After months of speculation, On has officially confirmed its much-talked-about move into football by unveiling none other than Kylian Mbappé as its leading athlete and Thierry Henry as its Director of Football.
The announcement – which came on September 18 – was hardly a surprise, with rumours swirling since before this summer’s World Cup. It’s a similar story for Mbappé’s involvement too, but finally seeing him wearing the brand feels pretty seismic.
Add Henry, who has apparently been working behind the scenes on the project since late 2025, and Barcelona’s Sydney Schertenleib, and this already looks like the most serious new arrival football has ever seen. Because unlike other “challenger brands”, On isn’t entering football to try its luck and see what it can achieve, it’s entering from a position no newcomers have ever occupied.
Naturally, Skechers offers the most obvious recent comparison here. When the American footwear label launched its football division in 2023, with Harry Kane wearing the SKX_01, it arrived almost from nowhere. Three years later, Skechers has established itself as a legitimate presence within the game, with its boots worn at the highest level, its roster expanded and the sight of a pair of Skechers commonplace.
That’s an achievement that shouldn’t be underestimated, but it also makes the possibilities for On feel considerably bigger. Sure, Skechers had scale, money and a global footwear business when it entered football, but what On has – alongside plenty of money of its own – is momentum.
It’s spent the past decade and a half turning itself from a strange-looking Swiss running brand into one of the most desirable sportswear companies on the planet. Its growth has been fairly ridiculous, too.
More importantly, it has achieved all of this without losing the challenger mentality that made the brand interesting in the first place. On is now enormous, yet it still carries itself like a company trying to upset the apple cart – which is precisely what football needs.
The boot market has been dominated by the same handful of names for decades. Nike, adidas and PUMA remain the immovable objects, while the likes of New Balance, Mizuno and now Skechers compete for remaining real estate.
For all the talk of speed and innovation, most modern boots seemingly exist within the same familiar framework. On, though, comes from somewhere else entirely. In running, the brand didn’t catch Nike and adidas by attempting to make slightly different versions of their shoes, it developed a visual and technical language of its own.
CloudTec made its footwear instantly recognisable, while its clean Swiss branding helped turn performance running shoes into everyday footwear. Roger Federer accelerated the crossover when he joined the brand in 2019 and Zendaya pushed it further when she became a Global Brand Parter in 2024. That, alongside collaborations with LOEWE proved that On could also occupy luxury spaces with ease. All the while, its elite running product continued to win races.
On’s ambition, according to co-founder David Allemann, is to connect “the pitch, the pavement and the runway.” It is an easy line to dismiss as business spiel, but On has already demonstrated that it understands how those three worlds increasingly overlap.
Then, of course, there’s the technology. LightSpray, On’s robotic (albeit slightly creepy-looking) manufacturing process, creates a one-piece performance upper by spraying a continuous filament around a mould. The process removes many of the conventional seams, materials and construction stages associated with footwear production, resulting in something incredibly light, precise and close to the foot.
On now plans to adapt that technology for football. That doesn’t guarantee it will immediately create a great boot — running quickly in a straight line and manipulating a football under pressure are obviously very different things — but it does give the brand a new place from which to begin.
In an industry filled with knitted uppers, grippy coatings and increasingly elaborate ways of describing materials, a robotically-sprayed football boot would be genuinely different. Not cosmetically different, but fundamentally different.
Mbappé’s involvement makes this whole thing impossible to ignore. He’s not just a famous face being used to amplify a launch moment. According to On, he will work directly with product teams to develop and test future footwear and apparel. Henry, on the other hand, will oversee the wider strategy, from athlete relationships to the cultural direction of the brand, while Schertenleib will help ensure its products are shaped by the future of the women’s game.
Even the launch campaign, photographed by Juergen Teller inside On Labs in Zurich, feels pointed. This is football presented through engineering, experimentation and a specific cultural lens.
Of course, breaking into football won’t be easy, but On has already disrupted one supposedly settled performance category by giving people something they didn’t know they needed. And now it has Mbappé, Henry, serious financial power, genuine cultural relevance and technology unlike anything currently on the pitch.
Football doesn’t need another sportswear brand doing more of the same. And the most exciting thing about On is that it certainly won’t.
