You’ve Been Lied to by ‘Grip’ Sock Companies

ELITE-1: Founder Update #1

Reading You’ve Been Lied to by ‘Grip’ Sock Companies 5 minutes Next I Cut Open 37 Grip Socks

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ELITE-1

Since starting Apex in 2021 I’ve definitely found myself thinking about grip socks far more than any normal person probably should. How they’re built. The materials used. How they behave once they’ve been through a few matches and a few washes. Everything that could contribute to those small, 1% gains in performance.

These thoughts occupy 99% of my time. And I genuinely couldn’t be more in my element. But I’m never 100% satisfied with the products we make - they’re exceptional but can always be better.

When I started Apex, the goal wasn’t simply to make another grip sock - it was to understand the small but surprisingly complex part of the game: the thin layer between my foot and my footwear. It’s easy to overlook that layer, because from the outside it’s just a sock (and not everyone cares about socks) - but once you start looking more closely, you realise it’s doing an insane amount of work.

And the more I started thinking about it like this, the more curious I became about how that layer is actually engineered.

So I began pulling apart grip socks from across the market (from the expensive ‘market leaders’ to the ‘cheapest entry’ options). Mainly, I just began by cutting them open, stretching them, examining the fibres, the knit structures, the compression zones, the grip materials. Trying to fully understand why they were built that way.

And something quickly became clear to me…. almost every football grip socks in the market is built exactly the same way.

The formula tends to look something like this: start with a fairly standard football sock construction (usually a polyester or cotton base) then apply silicone pads to the sole to increase friction between the sock and the boot’s insole. I admit, different brands may have slightly different grip pads or patterns, but the underlying principle remained the same - increase friction and make the sock ‘stickier’.

To be fair, this approach does improve traction compared to a normal (football) sock most of the time. But the more I studied it, the more it felt like the entire category had become overly focused on one very specific variable - sock to boot friction - while ignoring everything else that’s happening to our feet when performing flat out on a pitch. If I’m absolutely honest, the sock options on the market are lazy. Lack innovation, imagination, and any desire to genuinely find performance edges - this continues to drive me with Apex today (but more on that another time).

If you watch or play football (as much as I do and if you’re reading this then I’m pretty sure you do) you’ll notice the foot inside the boot isn’t simply sliding forwards and backwards. It’s constantly shifting under load. Stabilising during turns. Absorbing impact through the arch and forefoot. Managing rotational forces as the body changes direction. We see this in all the medical studies and sport science reports too - millions of tiny variables that exist way beyond sock to boot contact.

And that raised a slightly different question for me.

If the foot itself is behaving like a dynamic organic bio-mechanical system, why are most grip socks designed around a single static idea: friction?

That was the moment I realised we might be asking the wrong starting question. What if grip wasn’t the beginning of the design process for a high performance football sock?

What if, instead, you began with the mechanics of the foot itself? Only then asking what role grip should play within that system.

That line of thinking took us somewhere interesting.

I’ll go into much more detail on that soon, but next time I want to show you just how widespread this problem really is.

Coming Soon