Twenty-four years after their first World Cup collaboration sold out almost on sight, adidas and Coca-Cola are running it back for 2026 and SneakSurf is one of the selected retailers bringing the full lineup to Singapore while the tournament is still live.
Somewhere in the middle of Singapore's current 3am-screening, three-stripes-everywhere World Cup fever, there is a six-plus-shoe drop sitting quietly in adidas Originals stores that most people are walking past for the wrong reasons. They're seeing red, white and a cursive logo and filing it under "fun nostalgia collab," which it is, but that framing skips the actual story. This isn't adidas borrowing Coca-Cola's branding for a vibe. It's adidas and Coca-Cola finishing a conversation they started in 2002, on the last occasion football brought them together for a World Cup.
And this particular week happens to be loaded. Lionel Messi just put a hat trick past Algeria, pulling level with Miroslav Klose's all-time World Cup scoring record in the process, his first World Cup hat trick after five previous tournaments without one. Kylian Mbappé scored twice against Senegal in the same stretch to become France's outright top scorer of all time, overtaking Olivier Giroud with his 58th international goal. England and Croatia replay their 2018 semi-final in Dallas, Cristiano Ronaldo is back on a World Cup pitch for Portugal against DR Congo, and the screens at CHIJMES, Bar Soccer and every kopitiam running a borrowed projector are already filling up for all three. None of that has anything to do with a sneaker collection, on paper. In practice it has everything to do with it, because this is exactly the kind of week that turns a casual football watcher into someone who will buy the jersey, the sneakers, and an actual can of Coke to hold while watching, purely because the sport currently feels like it's running at double speed.
That first collaboration was built around the Climacool 1, a sneaker engineered for the 2002 tournament in Japan and South Korea that moved off shelves fast enough to become one of the more talked-about releases to come out of that summer. It wasn't a one-off design exercise either, since Coca-Cola's own licensing team has referred back to it for years as proof that a soft drink and a sportswear brand can actually make a sneaker people want to keep, not just photograph. That history is the part most coverage of this new collection has left out entirely, and it's the part that makes the 2026 version land differently once you know it.
Fast forward 24 years, and the rematch dropped again, timed deliberately around FIFA World Cup 2026, a detail that gets a little sharper once you notice Atlanta is both a host city for this tournament and the actual headquarters of Coca-Cola. The campaign carries the line "Originals Are the Real Thing" and is fronted by Lamine Yamal, shot on what looks like a blazing hot afternoon as a group of characters wait for a bus to the World Cup. It's a small, specific scene, and it's doing a lot of work: it's the same bus-stop, hang-around energy as a kopitiam screening here in Singapore, just relocated.
What actually separates this from a logo-slap collab is that the footwear isn't randomly chosen. The lineup runs across Samba OG and apparels. Each pair gets dressed as a different read on the Coca-Cola can or bottle, down to droplet detailing on the cushioning and a heel tab that nods to the contour glass bottle. It's less "put a Coke logo on a shoe" and more "what would a six-pack of Coca-Cola look like if each can decided to become a different era of adidas football history." That's a more interesting brief than most collabs bother writing for themselves.
It also slots directly into what's already happening on Singapore's streets this month. The Samba and the terrace silhouettes around it have spent this World Cup cycle becoming the default off-pitch uniform at every screening from Bar Soccer to CHIJMES, and now there's a version of that exact shoe carrying actual World Cup lineage rather than just World Cup timing. Wearing this collection to the next 4am kickoff isn't really a styling choice at that point, it's closer to wearing a small, slightly absurd piece of football merchandising history that happens to also look good with a jersey.
The group stage alone has already produced a Messi hat trick and a new France scoring record, and the knockout rounds start June 28, which is usually when a World Cup stops being background noise and becomes the only thing anyone in the office, the family group chat, or the kopitiam is talking about. With the final not until July 19, there's still a full month of screenings left to actually wear this rather than just read about it
The collection is available now in-store at Bugis Junction, Suntec City, Tampines Mall, and online at sneaksurf.com, while sizes last.