The Handball Spezial Loses Its Laces, and adidas Calls the Result Understated

adidas releases the Handball Spezial Loafer on October 1, and the name carries more weight than it first looks. This is the 1979 indoor handball shoe with its lacing removed entirely and a saddle strap laid across the vamp where the eyestay used to be. The gum outsole stays. The three stripes stay. What goes is the one feature nobody had been treating as negotiable on a shoe originally built to be cinched down on a court.

adidas dates the Handball Spezial to 1979 and describes it as a professional indoor model, which is the honest version of a story that usually gets told the other way round. It was built for handball. Indoor court sport, hard stops and direction changes, a gum sole chosen for grip on a wooden floor rather than for how it ages to amber in a shop window. The suede upper and the reinforced toe were there because the shoe had to survive a season. What happened afterwards is the part adidas now leads with, that the Spezial left the court and became a terrace shoe and then a streetwear one, until by the 2020s it was among the few adidas silhouettes able to carry a full seasonal program by itself. That is the position it holds here, and it is the only reason this release is possible. A model needs a lot of equity before a brand can pull out its defining hardware and still expect the shoe to be recognized on sight.

The construction is a real loafer rather than a sneaker with the laces pulled. There is a raised vamp with a strap across it, a detail borrowed straight from a penny loafer and with no history in sport at all, and the collar drops low enough at the heel to step into. The three stripes are cut in black leather over the upper, adidas puts the Spezial logo on the tongue and a foil sign-off on the lateral side, and the outsole is the gum unit the silhouette has always used. Then there is the upper, and this is where adidas’s copy and adidas’s photography stop agreeing with each other. The product page describes a premium suede upper with soft leather stripes, calls the palette muted tones, and closes on understated elegance. The photography shows a high contrast black and white spotted hide print running across the whole upper, irregular, closer to a cow hide than to anything the description suggests. adidas lists the colorway as Multi. Whatever that print is, it is not muted and it is not understated. The foil sign-off is the only place the gold in adidas’s own colour listing turns up, and in the photography it reads as a small mark on the lateral side rather than anything structural.

The laceless move itself is not an outlier. adidas has been converting its archive into slip-ons across several lines, and the logic reads fine on paper, since a mule or a loafer sells to someone who already owns the lace-up and wants a version that is easier to get out of the door in. What makes this one worth arguing about is which shoe got picked. The Spezial’s appeal has always been partly about visible function. It has a court shoe’s proportions, and the lacing is a good part of why it still reads as one rather than as a suede casual. Take that out and what is left has a court shoe’s outsole and a dress shoe’s opening, which is a strange object rather than a safe line extension. The print pushes it further out. adidas has filed this under Women’s Originals on its own release calendar, so it knows who it is aimed at, and the copy sitting underneath reads as though it were written for a different and much quieter pair.

Retail is $130. On the same adidas release calendar, the standard Handball Spezial makeups arriving that morning are listed at $120 and $130, so the loafer carries no premium at all over the lace-up despite the extra pattern work on the upper. That is worth noticing. adidas is not pricing this as a specialty item or a fashion exercise, it is pricing it as another Spezial, which is the clearest available signal that the brand expects it to move as a line extension rather than as a curiosity. Compare that with the Politics collaboration on the same silhouette, where the shop’s involvement is what carries the pair.

The Handball Spezial Loafer releases October 1 in style code KK0921 at $130, through adidas.com, whose release calendar lists a 12:00 AM Pacific start and files the pair under Women’s Originals. Three standard Handball Spezial makeups land the same morning at $120 and $130, alongside a wider Originals refresh that includes the Samba and the Gazelle. adidas has not named an outside stockist for the loafer.

Written by

The Sneakers Team

The Sneakers Team is the editorial desk behind becausesneakers, founded and edited by Nick Engvall. Nick has spent more than two decades in the sneaker industry. He built the original Eastbay Blog, led the first dedicated sneaker team at Complex, ran the first UGC and seeding programs at Finish Line, was employee number nine at StockX, and served as Senior Director at Stadium Goods. He hosts the Sneaker History podcast, and his first book, Small Luxuries: Sneakers, arrives in October 2026 from Motorbooks. Release details on this site are checked against the brand's own product information before publication, and anything we cannot confirm is labelled rather than stated.

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