The Pope Wore a Pair of Obscure Old Nikes

For a variety of reasons, Pope Leo XIV isn’t like the other popes. For example, the first American pope is a Chicago native who is prone to wearing his love for his hometown sports teams on his sleeve (or rather, on his head), especially during the MLB season. (Next time the pontiff posts a biblical X missive on what failure can teach us, go check to see if the White Sox lost that day.) Also, he’s a Villanova graduate and avid follower of their hoops legacy, even writing about the team during their championship heyday in the mid-2010s. Thirdly, his real name is Bob. So this week, when the Vatican dropped a trailer for Leone a Roma, a documentary they’ve produced about His Holiness’s days in the city of Rome, it shouldn’t have come as any surprise when eagle-eyed viewers noticed an unmistakable black swoosh on his shoes in one shot.

That’s right. This Pope wears Nikes.

In the clip, the sneakers are visible in a split-second archival shot from the pope’s early days in the Eternal City. He’s wearing a traditional all-white getup walking across a grassy field, and beneath the hem of his robes, the Nikes are hard to miss, dark swooshes on full display. Naturally, when the trailer went live, a certain contingency of sneaker-obsessed folks on the internet scrambled to get a confirmed ID on the shoe. But between the fairly generic colorway (white with black swooshes) and low-resolution of the image, the task proved harder than one might have expected.

Credit where it’s due: Ben Serlith of JustFreshKicks ended up the first to figure out the mystery. After a fairly extensive deep dive into sneaker eBay, Serlith pegged Leo’s kicks as the Nike Franchise Low Plus. It’s a fairly obscure tennis shoe that first emerged decades ago in the ’70s and ’80s. The shoe received a rerelease in 2008, which is likely when Leo (then Bob) picked up his pair, though it is not immediately clear when the image was taken per the Leone a Roma trailer. But there’s always a chance Leo pulled the ultimate men-over-40 sneaker move: finding a pair of shoes you like and buying six pairs at once so you don’t have to get new ones for a while.