Nike’s Mind shoes claim to soothe your neurons, tune your alpha waves and lift you into a state of focused brilliance. Trainers, in other words, that want to upgrade your head from the feet up. 

It is no surprise that tech minded creators have leapt on the story. Neuroscience. EEG data. Twenty-two foam nodes promising a pocket-sized reset for your instep. The ambition is impressive. Anything that tries to blend cognitive science with sports engineering is, at the very least, moving the conversation forward. 

But when footwear promises to reshape mindset, it is worth asking sensible questions. Hope has always been part of sport’s psychology. Max Factor famously sold hope, not cosmetics. In elite performance, whisper marginal gains and everyone listens. That is why we created The Smarter Sports Awards, formerly The Sports Technology Awards: to celebrate real advances and bring clarity to the ideas that can genuinely help people invest wisely. 

Nike’s Mind Science Department talks confidently about sensory pistons, altered brain rhythms and a future where cognitive tuning is as normal as cushioning. If the evidence follows, this could be a fascinating chapter in how athletes prepare. 

Right now, we simply have not seen the independent data that shows whether these neural ripples become better decisions or steadier competitive minds. The placebo effect is still sport’s most underrated technology. If someone believes the shoe sharpens focus, it will probably help, but that is psychology rather than engineering. 

So, are Mind shoes a glimpse of performance’s next frontier? Possibly. Are they marketing dressed as science? Also, possibly.  

The encouraging part is this: technology in sport is no longer something you simply download, recharge or plug in. Innovation is clearly accelerating but the bar for evidence also needs to rise. That combination is good news for everyone who wants sport to get smarter. 

On the TV mega-series, ‘This Is Us’, a couple made decisions by ‘worse-casing this’.  They’d imagine the most disastrous outcome possible, usually their daughter becoming a drug addled pregnant stripper, and work backwards from there.

So, let’s worse case the headline: England rugby team facing Fiji in front of 15,000 empty seats. The culprit, apparently? Women’s rugby.

After a summer in which the Women’s Rugby World Cup sold out, delivered thrilling matches, and created genuine new audiences, we’re now told it might have been too successful. Fans, the argument goes, are rugby fatigued. The women’s game has supposedly cannibalized interest in the men’s fixtures.

Really? Let’s worse case that.

If that narrative sticks, women’s sport becomes an easy scapegoat for a system struggling with its own economics. Rights holders start to whisper about whether women’s competitions can ‘afford’ prime calendar slots. Broadcasters retreat and sponsors decide their progressive experiment felt good but has run its course. Meanwhile men’s game pricing and formats go forward with blind faith that fans will keep coming.

Here’s the irony: women’s sport has been doing everything right; built new communities, new digital consumption habits, and a more modern relationship with fans. It has worked damn hard to earn attention, to make content social-first, and to show up where there was demand. It was forced to think differently and it did. Brilliantly.

FYI – see also the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup.

Assuming that fans will always come and pay whatever price is set is dangerous, fragile and misguided. Yes, there are cost of living pressures, over-commercialization, and fixture congestion, but the audience hasn’t disappeared, it has just got more discerning. Fans want value, variety and something real. Tradition and heritage alone is insufficient.

Blaming women’s rugby for the men’s attendance drop is missing the point by a very long margin. Women’s sport hasn’t drained demand; it’s shown what sport looks like when you innovate to compete. 

Women’s sport isn’t a threat to be managed but a playbook worth stealing. The future isn’t about dividing the pie by gender; it’s about cooking up something big and compelling enough to feed a wider fan base. 

The worst case isn’t 15,000 empty seats. It’s learning nothing from why they’re empty.

Want more like this?
Sign up to Access Innovation – the newsletter that tells you what’s next before it ends up in your competitor’s performance stack.

VAR and TMO in sport are good things. They back up referees with evidence, cut out errors, and—largely—make sure the right side wins for the right reasons. They’ve also taken some of the heat off officials, curbed a few theatrical collapses, and opened the door to genuine transparency for fans. In short, they’ve made sport fairer, sharper, and a lot harder to cheat. 

Continue reading

I bumped into athletics star and former Sports Technology Awards (now Smarter Sports Awards) judge and presenter, Dai Greene, last week. We talked about track and field’s current struggles and he landed a thought that stopped me short: T&F needs to ditch The Olympics as its four-year glory moment, build through more events and make the World Championships its pinnacle event.

Continue reading

When we launched The Sports Technology Awards over a decade ago, the idea was gloriously simple: celebrate the things that were rewriting – or rewiring – sport. Back then, ‘technology’ was the keyword. Apps, data, platforms, broadcast kit … all the wonder stuff that made sport look, sound, and behave differently.

Continue reading

There are few phrases in sport that make the blood run cold faster than ‘poisonous gas.’

Continue reading

The bosses of Electronic Arts have just trousered a historic $55 billion deal. For the uninitiated, EA is the outfit behind Madden NFL and EA Sports FC (formerly FIFA).

Continue reading

The World Championships in Tokyo might be remembered for medals and records, but one of its most important legacies should be how it manages its officials. 

Straight from the ‘Captain Cock-up’ playbook of the 1993 Grand National, the Tokyo marathon saw a false start. This was unprecedented and ridiculous, over 43km it would have made no competitive difference.

Continue reading

Hit 50 and people start referring to the next decade as ‘sniper’s alley’, the implication being that if something bad is going to get you, it’ll take the shot then. Apple, ever the opportunist, has clearly clocked this, and its latest watch comes with a new trick: passive hypertension detection.

Continue reading

Who remembers the days when quality cotton was the gold standard of sports kit? 

Your parents preached the benefits of natural fabrics and we believed them…right until it rained. 10 minutes later and lo, your bodyweight doubled and your kit had all the charm of a bath towel drenched in cold water.

Continue reading