Dave’s Football Blog

Sometimes the Internet makes your brain connect things in very odd ways.

Last week, the BBC published this article on why Thierry Henry has been such crap since moving to Barcelona. Aside from pining over not getting any more father-daughter time, Henry has been playing out of position and, more importantly, playing hurt.

The main cause of Henry’s recent injury troubles is a near-chronic back problem, officially diagnosed as the dehydration of an intervertebral disc, which causes lumbar and hip pain.

Former vice-president Sandro Rosell has gone as far as to say that the club made a huge mistake in signing Henry.

“Whoever signed him deserves a clip round the ear,” stated Rosell in December. “He should have been given an exhaustive medical.”

Two days later, Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing.net links to this article in New York Magazine, in which Adam Sternberg basically tells us that shoes are bad for our feet.

Look, it’s not your fault. It’s your shoes. Shoes are bad. I don’t just mean stiletto heels, or cowboy boots, or tottering espadrilles, or any of the other fairly obvious foot-torture devices into which we wincingly jam our feet. I mean all shoes. Shoes hurt your feet. They change how you walk. In fact, your feet—your poor, tender, abused, ignored, maligned, misunderstood feet—are getting trounced in a war that’s been raging for roughly a thousand years: the battle of shoes versus feet.

Last year, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, published a study titled “Shod Versus Unshod: The Emergence of Forefoot Pathology in Modern Humans?” in the podiatry journal The Foot. The study examined 180 modern humans from three different population groups (Sotho, Zulu, and European), comparing their feet to one another’s, as well as to the feet of 2,000-year-old skeletons. The researchers concluded that, prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the healthiest feet while the Europeans—i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers—had the unhealthiest.

In his own post, Doctorow then revealed that he owned a pair of Vibram Fivefingers “barefoot shoes,” which look something like this:

According to Doctorow:

(These shoes) do a pretty good job of simulating the experience of going barefoot without the tetanus and laceration risk, and I’ve done a lot of city and country walking in them, and I have to say, my back and knees and feet feel pretty damned good after a couple days in them.

The Vibram web site goes on to tell the world why their shoes are so good for you:

Vibram FiveFingers footwear acts like a second skin to offer a gecko-like grip over a variety of terrain. It protects bare feet from rocks, gravel, and sharp objects. And it promotes a natural walking motion, reducing impact on your knees, hips, and lower back.

So why aren’t they making football shoes? And why isn’t Thierry Henry wearing them?

We’ve all heard the stories about star footballers taking huge amounts of money to endorse a particular brand of shoes, then suddenly suffering a raft of foot injuries. Wayne Rooney, in particular, has had enough broken metatarsals to last a lifetime, and some have suggested his shoes might be the problem.

Well, here’s a solution that claims to promote a “natural walking motion” and reduce stress to various joints. If you can run in them and go hiking and climbing in them, maybe someone should ask whether you can play soccer in them, too. Kids all over South America and Africa play football barefoot. If it’s good enough for them, why wouldn’t something similar be good enough for the professionals?

Hey, it’s Association football. You play it with your feet, and if your feet get hurt all the time, that’s no good. Maybe a Vibram Fivefingers football shoe could prevent injuries. Maybe it could give players better control of the ball. Maybe it could help Henry’s bad back and Rooney’s aching metatarsals. After all, if there’s a chance something like this can make you a strong (and healthier) player, isn’t it worth trying?

So yeah, strange connections. That’s what the Internet does to your brain. Just thought I’d share that.