ADIDAS Y-3 SPLITS ITS BEAST PACK ACROSS FOUR NFL RECEIVERS

Grey scales run from heel to lace on one pair, blue on another, yellow on a third and red on a fourth. Those are the four colorways of adidas Y-3's new Beast Pack cleat, and this time each one carries a name that came from the brand's own account, not a sneaker site's guess. adidas football posted the assignments itself: Chad Johnson gets the Dragon, Amon-Ra St. Brown gets the Eagle, Rome Odunze gets the Tiger, and Garrett Wilson gets the Wolf.

The boot underneath the graphics is adidas' adiZero Electric+ II, the brand's current speed cleat platform, built with a Primeknit upper and a multi surface outsole meant to grip turf and grass without a swap. Y-3 did not design a new silhouette for this. It took an existing performance tool and wrapped four beast identities around it, a move the label first pulled nearly twenty years ago on the original plus F50 Tunit Beast Pack, a silver wolf, yellow tiger, blue dragon and red eagle drawn from artist Taishi Hayashi's original artwork for that release.

Chad Johnson Gets the Dragon, Not the Marquee

Johnson has not played an NFL snap since 2012, and he still lands the Dragon, the colorway the original Beast Pack treated as its blue flagship. He earns the spot as the face of adidas Football's Speed Is Money campaign, cast this year as a self declared speed broker who intercepts the league's fastest names on staged phone calls that turn into ad spots. Travis Hunter, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Garrett Wilson, Kyle Pitts and Emeka Egbuka have all taken his calls on camera. adidas itself has carried the Three Stripes since 1949, when founder Adi Dassler registered the company under the nickname that gave it its name, so a cleat named after a wolf and a dragon is a small chapter next to that history. The three receivers around him in the Beast Pack are all under 26 and still building the numbers he put up in Cincinnati two decades earlier: St. Brown has caught passes for the Lions since 2021, Wilson has started every healthy week for the Jets since his 2022 rookie year, and Odunze is entering his second season in Chicago after the Bears drafted him ninth overall in 2024. Odunze already had adidas on his jersey before that draft; he signed with the brand as a college prospect in 2023, one of the earliest football NIL deals adidas put its name on. The Speed Is Money campaign that made Johnson its broker launched in June 2026, months before this cleat existed, so the Beast Pack repackages sponsorships adidas already had rather than announcing new ones.

Beast Pack Started on a Soccer Boot, Not a Cleat

The animal graphics did not originate on a football field. They came from the plus F50 Tunit line Y-3 ran with adidas roughly twenty years ago, when Tunit was a modular soccer boot system built around swappable studs, not receiver routes. Bringing those four creatures onto a 2026 American football cleat plays closer to an archive reissue than a new product idea. adidas kept the Beast Pack's base consistent across all four pairs, core black and off white running underneath each one, and let the beast artwork at the toe carry the difference between them.

Four Style Codes Land on One September Date

The Wolf carries style code KJ4358, the Tiger KJ4357, the Dragon KJ4356 and the Eagle KJ4355, and all four released together on adidas.com on September 16, 2026, at 230 dollars a pair. That is two days after adidas and Metalwood Studio put a similar core black treatment on the Predator Sala, the second football boot collaboration adidas ran that week.

Runway Beasts Finally Reach a Football Field

This is the third time in 2026 that Y-3 has built a release around football, not the runway. The label turned Paris's Palais Brongniart into an astroturf pitch in June for its Spring Summer 2027 show, sent a Stan Smith reworked with a squared toe down that same runway, and now attaches its name to four cleats worn by players who have never modeled for Yohji Yamamoto. The Beast Pack reads less like a new idea than a rerun with four active receivers standing in for a twenty year old mascot system, four names on four boxes, one release date, and no fifth beast waiting behind them.