Stadium’s retractable roof) and also houses a 3,500-capacity concert venue on the ground floor.

In place until August 3, the new-look TRACK, which can hold over 5,000 spectators for various sporting events, will be the centre of New Balance’s Football House, home to workshops, skills and drills sessions and cleat trials. Among those in attendance will be local children from Boston SCORES, a non-profit free-to-attend after-school football programme founded in New England in 1999. These events will also be popping up in Miami, Los Angeles and New York throughout the tournament with similar youth groups set to be involved.

“We have a very purposeful roster and we’re very specific in terms of the athletes that we bring into that space,” Rob Sheldon, director of global football product, told The Athletic. “The reason for that is the idea of partnership over sponsorship. We use the term ’boutique and bespoke’, and what really sits behind that is the proximity it affords us with the athletes.

“It really is an opportunity to strongly partner with those athletes on a day-to-day basis to make sure we’re serving them the product on a week-to-week basis.”

During this World Cup there will be at least one staff member on location at every game where there is a New Balance player competing, be it Sadio Mane for Senegal or James Rodriguez with Colombia. “It is not required, but it is how we go the extra mile for our athletes,” said Chris Davis, brand president and chief marketing officer, via email.

All players will have the number of boots they have specifically requested, with most opting for between six and a dozen pairs. Saka and Endrick will also have pairs of New Balance’s Stone Island cleat collaboration, launched at the start of June. Saka debuted them during England’s opening game with his new logo replacing Stone Island’s on the heel.

And not only are the players kitted out, their families are too. “We want to make sure they feel supported and part of the brand as well because we understand the support networks and how important the families are as a base to the players,” Sheldon added.

A lot of the World Cup product preparation happened upstairs at the TRACK, at the Sports Lab where athletes were invited to test footwear and apparel and give feedback.

The lab is tucked away behind doors which need a specific pass to enter. This is a not-so-secret-yet-top-secret facility where the doors lock behind you. After big red sofas at the entrance — red is the colour theme throughout the building — there is a long corridor, either side of which are the various research departments, where 15 research engineers, led by director of research Jinger Gottschall, spend their days testing, innovating and inventing. A lot of which is off limits to filming and photography.

“I have been here for three years and, for my entire time, soccer has been huge in terms of initiative,” Gottschall said, while giving a tour of the facility, which has been open for four years on this site.

The lab has three main research arms: athlete insight, foundational research and innovation. Endrick, Eze and Frimpong are but a few of the footballers who have used the testing facilities.

The ‘Athlete Insights’ room is essentially a locker room that can be changed like a movie set to make sure whichever athlete is visiting feels at home when delivering their insights. Taking the middle seat of five lockers is 17-year-old rising star Deus Stanislaus, who plays for the University of North Carolina women’s team and the United States Under-17s. Stanislaus was a guest at the facility during the first weekend of the World Cup and was in attendance with her family at Scotland’s 1-0 win over Haiti at Boston Stadium, one of seven games being hosted in nearby Foxborough.

Olympic and world champion hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Canadian international footballer Jordyn Huitema and two-time Grand Slam winner Coco Gauff also have their spaces set up.

Insight involves surveys and focus groups, and “talking with athletes to understand not only the why of what they do, but how they feel on a day-to-day basis, what product means to them, both apparel and footwear, and how we can assist,” Gottschall, who worked at Penn State for 12 years and has a PhD in running physiology and biomechanics, explained.

“This is research for the good of human performance and health,” she said. “It’s just about how we can feel better and have higher daily satisfaction while moving.”

The innovation group is the sports lab’s largest, with engineers focusing on particular sports. “Here we specialise in track or race-day running,” she said. “Then our sports are baseball, American football, global football, tennis and basketball. We do love to help in other sports such as volleyball, lacrosse and we’re actually starting golf this season.”

Just about every athlete who has a deal with New Balance has been in this building. That includes the LA Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, two-time NBA champion Kawhi Leonard and tennis superstar Gauff, whose name is on the wall of the tennis court.

Athlete visits can last between 30 minutes and four hours, the latter if they are involved in testing. New Balance is currently at the end stages of testing footwear and apparel for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, a project they started after the closing ceremony of the Paris Games.

When The Athletic visits, the lab is quiet. It is also smaller than expected, with various rooms dotted along a corridor that leads to the half-sized tennis court signed by Gauff, which has the same hard surface as at the US Open. Adjacent to that is a shrunken NBA-certified court, as well as a small artificial pitch with a goal. The pitch can also be set up for a golf simulator or batting cage, depending on what it is they are testing and who is visiting. In this area alone, there are 126 cameras and force plates embedded beneath each surface to give further readings.

There is a foot scanner that can take 106 measurements from the ankle to the toes, which helps when personalising or adapting shoes or cleats, and a 3D body scanner, which gives 150 full-body measurements. A treadmill with artificial turf allows for further cleat testing, helping to understand the energy cost of various boots because reducing fatigue is a key area of focus.

In a room called the ‘Run Lab’, there are 26 cameras — even some beneath the floor — to measure intricate movements of the body from every angle to ensure balance in every running shoe produced. And there’s the ‘Smash Lab’, filled with various machines which can robotically mimic the movements athletes; from the in-demand Ivory Coast and RB Leipzig winger Yan Diomande to Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen, or Olympic marathon runner Emily Sisson. This is where the Furon v9 cleat was developed.

“Shoes can actually make about a four per cent difference in terms of reducing your energy cost. And if you’re talking about a marathon for an elite runner, that can be five to 10 minutes. For an everyday runner, it can be 20-plus. So understanding how the shoe influences energy cost is one of our most important questions,” Gottschall said.

The thermal testing room can be set from zero to 100 degrees Fahrenheit and zero to 100 per cent humidity. It also replicates the experience of being at altitudes of up to 17,000 feet above sea level. Football shirts are tested in this room.

Some quality-control testing involves a creepy-looking thermal mannequin, which can be set to the mass of any New Balance athlete. The robotic doll can walk, run and even sweat. They put liquid in the back of the mannequin and, depending on the conditions in the room, it will begin to sweat through small glands. There is even a wheelchair on stand-by to move it around the lab.

“We need to understand the sweat rate. And if the clothing is actually helping keep the individual cool,” Gottschall added. “This is huge for global football kits in terms of understanding how they are going to respond to 90-plus minutes of high-intensity exercise in multiple different conditions.”

Another way in which New Balance has attempted to cut through and connect during this 104-game tournament being played across three countries is through its roster of women’s players.

On the opening day of the World Cup, as Mexico were preparing to get the tournament underway against South Africa at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, the New Balance crew were on location in Boston shooting a marketing campaign at Babson College.

All six of their women’s footballers were on set at the university campus in nearby Wellesley. Michelle Cooper (USWNT, Kansas City Current), Tatiana Flores (Mexico, Club Tigres), Silvana Flores (Mexico, Pumas UNAM), as well as University of North Carolina’s Kate Faasse and the aforementioned Huitema and Stanislaus.

The purpose of the day was to capture content ahead of the US Youth Soccer National Championship, held this July in Nashville, Tennessee. New Balance agreed a multi-year contract with US Youth Soccer last year and so this shoot was to put the spotlight on that tournament and their women’s roster during a period which will be heavily dominated by the men’s World Cup.

Being one of just 19 “global football” athletes — the term New Balance uses in place of “soccer” — Chicago Stars forward Huitema finds this exclusivity lends to a stronger, more meaningful connection.

“It’s not just every athlete under the sun wearing the same thing,” the 25-year-old Olympic gold medallist told The Athletic. “It’s really collaborative. I am very close friends with everybody there and whenever I go on those trips, I always feel that way.”

But the current focus for New Balance is a successful World Cup. The We Got Now advert, which plays on repeat at the TRACK, is being broadcast around the world during the World Cup. It is a far cry from the Hollywood-style productions made by Nike or Adidas but is in keeping with New Balance’s relaxed style. Davis explained that was deliberate and was “rooted in a challenger-brand mindset.”

“We’re less interested in winning a moment and more interested in building long-term relevance,” he added.

In East London, they set up a two-a-side pitch called The Departure Lounge for four days at the start of the tournament and, in nearby Shoreditch, there are temporary murals of Saka and Eze. “The World Cup is one of the few moments where sport and culture truly collide,” said Davis. “The goal isn’t to be everywhere.”

From touring their facilities, it is clear the list of ongoing projects is lengthy and nothing is on hold as this tournament plays out.

“There’s still plenty to be getting on with,” Sheldon, who is based out of the company’s UK headquarters in Warrington, England, said. “As much as we’re going to enjoy the World Cup. I’m still thinking about 2027, 2028, 2029 and the projects we’ve got underway.”

“In terms of product creation, you work so far in advance, often working 36 months out,” Michael Mills, senior category manager for football footwear, equipment, and accessories, explained. “So, whilst we’re very excited to see these products hit the market, I would suggest that we probably put pens down on these (men’s World Cup) projects almost 12 months ago.”

Mills, who is also based in the north west of England, revealed they are now in the closing stages of finalising the boots which will be worn by their women’s players at next summer’s women’s World Cup in Brazil.

Also located at Boston Landing are the practice facilities of two New Balance-sponsored teams, the six-time Stanley Cup-winning NHL side Boston Bruins, and 18-time NBA champions Boston Celtics.

From the weight room of the Celtics’ Auerbach Center, you can see out onto Interstate 90. As cars speed towards central Boston, drivers are greeted with a subtle image of Premier League champion Saka with his arms outstretched.

New Balance are doing a home World Cup in their own way. And already innovating for the next one.

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