Master shoemaker Alexander Salot from Bremen was – his son Werner claims – the first person to come up with the idea of integrating threaded sleeves into the soles of soccer boots. Until then, it was normal to place iron plates in the sole. The Hungarians played the 1954 final with studs nailed into the soles of their boots. The Germans, on the other hand, had an easier time on the wet turf with their screw-in studs, which they could change easily. So it’s quite possible that the German team’s innovative boots played a part in their World Cup victory.
A winning innovation
For a long time, Adi Dassler was thought to be the father of screw-in studs. His company Adidas had developed a boot featuring removable studs. But it is more likely that the new technology can be traced back to Alexander Salot: a patent specification names him as the inventor of “soccer boots or similar with replaceable anti-slip studs”. The document is dated August 30, 1949, almost five years before the legendary World Cup final.
According to his son, Salot first came up with the idea years earlier: as a young shoemaker and a player in Bremen’s Blumenthaler SV soccer club, he took care of his teammates’ boots. In the late 1920s, he got the idea for screw-in studs that would make the sole last much longer. After the war, he continued to pursue his idea and began to make soccer boots with screw-in studs for other players as well. It is believed that he never found out during his lifetime that his patent application had been accepted and that he had succeeded as an inventor.
(Header: seeyou c. steps – Fotolia.com)
