Once upon a time, training shoes were for training... that was until a few thousand Scousers were let loose on the sportswear stores of mainland Europe.
Lucas Leiva accepts his Player of the Year Award - an Adidas Samba sprayed gold
The End magazine appeared on the streets of Liverpool in 1981 as adidas mania gripped the city. Liverpool FC’s European away matches meant that the youth of Merseyside both Red and Blue could go on lucrative ‘shopping’ trips of discovery. Searching for sports shops in European cities stocking the much-coveted items of footwear became just as important as the match itself.
That first generation of Scousers fell in love with the three stripes and they became de-rigueur for the terraces. At that time, we must stress, that the only place ‘trainees’ could be found was in sport shops. They were designed for sporting activities whereas young Scousers turned them into a desirable street wear fashion item. The End documented the period between 1981-1988, which coincided with the growing popularity of trainees and sportswear. Thus began the 30-year love affair with adidas that continues to this day and shows no signs of waning.
Trainer empires were built and fortunes acquired during the 80s as people like salesman Robert Wade-Smith noticed and capitalised on Merseyside’s obsession with trainees as street fashion. By the end of the decade ‘lazy’ journalists looked to the States and Hip-Hop artists like Run DMC to explain the phenomenon but most of what has been written was complete nonsense. The obsession with training shoes for the youth of Britain began in the late Seventies and not in the late Eighties. It came from the football terraces and the council estates of the big cities, and who gives a George Best who started it – it happened and that’s a fact. In the post-punk revolution of ‘78/79, Adidas Samba ruled the terraces of Anfield and Goodison, quickly followed by Stan Smith’s. European away matches were the perfect opportunity to acquire those obscure adidas training shoes available in Germany, but not in Liverpool.
By the end of the decade ‘lazy’ journalists looked to the States and Hip-Hop artists like Run DMC to explain the phenomenon but most of what has been written was complete nonsense. The obsession with training shoes for the youth of Britain began in the late Seventies and not in the late Eighties.
Most of the training shoe addicts would never dream of getting a pair you could buy in the city centre in Liverpool. This was real fashion, and the competition was intense. A revolution was going on that had absolutely nothing to do with the streets of Brooklyn or the Bronx. In all the years that The End magazine was printed in Liverpool, we never received a single letter about ‘trainers’ in America, but we did get hundreds about the training shoes the different football crews were wearing. A football crew’s reputation could be severely damaged if a fatty was seen wearing a bad pair of trainers by the opposing teams’ fashion spotters. In May 1981, Liverpool played Real Madrid in the European Cup Final in Paris. We arrived at Saint-Lazare Station on the Sunday before the game. The next three days weren’t spent looking at the buildings and architecture of ‘Gay Paree’ but for a mythical adidas Centre that one of my mates overheard someone whispering about in a Liverpool snug. Naïve teenagers we may have been, but if we had found it we would have been heroes. The bemused Parisians didn’t know what we were on about when we asked for the “adidas centre” in several differing French accents. It was like Monty Python’s search for the Holy Grail. The newspaper Paris Soir reported the antics of Liverpool supporters with some confusion. They had been drinking, but they didn’t seem to want to fight anybody. They were too busy shoplifting, with the main targets being clothes and, of course, trainees. By the morning of the game the sports shops of Paris were locked, with staff supervising the doors, allowing only two people at a time into the shop.
It was during this period that a young Yorkshire-man based in Liverpool named Robert Wade-Smith set up shop in a small back street in the city centre. Typically what prompted him was a trip to Germany. Travelling to the Frankfurt Sports Fair as a buyer for Topman, Wade-Smith wanted to stock Adidas Forest Hills (white leather, gold stripes) in his Liverpool branch of Topman. However adidas initially insisted on 500 pairs going to the Topman ‘flagship store’ in Oxford Circus unconvinced as they were that you could launch a training shoe outside of the capital. They didn’t sell a pair and most of the reps blamed the price tag of ￡29.99, which was considered too steep in 1980/81. Wade-Smith knew different. The un-sold Forest Hills stock was sent to Liverpool. He put them on sale in the beginning of December 1980; by Christmas they had sold out. Wade-Smith was given salesman of the year in January and promptly left to set up shop on his own.
The newspaper Paris Soir reported the antics of Liverpool supporters with some confusion. They had been drinking, but they didn’t seem to want to fight anybody. They were too busy shoplifting, with the main targets being clothes and, of course, trainees.
He immediately set off for Germany in a van and the rest is history. Wade-Smith went on to build a popular four-storey mainstream fashion department-style store built initially upon bringing in exclusive trainers from Germany like the much sought after, exclusive adidas Trim Trabb.
It was some time before the press started to write about this street culture, but when THE FACE wrote a big feature on the subject in its July 1983 issue the floodgates opened. The article, written by End contributor Kevin Sampson, concentrated on the fashion area of London’s so-called ‘Casuals’, Liverpool’s so-called ‘Scallies’ and Manchester’s ‘Perries’.
Within weeks, Time Out had an article written by London playwright and football fan Mick Mahoney who got it right when he pointed out that “if Nike brought out a crocodile-skin trainer for ￡140, it would be a smash”. The football crowd and estate dwellers of the big cities didn’t give a monkeys what they were wearing in Harlem or anywhere else; if it looked good in the Anfield Road End, the Scoreboard Paddock or the Clock End, it was good enough for them. Over the next year, nearly every newspaper in the country, from the Mail On Sunday to New Society, had articles on this strange breed of training shoe-clad youngster. However, despite this press interest, you still couldn’t buy good, exclusive trainers in most cities.
Somewhat belatedly, the hilarious Clothes Show even declared 1987 as the “Year of the Training Shoe”. Had these people been in a time machine or chained in dimly lit rooms in Beirut?
By the start of the 90s training shoes had gone a bit crazy with hilarious designs churned out of the factories and many a massive tongue has been laughed at. Competition was cutthroat and it seems some of the designers had lost the plot as the high-top trainer became more and more ridiculous.
By the time we created our final edition of The End training shoes were going through a major nostalgia –fest. The start of the 90s saw the resurgence of the adidas Shell Toes mainly because Nike, Troop, Converse, British Knights, Travel Fox, Reebok, LA Gear, Hi-Tec, Jordache, were producing some of the silliest, sh***iest trainers known to man (and woman). The frantic search for trainers past was simply a reaction against the contemporary shit-trainers syndrome! Thankfully, according to Wade-Smith’s sales figures at the time, Liverpool was not a great supporter of multi-coloured high-tops.
The football crowd and estate dwellers of the big cities didn’t give a monkeys what they were wearing in Harlem or anywhere else; if it looked good in the Anfield Road End, the Scoreboard Paddock or the Clock End, it was good enough for them.
Twenty years on since the end of The End and the relationship between the typical End readers and adidas remains strong. When Liverpool fans from the influential ‘Red All Over The Land’ forum presented Lucas Leiva with their Player of the Season award at the final home game of the 2010/2011 season it wasn’t a ‘golden football boot’ that they mounted on a plinth it was an adidas Samba trainer sprayed gold. The Red All Over The Land member behind the presentation Chris Maguire said: “I put the poll on the forum and Lucas got about 75% of the votes. We started debating whether to get him something and someone said, with him being Brazilian lets get him a Samba!
“Scousers are famous for their love of adidas trainers and I was put up to the task of sorting it out. I bought a pair, got one spray painted gold and then mounted. “It’s great. It’s got pride of place on his mantelpiece and it’s recognition for his performances as he has really turned it around.” No Sambas were wasted as the other went to Young Player of the Year John Flanagan.
It was symbolic, it was clever and it reaffirmed Merseyside’s love affair with everything adidas especially the training shoe. When the youth of Merseyside began to wear training shoes during this period as a fashion item rather than a sporting accessory it was ground breaking. In post punk 1970’s Liverpool adidas Samba was the training shoe of choice and still remains a classic to this day.
Other brands have had their moments in the sun, but Liverpool has remained – and still is to this day -extremely loyal to adidas.
Discussions in pubs around the ground and on the forums on naming rights for a new Liverpool FC stadium always come up with the preferred title for many ‘adidas Anfield’. The argument prevails that if you are going to have your team’s ground branded then it may as well be a cool brand that the youth of Liverpool are still obsessed with. The three stripes rule and don’t you forget.
This article was an extract from The End Book.
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