The following article was published on 23 March 2025 by MUNDIAL
—
MUNDIAL has made a new Puma King
Imagine telling us 10 years ago that we’d end up doing this…
—
MUNDIAL has made a new Puma King
Imagine telling us 10 years ago that we’d end up doing this…
MUNDIAL has designed a new Puma King. Just give yourself a minute to let that sink in. We’re still digesting it ourselves, to be honest. The Super-Archive is inspired by 10 years of MUNDIAL and nearly 80 years of Puma design excellence, and we are fizzing with excitement to finally bring it into the world.
To mark the occasion, we’ve made a short film, shot in Manchester and Herzo, home of Puma’s headquarters and, of course, their incredible archive where timeless delights made famous by the likes of Maradona, Eusébio, and Cruyff are preserved in pristine condition for eternity.
We really hope you love the boot as much as we do.
Here is Editor-in-Chief James Bird and Art Director Alex Mertekis to tell you a bit more about the creative process behind one of the best things MUNDIAL has ever done.
James Bird, Editor-in-Chief: This is the culmination of 10 years of incredibly hard work maintaining the MUNDIAL brand, and that runs straight through all of the people who have worked here or contributed regularly over those years.
The only way we were able to do this is because we've maintained a level of authenticity. Nothing we do is box-ticking or done for any reason other than we think it's a good story, a good product, or something that people would love. And that idea of reminding you why you love football is something that we've held dear. So whether that's through 33 issues of the magazine, whether it's through audio documentary series or our podcast or our social media, I think that all of those things have added up for us to be able to work with Puma on doing a version of the King.
This is the equivalent of FourFourTwo having an adidas Predator or VERSUS having a Mercurial Vapor. This is as big as it gets—the Puma King is arguably the most iconic football boot of all time. Eusébio, Pelé, Maradona, Cruyff. Boom! It's an icon of the game, one of the greatest pieces of design on the planet. So, yes, at a MUNDIAL level, we are extremely, extremely proud to be able to do it.
On a personal level, I had a pair of Kings growing up, and I reckon that at some point, most kids, at least in the UK, were bought a pair of Puma Kings to play football in. And while it’s inauthentic to say X boot is for grassroots players—all boots are for all players, really—the Puma King is iconic specifically to Sunday League football: the football I used to go and watch my dad play every Sunday morning for the first 15 years of my life. It's synonymous with mud, with putting goalposts up, with having a hangover, with that one techy player in the middle of the park, with the sound of metal studs in the changing rooms, with the smell of Deep Heat.
'This is as big as it gets'
So, to think about us creating a new version of the Puma King … it’s mad. I'm just a normal guy, and when you’re growing up, you don't really think that these things happen to normal guys. This is a boring thing to say, but my favourite thing about the boot is simply that it says MUNDIAL on the actual leather of a Puma King. So yeah, it’s very, very cool.
Alex Mertekis, Art Director: I think I’ve said this publicly a few times now, but I start almost every project I do by throwing a lot of shit at the wall to see what sticks. The document of initial boot designs was a bit … mad. A lot of the design in the magazine is quite maximalist—intentionally—so the first few ideas were just that. There was very little nuance to them.
Things started to come together on our first visit to PUMA HQ in Herzo, and more specifically, when rooting round the fabled Archive room. Owen Blackhurst appeared from deep within a pile of PUMA boxes, a big grin across his face. “We have to base it on this room, Al,” and I excitedly nodded in approval.
It’s a bit like stepping back in time. It’s such a brilliant juxtaposition to the rest of the hyper-modern, amazing PUMA complex; this hidden room in the basement, with rows and rows and rows of shelving stacked full of the entire history of this incredible brand, all boxed up and arranged and labelled and ordered perfectly. In my head, at least, the slightly musty aroma of old leather, print and metal all combine to almost smell a bit like changing rooms before kick-off. I put a box back in slightly the wrong place at one point, and Helmut appeared almost out of nowhere to scold me and shift it three places to the right. I’m still sorry about that now.
We did some more rooting, took some more reference pictures, looked for and found the Holy Grails (Maradona’s boots, of course), and then moved back upstairs to a big, shiny meeting room to present my sticky-shit designs. We must’ve been there for two or three hours, chatting about ideas, our favourite PUMA boots, the history of MUNDIAL, etc.
From that point, it was a case of ‘how do we get all of these things onto one boot and still make it look fucking cool?’ I think we’ve done that: it was a case of using the tools we already had—stitching patterns, the underside of the tongue, the Formstrips, soleplates, the PUMA font, the MUNDIAL font, colours—and assigning them to the references. We ultimately managed to pack a lot of different references into a single pair of boots and not make them look like Frankenstein's Monster.
James Bird: The creative of the film? Well, one of the key aspects of the design is those coordinates.
So, immediately for me, that screamed an adventure film or a Western-style thing: one person on a mission to get from A to B to C to find out something brilliant, with some nods to MUNDIAL dropped in, like the bar scene that’s supposed to represent Seb White and Dan Sandison having the first conversation about the magazine.
It's a working men's club between Manchester and Bolton that’s got snooker tables and pool tables, and Derek, the barman, is wearing my Puma King leather jacket. The evening we filmed, they had a Motown night going on. Perfect. Beautiful. There are quite a few little MUNDIAL Easter eggs in that too.
And we knew that we were going to be able to get some form of talent, but we didn't think it would be Lothar fucking Matthäus. We decided we wanted him to be this sort of moody guy that's like: “Where have you been? We've been waiting for you”.
We would then have the relief with the archivists. So Helmut Fischer, who lived next door to the Dasslers, and has been part of Puma since the very start, he's known as Mr. Puma. And then Uli, who is the archivist there now. We wanted them to be the relief. “Hello, welcome, here we are in this amazing place”—basically two mad scientists with the keys to heaven.
Juwon, the lead, works for FootballCo on a brand called The Front Three. He's very good on camera, he's very funny, he connects with all audiences, actually, because he's got incredible football knowledge. His football knowledge is absurd. If you want to win a pub quiz, you take Seb White and Juwon Musa—job done.
And also, Juwon hadn't played football for ages, which was sort of key. like this idea of going back to the roots in Sunday League and the whole story behind that. So it made a lot of sense that you almost would be in it.
He's a brilliant protagonist. He's great on camera and he fits because he's a King player.
Alex Mertekis: The box is special too. That was actually influenced directly by the PUMA team. They kept mentioning how much they all loved the magazine (maybe it was flattery, who knows, who cares?), and then someone just said, “Maybe the packaging could be two magazine holders pushed together?” and we all just went, “YEP, THAT’S THE ONE.”
I love how the pink has become a really strong feature of the whole package too. I’ve always been interested in pink in football because it has this cult feel to it; it’s not a particularly prominent colour throughout football like, say, red or blue, but when it’s used, it gets a lot of attention because it stands out—particularly in men’s football, like an offset of that sort of false ‘macho masculinity’—which is one of the reasons for it to be one of our prominent brand colours.
But my absolute favourite thing about the boot is the stitching pattern. I wasn’t sure whether we’d be able to change that at first, but I was pretty set on that being a feature, so I added that in, sent it off to production, and it came back on the sample exactly how it was supposed to look. A real homage to Diego, that. I’m also quite pleased with myself for getting a little bit of myself on the boot—a handwritten MUNDIAL ‘signature’ on the transparent soleplate. PUMA actually made it bigger in production than I’d originally designed it to be—I’m taking that as a personal compliment.