Nike FC Barcelona Training Range 2022
It seems hard to believe now, but in the early 90s Ronald Koeman was a Barcelona legend. Nicknamed “Snowflake” after his apparent resemblance to the Albino Gorilla at Barcelona Zoo, he was a tough tackling defender with an uncanny knack of scoring spectacular free kicks. In fact, by the end of his time with Barcelona he was their highest ever goalscorer from both free-kicks and penalties - until a certain Argentinian came along.
The pinnacle of his Barcelona career came in the last ever European Cup final in 1992, before the competition was renamed the Champions League. Koeman had joined Barca from PSV Eindhoven where he’d won the European Cup under Guus Hiddink, and became an indispensable cog in Cruyff’s idealistic Dream Team. A hybrid centreback-defensive midfielder, he played a position that seems possibly idiosyncratic now, but he inspired generations of Barca players including Guardiola, Xavi and currently Sergio Busquets. The game was held on a sweltering night at Wembley to mark the return of English clubs to the competition following the ban from Europe after the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985. With the game deep in Extra Time, and looking to be headed for a stalemate and penalties, Koeman stepped up to take a Free-Kick just outside of Sampdoria’s area. Stoichkov rolled it back, Koeman ran up and laced it through the wall past a sprawling Gianluca Pagliuca.
28 years later, with the club in turmoil facing financial ruin and having lost the Cruyffian idealism that had brought the club a 15 year period of success under Rijkaard, Guardiola, Enrique et al, Koeman was brought in to rejuvenate the club as he had done with the Dutch National Team for two years previous. However, after another ignominious exit in the Champions League, an absolute disaster of a summer 2021 that saw the club lose their talisman Lionel Messi to PSG and a woeful start to the season, Koeman was sacked. His time in charge left his Barca legacy in tatters.
Fast forward to January 2022. Nike have dropped their new Dri-Fit Adv based on the iconic orange Meyba Away shirt Barcelona wore during the 1992 final. Without the manager who scored the winning goal, and no longer in the competition they won 30 years before. It is quite literally a training range that is now “without context.” So why bother writing this at all? If nothing else this training range gives us an exciting look into the future of Nike’s football output at the beginning of a World Cup year. Focusing on the Strike Elite Dri-FIT ADV Training top we look into the design details of the shirt to get an idea of what Nike’s 2022 shirt releases might look like.
Just as the 2021 Barca Training range dropped the NextGen Vaporknit technology, Nike have used Barca to launch the next evolution of Dri-Fit Adv. Featuring what Nike describe as “advanced sweat-wicking fabric that's strategically placed in high-heat areas to help keep you cool and comfortable” the material has a slight pocked texture that, in this colour, resembles the surface of a basketball. In fact at first glance the material shares more in common with the 2016 Vapor range that utilised the Aeroswift knitting technology, than the Dri-Fit shirt releases of last summer. Whereas before 2016 ventilation holes were cut into the fabric after the construction of the shirt, the ventilation holes for this are woven directly into the fabric as with the 2016 range. This gives the shirt an organic appearance reminiscent of skin. Subtly woven into the front panel is a musculature pattern that recalls the chestplate also on the Nike Aeroswift range. The original design was developed to prevent the shirt riding up on the players, whilst minimising “grab-points.” In 2016 Nike Creative Director Martin Lotti stated that the player feedback for this feature had been “phenomenal” and so is likely to have fed it’s return to Nike standard bearing training range. The overall construction is very slim fitting with the waist being about 2 inches narrower than the chest and hips on the size Large.
The under arms feature simpler lightweight material designed to release excess heat and moisture. It is perhaps in the joining of these panels that draws the biggest questions. On turning the shirt inside out you will notice that there isn’t a single heat-bonded seam on the entire shirt. Every panel is joined with overlock stitching. Whilst soft to the touch, I would believe that these seams would be noticeable to the wearer. Maybe this is something that will be addressed in next season’s club and international match shirts due for release over the summer.
Maybe the most noticeable feature from afar is the absence of separate collar or cuff pieces. This is without doubt to increase comfortability for the wearer and certainly with it on you struggle to tell where the shirt ends and your skin begins. However, if you are wearing this as casualwear it may make the shirt feel a little unfinished. As would be expected of Nike performance wear the crest, swoosh and heat pressed on to the material to eliminate any chaffing from excess stitching. They are so uninvasive that on the inside of the shirt it is near impossible to tell from the eye where they are applied. The crest is outlined in red and the swoosh is outlined in blue recalling the asymmetrically coloured panels on the Meyba ‘92 Away shirt. Interestingly the crest and swoosh are intentionally printed skewed against the coloured background. Whilst this is probably meant to give the shirt a modern disrupt appearance similar to the Nike World Tour range, it could easily be turned into a joke about the instability at the club at the moment. Whether this is to be carried across to other teams or is unique to this range is yet to be seen.
If this is a true representation of what Nike’s Dri-Fit Adv template for the coming year will look like, we are in for an exciting year. We are living in a time where the fabrics they are producing share many of the same properties as our own skin, where the kit we wear becomes extensions of our own bodies.