Adidas Handball Spezial

For fewer than 4 in 10 feet. If you follow Adidas's size guidance online, the Handball Spezial fits true to size for 38% of feet. Here, true to size means the size Adidas's online guidance gives you is less than a full size away from the size that fits best, with enough toe room and enough forefoot volume.

Adidas's guidance gets the length right. Adidas's page for the Handball Spezial says the shoe is true to size and recommends ordering your usual size, and with Adidas's size chart, every foot in our fittings had enough room in front of the toes. The guidance falls short on forefoot volume, because the Handball Spezial comes in one width, so a different size is the only way to change the forefoot volume.

The Adidas Handball Spezial fits similar to the Adidas Samba OG, so both came out the same in our fittings. When the writer of this page tried both on, though, the Handball Spezial felt like it had a bit more room under the arch of the foot. Here is where every foot landed in the Handball Spezial when we followed Adidas's size chart and ordered the usual size, as Adidas recommends.

Share of 16,874 feet. Each foot is counted once.

• Right size from the size chart: 38% of feet got a size that fit both their foot length and their forefoot volume. Adidas's size guidance worked well for this group in the Handball Spezial.
• Sized up for more forefoot volume: For 25% of feet, the Handball Spezial had too little forefoot volume at the size the chart gave. The Handball Spezial has no wide version, so going up a size was the only way to get more forefoot volume, and the bigger size also adds length in front of the toes.
• Sized up for toe room only: No feet landed here: 0 of 16,874. Adidas's size chart leaves every foot enough room in front of the toes in the Handball Spezial.
• Sized down for less forefoot volume: For 37% of feet, the Handball Spezial had too much forefoot volume at the size the chart gave. The Handball Spezial has no narrow version, so a smaller size was the only way to get less forefoot volume, with less room in front of the toes.

We measured the standard width of the Handball Spezial and virtually fitted 16,874 real feet from our earlier in-store 3D foot scanners. Out of 17,311 foot scans, those 16,874 feet fall in the size range of the Handball Spezial (US men's 4 to 13.5). For every foot, we followed Adidas's size guidance online: the length chart, ordering the usual size as Adidas recommends, in the standard width. A difference of a full size or more between Adidas's size and the size that fits best counts as a miss. These numbers show how the Handball Spezial fits a large group of feet, not how the shoe feels on your feet.