Barefoot and minimalist training has a real research base behind it — soccer players, field hockey players, general strength-training populations, all showing measurable gains in foot strength, balance, and stability. Search for the same research on American football players, though, and you'll find almost nothing. No controlled study on gridiron athletes. No JSCR paper testing barefoot drills against cleats for change-of-direction performance in linebackers or receivers. That's a strange gap for a sport this heavily researched in almost every other respect. American football has some of the most extensively studied strength-and-conditioning literature of any sport on earth, and this specific question just isn't in it.
So why the blind spot on barefoot training?
A few plausible reasons, none of them fully satisfying on their own:
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Liability culture. American football already carries more injury scrutiny than almost any other sport — concussions, joint injuries, contact trauma. A program or researcher proposing "let's have athletes train without footwear" is proposing something that reads as added risk to an institution already defending its safety record, even if the actual injury profile of short barefoot drills is mild compared to what these athletes already absorb in pads.
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The equipment is the sport. Cleats, pads, and turf are so structurally central to how the game is played that "barefoot football" sounds like a category error to a lot of coaches and researchers — worth studying as a training tool, maybe, but culturally it doesn't read as football-adjacent the way barefoot ball-striking drills obviously read as soccer-adjacent.
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Research follows the global market. Soccer's research base is enormous partly because it's studied everywhere, by everyone, constantly — it's the most-played and most-funded sport on the planet for sports science research. American football's research funding is real but narrower, concentrated on the injuries and metrics (speed, power output, concussion) that programs care most about protecting against, not on a training method that's still fairly fringe even in its home sports.
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It might just not have been asked yet. Sometimes a gap is just a gap. Nobody's run the study because nobody's proposed the study, not because there's a principled reason not to.
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What we do know, from the sports that have been studied
A 2025 systematic review of barefoot and minimalist footwear strength training in athletic populations found that most interventions produced real gains in intrinsic and extrinsic foot muscle volume, arch function, toe-flexor strength, and neuromuscular control. Minimalist footwear research elsewhere has found meaningful increases in foot strength with sustained use, plus greater glute activation during walking and running — evidence the effects reach up the kinetic chain, not just the foot. And barefoot training has shown benefits for balance and ankle stability in soccer specifically, the closest sport-specific evidence available.
None of that is American-football-specific. All of it points toward the same underlying mechanism: bare feet force the small stabilizing muscles in your foot to activate instead of letting a rigid sole do the work for you. That mechanism isn't sport-specific physiology, so there's no obvious reason a linebacker's foot would respond differently than a midfielder's. But "no obvious reason it wouldn't transfer" is a hypothesis, not a finding, and it's worth being honest about that distinction rather than borrowing soccer's research to make a claim football hasn't earned yet.
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Where this leaves a football player right now
Until that research exists, the reasonable position is: the mechanism is well-supported in adjacent sports, the training itself (short drills, controlled settings, footwork and cutting work, off-season only) carries low risk when done sensibly, and the potential payoff — better ankle stability and change-of-direction control, which matters at every position — is worth testing for yourself even without a study to point to. Just don't mistake "this should probably work" for "this is proven to work for football specifically." Nobody's shown that yet. Somebody should.
So where does that leave your actual cleats?
Whether or not the barefoot-training research catches up to football specifically, the fit problem it exposes is real regardless: train barefoot or in minimalist shoes, build that stabilizing strength, then strap into a cleat built for a foot shape that isn't yours — narrow toe box, stiff standard last — and whatever you just trained gets muffled by the shoe itself. That's the specific problem Prevolve's custom-fit football cleats are built to close. A 3D foot scan builds the cleat around your actual foot shape, wide toe box, natural toe splay, a structure that supports rather than overrides your foot's own stabilizing work. If you're new to the idea, our explainer on why custom-fit cleats matter covers the fit problem in more depth, and our piece on wide-fit football cleats makes a related case for gridiron specifically.
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