Do Cleats Actually Improve Your Performance?

Cleats are the spiked shoes you'll see on soccer, football, and baseball players, designed to bite into natural grass or turf for traction on a surface that's often uneven, wet, or unpredictable from one game to the next. The idea is simple: enough grip to stop you from slipping, not so much that you can't still move freely.

Do They Actually Help?

A 2017 systematic review of cleat-surface interaction in soccer found no significant performance advantage from cleat design alone — the real variable turned out to be the combination of cleat and surface, not the cleat by itself. That pairing affects things like shock absorption and impact with each step, and research on soccer shoe biomechanics suggests surface conditions alone can account for up to 20% of performance differences between players. The right cleat on the wrong surface, or vice versa, genuinely matters.

What "Performance" Actually Means

Speed is the obvious answer, but in most cleat sports, agility carries just as much weight — how fast you react, how well you change direction without losing your footing. What matters most shifts depending on position and role, which is part of why teams often have more than one cleat design in the locker room rather than one standard shoe for everyone.

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Can Cleats Cause Injuries?

There's anecdotal concern about cleats catching in the ground and contributing to knee injuries, but the research points elsewhere: turf type, warm-up routine, and prior injury history are much stronger predictors of injury than the cleat itself. Used properly, cleats are doing their job — preventing slips and giving you control over your own movement. If you're buying a pair, it's worth checking the manufacturer's guidance on which surfaces that specific cleat is built for.

What Cleats Don't Address

Here's the part that doesn't usually come up: a cleat's outsole — where the studs are mounted — is typically built rigid, for the same reason a work boot's sole is rigid: stability and power transfer. That rigidity means even on natural grass, which has real give to it, a stiff cleat plate can still limit how much of that terrain actually reaches your foot. The subtalar joint, the hinge just below your ankle that's built to rotate on a diagonal path with every step, gets less to work with than the field itself would otherwise offer.

That unresolved rotation doesn't just disappear because the cleat plate is rigid — it gets pushed onto nearby tissue instead, the same mechanism behind plantar fasciitis and Achilles strain in any other sport. Over 90 minutes of cutting, sprinting, and changing direction, that's a lot of repetitions for tissue that wasn't built to be the primary stabilizer.

Cleats also leave very little room for anything underneath the foot, which is why a thin profile matters more here than in almost any other shoe category — the same fit constraint we talk about with snowboard boots.

What Actually Helps

Landing Gear's heel cup is shaped to match that diagonal rotation directly — not a simple tilt, but a shape built along the same two-plane path your heel actually twists through, so the foot has something to work with even when the cleat's plate won't flex. In independent 3D motion capture testing (BioMechanica LLC, Dr. Martyn Shorten, 2019, n=31), 28 of 31 people landed with their heel rotating correctly in Landing Gear's M-100, compared to just 3 of 31 in standard foam. The T-100 uses the same underlying shape in a thinner profile built to fit inside cleats without crowding the foot.

Want the fuller picture on footwear and athletic performance, including the research on running economy across sports like soccer and football? See the complete breakdown here →

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