From NIL to inspiration: How Rome Odunze helped build Adidas’ future of football cleats

CHICAGO — Months before his team made the NFL playoffs — and he secured a clutch fourth-down catch to save its season — Chicago Bears star wide receiver Rome Odunze spent an off day with all eyes on his feet helping fine-tune the latest innovation from Adidas.

The 23-year-old has actually been working with the German-based, global footwear company – long cemented in soccer and now prioritizing American football – for more than two years on a future-minded cleat design. It was initially inspired by his unique skillset.

In October, Odunze met with Adidas on an off day before Week 7, partaking in product adjustment conversations and a promotional photoshoot for the new football cleats he had been pinpointed to headline.

This week, Adidas officially unveiled the Adizero Horizon, days after Odunze and the Bears overcame an 18-point deficit to beat the Green Bay Packers in the opening wild-card round of the NFL postseason. It was Chicago’s first playoff win in 15 years.

Although Odunze didn’t wear the new cleat last weekend ahead of its announcement, he’s expected to deliver the NFL debut of the Adidas Adizero Horizon in Sunday’s divisional-round matchup with the Los Angeles Rams. The moment will culminate in a comprehensive ideation, design and rollout process dating back to 2023 during his senior college season.

“This is an experience you dream of as a kid,” Odunze told Andscape in October. “Growing up, you always think about having your own shoe, especially seeing basketball players with all their different signature shoes. So, it’s been great to be able to put my own mark on a cleat, for sure.”

Together, Adidas and Odunze, along with dozens of high school, college and pro athletes the brand leaned on for feedback through wear testing, teamed up to engineer an enigma of a cleat. The first word Adidas uses to advertise the Horizon — which won’t hit retail until the fall for $250 a pair — is “lightweight,” despite delivering a design crafted with the most studs the brand has ever incorporated into a cleat.

The studs strategically span from the forefoot, across the sole and around the heel, to promote faster acceleration, sharper cuts and more powerful braking. Modeled after track and field spikes, the Horizon also features a collection of technology, dubbed by Adidas as “SEPR8” innovations, including a metallic exterior plate splitting into three forefoot fingers for articulation and traction, as well as the most Lightstrike foam — introduced in 2018 for basketball footwear –ever incorporated into a cleat.

“In a way, this feels like my own cleat,” Odunze said. “But it definitely feels like a collaboration. It’s our cleat, between all the people who worked on it, provided thoughts and made deliberate changes from the prototypes to the final product. I’m happy with what we’ve created.”

In October, the two minds responsible for developing the vision of the Adizero Horizon traveled from Adidas’ North American headquarters in Portland, Oregon, to Chicago to hand-deliver the completed cleat to its headlining athlete. Attending their first product shoot, in a combined 25-plus years working for Adidas, Fionn Corcoran-Tadd, a senior designer for the company’s innovation team, and Keith Blume, the team’s senior manager of concepts, observed Odunze interacting with their creation.

As cameras flashed, an Adidas marketing rep handed Odunze a black briefcase adorned with the three stripes logo in chrome. It opened to reveal to the football world — after years of development — the Adizero Horizon.

“We work in the shadows,” Corcoran-Tadd told Andscape, “and our obsession is making athletes better. That’s what we strive toward every day. So, to bring something to life all the way, and then see it on Rome — I don’t know how to explain it. In innovation, there’s a lot of work that doesn’t make it. Because, we’re experimenting, pushing, trying things, and not everything is successful. So, when you do have a breakthrough like this cleat, and it works? It doesn’t get much better than this.”

The genesis of the journey to the Adizero Horizon stemmed from a simple internal question.

“We started by asking, ‘What is the future of football?’” Corcoran-Tadd recalled.

But the brand had to figure out who exactly could best field the question.

Adidas’ innovation team discovered that the answer lay in Seattle, 175 miles north of the Portland offices, at one of the brand’s partner universities. In 2018, after 20 years of repping Nike, the University of Washington reached a 10-year agreement to make the switch to Adidas as the school’s official apparel sponsor. The partnership went into effect on July 1, 2019. Exactly six weeks later, Odunze, then a 17-year-old, four-star high school football recruit from Las Vegas, committed to Washington.

By the start of his senior season, Odunze had emerged as one of the top wide receivers in college football, ultimately earning him a historic, multiyear endorsement partnership that would extend into his NFL career. In October 2023 — two years after the name, image and likeness (NIL) era in college sports officially began — Odunze and Michael Penix Jr., his quarterback at Washington, became the first football players to sign NIL deals with Adidas.

“Being able to join Adidas off the rip was definitely huge,” Odunze recalled. “I also got to do it along with my brother, Michael Penix, which was a really cool moment for us to share. We both definitely take pride in being Adidas’ first NIL athletes in football. It felt good to be able to open the door of NIL, and it’s dope knowing now how pivotal of a moment that was.”

From the beginning, Adidas planted the seed in Odunze’s head of a bigger plan for their partnership.

“Helping design a cleat was definitely something in my mind when I signed my NIL deal,” Odunze said. “There was chatter about a cleat that eventually came to fruition with this opportunity.”

While seeking to experiment and innovate on footwear for football, Adidas found a physical specimen to work with in Odunze. And the brand didn’t waste time before picking his brain.

“This project started when Rome was transitioning from his junior to senior year at Washington, where he was just a real stud — a rising star,” Blume told Andscape. “It was clear that he was a phenomenal athlete, and it was a great opportunity to speak with someone who we felt could be a good fit for the product we wanted to build.

“Part of the motivation was to look at speed players. Look at wide receivers. Look at defensive backs. It’s a priority for the brand to look at speed, and how we can add new dimensions to speed through product to give these athletes something new. That was kind of the focus coming into the project, and then it transformed through talking to Rome.”

In 2023, an initial discussion between Odunze and Adidas’ innovation team took place in Portland, launching a series of check-ins and tests during the cleat’s development. It lasted about two years in the lead-up to the photoshoot for the Adizero Horizon.

“I remember the early conversations with Adidas,” Odunze said. “It was interesting to hear how curious the team was about us as athletes, and how much of an emphasis they put into our personal thought process and liking. It wasn’t just like, ‘Here, wear whatever we give you.’ Adidas is really caring when it comes to its football athletes, and what they like in a cleat and want out of it. Being in that room with Adidas for the first time was like, ‘Oh, I’m really am a part of this brand and movement they’re making.’”

After kickstarting the process by asking themselves a question, Corcoran-Tadd and Blume posed a unique prompt to Odunze.

“We asked Rome, ‘What is your superpower on the football field?’ and he started talking about the concept of breaking,” Corcoran-Tadd recalled.

In football, a “break” is defined as the moment a receiver changes directions in a route. The common phrase of a receiver getting “in and out of breaks,” references the movement of a player entering and exiting s those directional changes, with the primary function of creating separation from a defender.

“When it comes to wide receiver play, there are so many different ways you can win a route,” Odunze said. “You can win at the release; you can win within the route, when it breaks; and you can win at the catch point. I’d say my game is defined by versatility and winning in a route at any given moment.”

An important aspect of route running is that a wide receiver needs to change speed — accelerate and decelerate — in order to get in and out of a break. So, for Corcoran-Tadd and Blume, the concept Odunze explained took on a double meaning, of both “breaking” and “braking.” 

“For a brand that’s focused on speed, at first it was like, ‘That’s a counterintuitive insight,’” Corcoran-Tadd recalled. “Because we’re trying to get athletes to go faster, but we’re talking about breaking. Then, we started to wrap our heads around the faster you go, the more important your braking gets. So, Rome started talking about how much power he has to give when he’s making breaks — and asked if there’s a way for us to kind of unlock that more. This was not a space we’ve ever looked into before.”

Simply put, Blume was blown away by Odunze’s communication.

“Once we had our first conversation with Rome, it was clear he was the right fit for this product,” Blume said. “He was very articulate about his performance. And that’s a really rare thing. It’s actually quite hard to find. A lot of guys, as they get older and are in the league longer, can form that type of articulation. But Rome, at a young age, was already able to describe both how he plays and what he needs. He just gave us really juicy insights, which we were able to build off.”

As soon as they made sense of the notion necessary for an elite athlete like Odunze to succeed, Corcoran-Tadd and Blume got to work on crafting a cleat that could solve for improvement in a wide receiver’s breaks.

“The first thing from our side is how do you take an insight and then build something that answers it?” Corcoran-Tadd said. “Some of the stuff we built was pretty out there and wild. You have to push to those edges of what is an acceptable shoe. What is realistic to build? It started with extending the heel out, adding additional studs, with almost like wings coming off it. Then, taking those prototypes as a proof of concept almost, then ask, ‘How do we build the real product?’”

While Adidas cooked up a new cleat, so did Odunze on the field. As a senior at Washington in 2023, he set a single-season school record for receiving yards (1,640) that also led the nation for FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) schools. Ahead of the 2024 NFL draft, Odunze tested as the top-ranked wide receiver prospect at the combine, leading the Chicago Bears to take him with the ninth selection of the first round, one pick behind Penix.

By his rookie season training camp, Odunze drew praise from six-time All-Pro receiver Keenan Allen for the exact receiver concept he had been championing to his brand partner.

“He’s a little better than me when I came in,” Allen, now with the Los Angeles Chargers, told ESPN. “He’s faster. He comes out of his breaks better than I did when I was that young. He looks more polished than I was.”

Behind the scenes, Adidas continued to design the new cleat, swiftly creating multiple iterations via 3-D printing to reach the point in the process of real sample development that leads to proper wear-testing and product examination through the lens of high-speed filming.

“We built out lots of different versions of a similar construction,” Corcoran-Tadd said. “So, with the heel, the questions were: What is the exact curvature? How far back? How many studs do we add? Then, we started to get the cleats on athletes, test and look at them in slow motion.”

Early in the current 2025-26 NFL season, Adidas sent two reps to Chicago to get the latest version of the cleat on its star headliner’s feet. Originally, they booked 20 minutes with him. But Odunze gave the brand more time. He didn’t want to take the cleats off.

“When Adidas flew in at the start of the season, I really appreciated them coming out, and being concerned about making the cleat perfect for me,” Odunze said. “My feet are my moneymakers. They’re such a big aspect of what I do for a living. Keeping my feet right — and being in the right cleat — is of the utmost importance to me and my career.”

In between check-ins with Odunze, high school and college athletes, commissioned by Adidas, spent countless hours lacing up and testing out all the evolving iterations of the cleat on the football field. They beat them up so much that pieces would break, which Corcoran-Tadd and Blume would fix. The brand’s innovation team worked relentlessly with the end goal of delivering a full-circle, finalized product to fit Odunze and his original insights. 

“The first time Rome saw the heel traction in its closer to final form, he was thrilled, because there was a connection between when he first sat down and talked to us, to something we went away and built for him,” Blume said. “This cleat is built because of Rome’s style of game. It’s almost bespoke, in a way.”

Around the time of the Adizero Horizon photoshoot, Odunze sustained a heel injury, ultimately revealed to be a stress fracture in his foot that sidelined him for six weeks. Finally, for the Bears’ Jan. 10 wild-card matchup against the Packers, Odunze returned but decided against debuting the soon-to-be-unveiled new cleat he’d been quietly working on for years. He had to get his feet wet first.

On fourth-and-8, Chicago down 11 with 5:37 left in the game, Odunze executed an impromptu – yet perfect – break of his route, freeing himself for a 27-yard grab. It was crucial to sparking the Bears’ 31-27 comeback win over the rival Packers in the NFC’s wild-card round last weekend

Now, Odunze has a new cleat to match his superpower.

“It’s been super progressive being a part of Adidas in the sense of us being able to continue to build our relationship, starting at the level of college to now figuring things out in the league,” Odunze said. “I’ve grown with Adidas, and Adidas has grown with me through all the very pivotal moments of my career. Finally being able to get to this moment is really cool. It lets you know that hard work, and sticking with something, pays off.”

The post From NIL to inspiration: How Rome Odunze helped build Adidas’ future of football cleats appeared first on Andscape.