Nike Football – Palais of Speed Event

This past weekend we were fortunate enough to be invited over to Paris with Nike to join them in celebrating the European championships currently being hosted in France this year. The event took place at Paris’ historic Palais de Tokyo Museum, which was transformed inside to showcase their latest boot in the Mercurial timeline, the Veloce.

The core concept of the space was to challenge the idea of Speed, and examine how products can improve an athletes performance and enhance speed on the pitch. The new Mercurial Veloce is based around the construction process of a Formula 1 car, stripping back it’s elements and utilising innovative materials to improve performance.

The space played host to Nike’s world finals of their Football X tournament, a competition held through the Nike Football App which pitted some of Europes top street Football teams against each other for the chance to win the championship and scoop the top cash prize.

With the theme of speed at it’s heart, an actual Formula 1 car was positioned inside a timeline, chronicling the development of the Mercurial DNA. Alongside this, a showcase presentation of 52 different variations of the Mercurial were on display to show the progression of this style over the past 20 years.

Visitors were given the opportunity to personalise product from Nike’s recent Pitch to Pavement collection including the Footscape Magista and Free Flyknit Mercurial, with laser engraved graphics, and design custom jersey’s on-site with help of graphics and patches created by London design studio ilovedust.

As well as being given the opportunity to check out the space, we were also able to take part in the ‘influencer’ tournament which gathered together creatives and retail locations from across Europe to compete against each other. The standard was extremely high and we unfortunately finished in third place in our group (we did manage to score at least one goal though!), but it was great fun, and an interesting experience playing football on the surface of a renowned historic landmark.