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Background: Footwear is the most relevant tool of a footballer's gear and has to cope with the individual sport-specific demands of the athlete. The challenge in the development of a football shoe is to fine-tune its functional parameters to meet criteria of injury prevention and performance enhancement. There exists a contradiction between those two set-targets that needs to be addressed.Objective: The objective of the review is to provide a literature survey about the scientific knowledge on how football shoe characteristics influence performance and injury risk. Almost 100 scientific publications are included in a qualitative synthesis.Results: The outsole configuration and its influence on traction can be regarded as the most studied functional shoe parameter and has been scientifically proven to affect the player's performance in translational locomotion and the injury risk in rotational movements. The second main aspect consists of the interaction between shoe and ball, which can be divided into the influence of shoe construction on kicking velocity, accuracy and ball control. Footwear properties, such as bending and torsional stiffness, cushioning and comfort, have barely been studied, if at all.Conclusion: The present literature survey shows a substantial influence of football footwear on the athlete. Currently available literature suggests that outsole design influences shoe–surface interaction, which has implications regarding performance and injury risk. Additionally, shoe upper seems to play a crucial role with regard to the performance in ball interactions. However, further research is needed on shoe–foot interactions and on footwear requirements for female, adolescent and indoor players.
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Kulessa et al. (2017) studied this question.
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