The Sneaker Savant

Check out this pair of Free Mercurial Flyknits...copped these at one of my favorite spots a couple of years ago and was STOKED to find another pair of HTM’s for a steal. The last pair of HTM Mercurial Flyknit’s I sold for was about ~$700 (swipe) and the pair I had in front of me was only $37.50. I wasn’t able to find the colorway with a quick google, but had no worries about authenticity as I figured no one would bother with fakes of this shoe.

Anyways, when I got home, I did most of the usual checks...the product code didn’t turn up anything and on GOAT there were just stock pics of the same pair (minus the HTM branding)...I’ve come across quite a few issues with GOATs catalog so didn’t think anything of it. These definitely felt beefier than the other pair(s) I owned, and HTM’s are known to be of slightly higher quality so I figured it was just another pair that went under the regular radars. These would sell for sure.

They’ve been sitting on my ebay for nearly a year. The other day, someone reached out to me and said ‘these are fake, FYI’. I hit him back like ‘what do you mean?’ He said ‘they never made this colorway in HTM branding’. And if you know anything about HTM branding, you’d know that their releases aren’t always the most publicized. Maybe I was just holding out hope. I don’t know but they definitely fooled me (even against the evidence that I put up before). Then the dude said ‘c’mon man, they’re fake, you know this.’ I promptly pulled them off of eBay.

I hit up my dude at Nike and asked him what he thought. He said ‘100% real.’ And then, over the course of about 30 minutes over the phone, we dug and dug and dug and dug and both determined that the random dude on eBay was correct. These were fake. We couldn’t find any release info on these whatsoever on it and noticed slight issues...namely the shape of the sole, the collar, and flyknit supports. MIND. BLOWN.

Anyway...just wanted y’all to know...sometimes I suck at this stuff, too.