adidas Nemeziz+ Messi "Rey Del Balón"

The Adidas Nemeziz Messi .1 "Rey Del Balón" ("King of the Ball") is a signature colorway released in Solar Red/Solar Yellow/Core Black in the spring of 2021. It stands as one of the final Nemeziz-silo boots Lionel Messi wore before his high-profile switch back to Adidas's X speed line later that year with the "El Retorno" release, making it an important closing chapter of his multi-year run in the Nemeziz franchise, which began in 2017. Adidas used the boot to explicitly frame Messi as football's reigning "king," timed to a season in which he was setting historic club records for Barcelona.

• Leaked images of the boot first surfaced via Footy Headlines in February 2021.
• Officially launched around March 29, 2021 (per SoccerBible coverage), with Soccer Reviews For You dating a formal retail review to April 11, 2021.
• Messi had reportedly already been wearing the boots in matches for "weeks" prior to the official unveiling, pushing his in-game debut back toward February/early March 2021.
• The boot's period of prominence in Messi's rotation ran through March and April 2021, shortly before he switched silos entirely to the X Speedflow "El Retorno" boots in June 2021.
• A related "Showpiece" Nemeziz Messi.1 release followed in May 2021, extending the design language of this era slightly further.

Built on the Nemeziz .1 platform (the top-tier, laced firm-ground build within Adidas's 2020/2021-generation Nemeziz range), the boot features a V-shaped Tension Tape collar construction for added ankle wrap and support, a lightweight textile/synthetic upper for a close, adaptive fit, and a split outsole working with Adidas's Torsion System to permit extreme torsional movement through the midfoot while preserving balance and stability during Messi's signature sharp turns and changes of direction. As a laced (".1") build, it catered to Messi's well-documented personal preference for traditional lace-up boots over Adidas's laceless "+" options, even though the wider Nemeziz range at the time was also sold in laceless (+) and other lower-tier configurations (FG, AG, SG) sharing the same Rey Del Balón graphic treatment.

The dominant colorway is Solar Red and Solar Yellow with Core Black detailing, an eye-catching, high-contrast palette typical of Adidas's more aggressive signature drops. The standout design element is a Gold Welded crown logo applied to the boot, together with Messi's signature rendered in Solar Yellow on the medial side, both direct visual references to the "Rey Del Balón" (King of the Ball) name and its royal, crown-based iconography.

Adidas framed the "Rey Del Balón" name and campaign around Messi's ongoing record-breaking form for Barcelona during the 2020–21 season, a season in which he became the club's all-time record appearance-maker and continued extending his position as Barcelona's all-time top scorer. Coverage described the "King of the Ball" title as "a fitting description for Messi in a season where he continues to break record after record," reflecting Adidas's decision to lean into unqualified superlative branding for its ambassador rather than a specific single achievement (unlike, for example, a tournament or an individual award). The gold crown motif reinforced this "royalty" framing visually on the boot itself.

This release window (roughly March–April 2021) coincided with one of the signature trophies of the late Messi-Barcelona era: on April 17, 2021, Barcelona defeated Athletic Bilbao 4–0 in the 2021 Copa del Rey final, with Messi scoring twice, the club's first trophy of that season and one of Messi's final honors in Barcelona colors before his shock departure from the club in August 2021. The timing places this final squarely within the boot's active release window, though sources reviewed for this file did not include a boot-specific photo confirmation tying that exact match to the "Rey Del Balón" colorway specifically, so this connection should be treated as a strong contextual overlap rather than a fully documented certainty. More broadly, the boots were part of Messi's rotation as he closed out his all-time appearance and goalscoring records for Barcelona during this stretch of the season.

The "Rey Del Balon" closed out Messi's Nemeziz years with adidas at its most unsubtle: solar red and yellow, a gold-welded crown, and a name that simply declares him king. Built on the laced Nemeziz .1 platform (the 19.1 build carried into 2020/21), it shares that boot's well-reviewed adaptive Tension Tape fit and clean striking feel. Its timing gives it real historical weight: this is the design Messi wore in the weeks around his final Barcelona trophy, the 2021 Copa del Rey, months before the move to PSG. A meaningful late-Barcelona-era pickup for collectors.