The World Cup's Pink Cleats Are a Warning About AI
To stand out in the world's most popular sporting event, all the major companies relied on the same prediction, and made the same shoe. It's an AI parable for our time.
A.I. Disclosure: I use LLM technology to help with research, fact-checking, document summaries, editing, and rewrites. I’m trying to use it responsibly, but I’m learning as I go. You can read my full ethics disclosure here.
The last game of the 2026 World Cup begins in an hour — I’m about to bring a portable DJ rig over to my neighbors — and if it’s anything like the first, there will be a lot of pink. You’ve noticed it by now. In the inaugural game of the tournament, Mexico vs. South Africa, all but three of the 22 starters took the field in some form of pink cleats. I’m in a pink era myself, so I felt kinship with these forward-looking multimillionaire superhumans racing around in shocking magenta.
We live in a time of oracles, when guidance is cheap and strategy is hard, and when the need to get one’s signal above the ever-growing noise is professionally existential. But the commodification of guidance means that it’s possible to all be drinking from the same source of wisdom without realizing it until it’s too late. It’s true of hot takes. It’s true of political messaging. And it’s true of shoes. In this economy of seekers, the major football-cleat companies, it turns out, are also looking to stand apart, and accidentally found themselves herded together.
Nike, Adidas, and Puma each spent somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four months developing a boot meant to be unmistakable against green turf and inside a phone screen. But in the end, they wound up at the end of a very expensive process with what look to the rest of us like the same shoes. Why? They all seem to have relied on the same oracle.
The forecasting company WGSN (which bills itself as “the global authority on change”) predicted that one of the hot colors of spring/summer 2026 would be something called Electric Fuchsia. As legendary sneaker designer Christian Tresser told British GQ, “this is what happens when marketing and trend analysis is seeing and using the same sources”: a musical-theater-level of footwear coordination.
I love this story. It tickles my taste in self-serious corporate misadventure. But it also scares the hell out of me. Because the people who build language models have been experiencing a version of this for years, and we’re all unwittingly victims of it.
