What Happens When Nike Lets Seven Collaborators Share The Same Stage?

For Patta, the project represents the latest chapter in a relationship with Nike that dates back nearly two decades. Yet despite how much the collaboration landscape has changed since the Dutch retailer’s first Nike project in 2006, its philosophy has remained remarkably consistent. “Making product, for us, has never been transactional,” Schmidt explained. “Patta’s never been that type of company.”

Rather than viewing collaborations as isolated product launches, Patta has long approached them as opportunities to share its perspective with a broader audience. As collaborations have evolved from niche sneaker releases into full-fledged cultural campaigns, expressing cultural identity has remained at the center of the brand’s work.

While many consumers immediately associate Dutch football with the color orange, Patta’s approach extended beyond visual cues and national symbolism. According to Van De Waal, the team spent considerable time examining the composition of the Dutch National Team itself.

“When we had the opportunity to do this jersey and to also look at what the Dutch national squad stands for and who is in that squad, we checked player backgrounds,” Van De Waal explained. For the Amsterdam-based brand, the diversity represented throughout the Dutch roster mirrors the multicultural reality that has shaped both the city and the company itself. “All these diverse backgrounds are, for us, always been a great strength.” Van De Waal continued.

In many ways, that perspective captures what Universe of Football is attempting to accomplish. Rather than creating generic World Cup merchandise, Nike challenged each collaborator to tell a story rooted in its own community and lived experiences. For Patta, that meant exploring the multicultural makeup of the Netherlands. For others, it meant examining football through entirely different cultural lenses.

While Patta’s challenge involved expressing an existing football culture, the assignment looked very different for NOCTA. During the conversation, Matte Babel explained that Canada occupies a unique position within the World Cup conversation because unlike many of the countries represented throughout the X2 collection, Canada doesn’t possess the same deeply rooted football traditions that have existed across other parts of the world for generations.

So rather than drawing from an established football culture, NOCTA was tasked with helping create one. As Babel explained, the goal wasn’t simply designing product for a tournament, but to find a way to inspire Canadians to engage with the national team in a way they historically haven’t. “If you go to Amsterdam during the World Cup, everyone’s wearing Netherlands jerseys,” Babel said. “You go to Canada during the World Cup, no one’s wearing Canada jerseys. Everyone’s wearing their own country jerseys.”

That insight ultimately became one of the catalysts behind NOCTA’s collection and, in many ways, speaks to the broader strength of the Universe of Football initiative. While every X2 partner was participating in the same project, no two collaborators were solving the same problem.

Listening to Van De Waal and Schmidt discuss the Netherlands, and Babel describe Canada’s unique relationship with football, it raises an obvious question: how do seven distinct points of view ultimately become one cohesive initiative? For Delimi and Nike’s Energy Marketing team, that challenge sat at the center of Universe of Football from the very beginning.

On paper, the project sounds overwhelming. Seven countries, seven collaborators, seven communities. In total, that’s twenty-one stakeholders when accounting for local partners and organizations. Despite the intimidating matrix points, Delimi repeatedly described the process as surprisingly fluid. “The fact that we went very deep into the local and distinctive point of view nourished all of us to do our best,” Delimi explained. Rather than attempting to force alignment, Nike encouraged each collaborator to go deeper into its own identity.

But when the World Cup is involved, it can’t be entirely harmonious. “There was a healthy competition,” Delimi explained. “It was more like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re going for that one?’ or, ‘They came up with this crazy idea.'” Instead of creating friction, the presence of multiple collaborators pushed each partner to elevate its work because while the World Cup is ultimately a competition on the pitch, what could have easily become a clash of ideas instead became a collective effort fueled by mutual respect and shared passion for football culture.

If Universe of Football represented the framework, the Cryoshot quickly became one of its most recognizable products. According to Babel, the silhouette’s journey began years before football-inspired footwear exploded across sneaker culture. “The Cryo was a shoe that one of the Nike designers had made that no one wanted,” Babel recalled. “We thought it was hard, so we’re like, we’ll take it.”

Long before football boots became one of fashion’s hottest trends, NOCTA saw something in the concept. The blend of performance football DNA and lifestyle sensibilities immediately resonated with the team, who began exploring the silhouette roughly three years ago. At the time, however, the market looked very different and fast forward to the summer of 2025, football boots suddenly became one of the industry’s most discussed categories as consumers gravitated toward silhouettes that once existed almost exclusively on the pitch.

Nike had already been monitoring something that appeared like an overnight trend to many. According to Delimi, the surge in football-inspired footwear reinforced the belief that the sport’s influence was extending well beyond match-day, and Nike recognized a creative opportunity to build a larger platform around football culture itself that could accommodate multiple perspectives and creative interpretations.

The Cryoshot ultimately became one of the initiative’s defining products and Patta played a key role in introducing it to the public. Nearly a year before the full scope of Universe of Football had been revealed, the Amsterdam-based brand offered the first sanctioned glimpse of the silhouette, generating immediate discussion around Nike’s football-inspired direction and building the hype to what we see today.

For Patta, the assignment wasn’t to radically transform the shoe. “It’s totally intentional to keep it as much as possible original,” Van De Waal explained. “We do love a lot of what Nike did already. We are just nerds of the game, to be honest.” Their resulting Cryoshot design remains deeply connected to the original Mercurial, serving as both a tribute to Nike Football’s past and a glimpse at where the category may be headed next.