The History of Lionel Messi's Football Boots

You can almost date a Lionel Messi photo from the boots alone. The Nike T90 takes you right back to the beginning, the Tiempo and the Mercurial belong to those first Barcelona years, and then adidas arrives in 2006. From there, the F50 becomes part of the Messi look, following him through his rise at Barcelona before adidas eventually gives him a silo of his own. The Nemeziz and the X come later, before the story circles back to the F50 almost twenty years after he first wore the name.

The colourways tell an even deeper story. Ballon d'Or gold, Argentina blue and white, the original 10/10 collectors' boots, the World Cup-winning Leyenda, Miami-inspired releases and plenty of designs pulled straight from his own archive. Messi still wears the adidas F50 for Inter Miami today, so this is not a finished timeline either. From the Nike years to the latest F50, these are the football boots that have followed one of the longest careers in the game.

Early Career: Nike T90, Tiempo and Mercurial

Messi and adidas have been together for so long that seeing him in a Nike boot still looks slightly wrong. He made his Barcelona league debut against Espanyol in 2004 wearing the Nike Air Zoom T90 III, before the Tiempo Air Legend appeared during his first senior season and the Mercurial also got time on his feet. That gave the T90, the Tiempo and the Mercurial a brief place in the Messi archive before adidas arrived in 2006. It is a small part of the timeline compared with everything that followed, but a good reminder that one of the longest player-brand relationships in football did not actually start with the three stripes.

2006: adidas F50 TUNIT

adidas placed its new signing in the F50 family rather than the Predator, and it suited the player Messi was becoming. The +F50.6 TUNIT was one of the brand's more ambitious ideas, allowing players to change the upper, chassis and studs, although Messi was famously happier with the fixed sole construction of the lower-tier F30. His own boots were adapted accordingly, giving him the look of the F50 with a setup closer to what he wanted underfoot. He continued through the +F50.7 and +F50.8 generations as his role at Barcelona grew, while the 2006 World Cup gave the F50 its first place in his Argentina story. Long before player-spec boots became something everyone could zoom in on online, Messi was already wearing versions that did not quite match what was sitting on the shelf.

2009: adidas F50i

The F50i arrived as Messi moved from outstanding young player to the centre of world football. He wore the silo during Barcelona's Treble-winning 2008/09 season and famously removed and kissed his boot after scoring against Manchester United in the Champions League final. His first World Player of the Year award followed, and the colourways started becoming much more personal. Silver, gold and Argentina-inspired editions appeared, with the Sun of May featuring in the design language around several of his boots. The F50 was still an adidas silo worn by plenty of players, but Messi was already beginning to have his own lane within it.

2010: adidas F50 adizero

The F50 adizero changed the shape of the relationship. TUNIT was gone and adidas went hard at the lightweight speed-boot market, producing a cleaner, lower-profile F50 that Messi would make his own over the next few years. The purple Chameleon remains one of the great early colourways, followed by orange, silver, yellow and a run of gold boots celebrating his Ballon d'Or wins. His personal logo became more prominent and his player-spec pairs continued to offer details you did not necessarily get at retail, including customised leather uppers on models sold in synthetic. More importantly, these boots sat underneath some of the most ridiculous football of Messi's Barcelona career. For a generation who grew up checking what players were wearing every weekend, the F50 adizero and Messi are still difficult to separate.

2015: adidas Messi 15

adidas retired the F50 in 2015 and gave Messi something even more unusual: his own silo. The Messi 15 sat alongside the wider adidas football boot range with his name, logo and design language built into the boot from the start. Signature colourways are common enough now, but a player getting a full performance silo remains rare territory. The first Messi 10/10 also arrived that October, limited to only 100 pairs, with one for Messi, ten going to players in the Backed by Messi project and just 89 available to buy. Black, red and gold gave the release the collector look, but the bigger idea was the date itself. Number 10 became 10/10, and adidas had found a piece of Messi boot culture it could keep long after the Messi 15 disappeared.

2016: adidas Messi 16

The Messi 16 carried the dedicated silo into another generation, with a cleaner shape and another run of colourways built specifically around him. A second 10/10 release followed in October 2016, again produced in just 100 pairs, strengthening the link between Messi's shirt number and the date. Argentina details, personal graphics and his own logo were now established parts of the range, giving the Messi boots a recognisable identity without borrowing from another adidas silo. The dedicated family would prove relatively short-lived, but it left a bigger footprint than its lifespan suggests, particularly through the 10/10 concept that adidas still had plenty of use for.

2017: adidas Nemeziz

The Nemeziz moved Messi into one of adidas' most distinctive modern silos. Its bandage-inspired construction and wrapped upper looked a long way removed from the stripped-back F50 adizero, with the whole range positioned around agility and movement. Messi became the lead player across several generations, and his colourways increasingly started looking backwards as well as forwards. The purple Nemeziz 19.1 released around his sixth Ballon d'Or deliberately brought the Chameleon F50 adizero back into the conversation. adidas now had enough Messi history for one signature boot to reference another from almost a decade earlier, something that would become a regular part of his releases from here.

2021: adidas X Speedflow

The move into the X Speedflow brought Messi back into adidas' dedicated speed silo, and El Retorno was a fitting way to mark it. The colourway looked back towards the F30 associated with his famous Getafe goal in 2007, pulling old Messi boot details into a completely different generation of adidas speed boot. The timing gave the release another layer when Messi finally won the Copa America with Argentina that summer, before leaving Barcelona and beginning the Paris Saint-Germain chapter. Later X Speedflow colourways continued pulling from Rosario, Argentina, family and previous boots, with Messi's own career becoming an increasingly useful design archive rather than something adidas needed to reference vaguely.

2022: adidas X Speedportal

The X Speedportal period gave Messi one of the most important colourways of his career. Mi Historia and Balon Te Adoro arrived first, both leaning heavily into personal references, before the gold Leyenda appeared for the 2022 World Cup. The boot already carried Argentina details and callbacks to earlier Messi designs, but Qatar changed its place in the archive completely. Messi scored seven goals during the tournament, twice in the final against France, and lifted the World Cup with the gold X Speedportal on his feet. There are rarer Messi boots and louder Messi boots, but very few have photographs attached to them that can compete with the Leyenda.

2023: adidas X Crazyfast

The X Crazyfast followed Messi from Paris to Miami and gave adidas another part of his life to work into the colourways. Infinito continued the Argentina story, while Spark Gen10s used the national team's blue and white and connected Messi with ten young players chosen to represent the next generation. Miami started feeding into the palette too, opening the door for brighter pinks, blues and tropical references that felt very different from his Barcelona years. Between Argentina, Rosario, the number 10, Miami and an increasingly deep archive of previous boots, Messi's signature releases no longer needed to stay within one visual theme.

2024: The adidas F50 Returns

The F50 returned in 2024 and Messi went straight back into it. Almost twenty years separated the modern boot from the TUNIT family he first wore with adidas, with very little shared technically, but the name brought a lot of history with it. Triunfo Dorado introduced Messi to the revived silo with a black-and-gold look, while Triunfo Estelar arrived around 10/10 and reached back towards the Chameleon F50 adizero era. The adidas x Bad Bunny F50 pushed things in another direction again, taking the Messi F50 into a wider cultural collaboration. With Messi back in the F50, adidas had almost two decades of its own archive ready to work through.

2025: adidas F50

The F50 settled back into Messi territory during 2025, with La Vida Rapida followed by the Miami-inspired La Vida Tropical and then Vis10n later in the year. The colourways could now move around different parts of his story without needing to force everything into one signature look. Miami brought the brighter palette, older boots remained useful reference points and the number 10 kept finding its way into names and graphics. Underneath it all was the F50, the same silo name attached to Messi as a teenager and now following him through the latter stages of his career in the United States.

2026: adidas F50

The F50 stayed on Messi's feet into 2026, with Aurora Radiante continuing the Miami side of the story before El Ultimo Tango turned the attention back towards Argentina. Designed around his sixth and final World Cup, the F50 Messi El Ultimo Tango connected 2006 and 2026 through the F50 name, with white, Argentina blue and gold joined by a covered-lace look carrying a little of the older silo's character. Messi then wore the F50 through the end of his international career, including his final Argentina appearance at the Monumental on 6 October, where the game stopped in the tenth minute as the stadium stood for its number 10. He finished with 208 senior appearances and 126 goals, giving El Ultimo Tango a place adidas could never have fully designed into it: the final Argentina boot of Lionel Messi.

What Football Boots Does Lionel Messi Wear Now?

Lionel Messi still wears the adidas F50 for Inter Miami, so his international retirement has not closed the boot timeline. El Ultimo Tango can now sit in the archive as his final Argentina pair, alongside the Chameleon, the early 10/10 releases, El Retorno and the Leyenda as colourways that immediately take you back to a particular version of Messi.

There is also another familiar date approaching. adidas first turned 10 October into Messi Day in 2015, and this year's 10/10 arrives only four days after his final Argentina appearance. El Ultimo Tango was dressed for the goodbye, but anyone expecting the Messi boot story to fade out with the blue and white should probably keep an eye on what comes next. There is a lot more red waiting in the wings.

The show's not over.