Ahead of their crunch Champions League semi final clash with Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City’s Ilkay Gündoğan has been spotted training in what looks to be a purple Primeknit Copa Mundial, suggesting that it could be set to drop in the near future.
The Copa Mundial is a special boot, and since adidas first tinkered with its classic look back in 2013, a full 31 years after its World Cup debut, it has been the subject of countless special editions, including the limited edition COPA70 from 2019, which was constructed from Primeknit and launched to celebrate the brand’s 70th anniversary. Well now it looks as though we could be getting a follow up to that release, with what looks to be a purple edition spotted on the feet of Manchester City’s Ilkay Gündoğan.
The COPA70 Primeknit was a thing of beauty, blending iconic aesthetics with modern mechanics for the perfect mix of tradition and forward thinking that’s at the heart of adidas’s ethos. It was the past meeting the present in a premium space. But it was also far from being the first time that Adidas had tinkered with the traditional look, and after inverting the classic colours back in 2013, they really ruffled traditionalist feathers by launching the Samba Copa Mundial collection, which featured colourful paint jobs inspired by the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Chief among those was the “Purple/White/Berry” look, and it’s that colourway that looks to have been recreated here.
This new boot looks to sit the Primeknit upper on the current COPA Sense soleplate, rather than the COPA 19+ soleplate that was used on the COPA70, but that stands to reason given the advances in technology. The colourway looks to be a fairly faithful recreation of the Samba release from 2014, although the laces adopt the same purple as the upper rather than the berry colouring of the OG. Then the soleplate – only glimpsed on Gündoğan's feet – appears to be berry coloured rather than white, which gives it more of a link to the current ‘Superspectral’ pack COPA Sense.
Gündoğan was wearing them in training, which suggests he may be gearing up to debut them properly in the game against PSG tonight.
Watch this space for news of an official drop for these...
