It’s about that time of year when we start to get early glimpses at the new generation of adidas’s iconic silo, the Predator, doing the rounds, and sure enough Aston Villa’s Emi Buendia has given us a good look at the prototype in a recent training session.
The recent trend is that we get a new Predator from adidas at the start of each year, and so, with 2023 looming large on the horizon, we get our traditional first look at the prototype for the next instalment in the iconic franchise, courtesy of Aston Villa’s Emi Buendia. Arriving in typically blacked out fashion, it looks like the boot has once again had some significant retooling, abandoning the stripped rubber element approach of the Edge in favour of a look that goes back to something more akin to the Mutator and Freak that preceded it.
It’s always hard to tell too much about a prototype, with that blacked out look keeping it shrouded in a certain amount of mystery (kind of the point), but we can still see that this is set to be a big departure from the current-gen Predator Edge.
Buendia has obviously opted for a laceless ‘+’ version of the boot, and the collar doesn’t seem too high. The upper has a 3D texture that moves away from the Zone Skin of the Edge and back towards the Demon Skin of the Freak (in look at least), although the spikes and their formation don’t quite carry the same aggressive aesthetic as the latter.
Expect to see more pros giving this boot a test run in the coming weeks as we edge towards a launch that you can expect to see in the new year.
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