Ex-player fit enough to make Messi's boots

WILD GEESE: Aubrey Dolan, Senior Product Manager, Adidas, Nuremberg, Germany

WHILE THE DREAM of former Sligo Rovers midfielder Aubrey Dolan to play professionally didn’t come to pass, many would be just as envious of the job he ended up in. Working as a senior product manager with boot-maker Adidas, Dolan’s day job now sees him at the feet of the world’s greatest players.

“Van Persie is coming in tomorrow to talk about Euro 2012,” says Dolan, who is based at Adidas HQ near Nuremberg.

The meeting will entail a chat about the Arsenal striker’s footwear and perhaps a kick around at the Adidas on-site training ground to test some boots. Not bad for a morning’s work.

“I need to give him a bit of stick too because he scored two goals against Liverpool last weekend,” says Dolan. “I’m not too happy about that, but at least he did it in the right boots.”

That Dolan has ended up in Germany at all was the result of a coin toss, with the language winning out against French in his choice of Leaving Cert subjects.

Alongside training commitments with Sligo Rovers, the Sligo man graduated with a degree in international commerce and German from NUI Galway in 2002.

Spending a year of his studies in Nuremberg to improve his language skills, he also played football there.

When, on graduating, friends in Nuremberg talked of opportunities to play professionally with German clubs, Dolan thought, “Why not?”

“I knew that Adidas was in the Nuremberg area and I said to myself, if it doesn’t work out at football, I could try Adidas,” says Dolan. “Realising how hard it is to get in here now, it was probably naivety. I was just very lucky.”

After seven months of playing with a German league team, Dolan says it wasn’t for him.

“It was a great experience and I’m very glad I tried it but I didn’t have the sporting skills or the personality for it,” he says. “It’s a challenging industry where sponsors are few and far between so it’s very cut-throat. When there is a central midfielder who is looking to put bread on the table for his family and he sees a young gun Irish lad of 23 coming in, it can be quite tough.”

Asked by a friend to play for Adidas in a friendly tournament sponsored by the company, Dolan says he simply met the right people at the game and was offered an internship.

“It was like all my Christmases coming at once,” he says.

Now a senior product manager working in football boot design, he shoes some of the most talented feet in the world.

“Our brand values are about enabling athletes to play better, so we always start with the player,” he says of his collaborations with the likes of triple Fifa Ballon d’Or winner Lionel Messi, who he began collaborating with in 2008.

“With any consumer, it’s ‘make me better’, but at the very top level, we need to break that down into whether that is ‘make me faster’ or ‘help me control the ball better’ – we speak openly with players to identify what they are looking for in a product.”

With boots designed according to their performance benefit he says: “You ask, is this a player that’s doing 13 to 14 kilometres in a game or one who is looking to be fastest to the ball?”

He says a boot like the Adidas Predator is built for players like Kaka or van Persie, who are touching and controlling the ball a lot, while the Adidas F50 adiZero is for high-speed players looking to be first to the ball like Messi or Dani Alves.

So does Adidas make bespoke boots for players?

He says while some players may have specific needs like one foot larger than the other, or their physiotherapist may request a modification, the majority of professional players wearing Adidas boots are wearing those produced for the mass market.

“The standard that we set ourselves is that professional athletes wear our product out of the box – so a mass market product worn by little Johnnie on the street is the same one worn by Messi playing with Barcelona or Argentina,” he says.

The company does, however, have a made-to-measure facility where players sponsored by the company might look to have their boots personalised.

“It could be the date of birth of their child, or a belief in something, whether it’s God or their family or it could be something random,” says Dolan. “But we cater for these needs because we know how superstitious players are.

“When you feel good, you play good, and we do our best to equip our athletes so that they are ready for battle. Sometimes it’s the little things that make a difference.”

Superstition can also extend to how many times a player wears a boot. “Some players will wear the same boots until they just can’t be worn anymore,” he says.

One thing common to every boot, however, is the distinctive three stripes. “They are a must on every shoe, they are the brand’s DNA,” says Dolan.

“Whether you do market trips to Asia, the US or Brazil, the three stripes are a badge of value and quality.”

He says product life cycles can vary depending on the boot, with some taking 18 months to innovate and others up to five years – in fact, he has just come out of a meeting on boots to be launched in 2016.

As official sponsor of Euro 2012, this is a big year for Adidas. Outfitting six of the 16 teams that have qualified, Dolan will be front and centre for the launch of Adidas’s new Predator boot at the tournament.

“I’ll be very excited to see the product go live and to see some of the best players in the world wear it,” he says. But there are other reasons to be excited too. “I’m going with my father, uncle, my two brothers and some friends,” he says.

And who will he support?

“I’ll wear the German away jersey because it’s green and it’s got Adidas written on it,” he says. “So I can still be an Irish fan. You still have your loyalties.”