The Evolution of the World Cup Ball | Hacker News Reader

The Evolution of the World Cup Ball

nytimes.com

29 pointszeynel114 comments

The 2006 ball was the best one. Loads of long range goals scored in that tournament. This one looks to be another flyaway like the 2002 ball - so far every single free kick has whizzed way over the bar. Still, the 2002 ball was so bad you could visibly see it change trajectory and life upwards mid-flight when it was kicked hard enough, as if it had been deflected.

German engineering for the win.

From the matches I've seen so far, the latest ball seems very light. For long range passes the player has to be behind the ball to trap it with foot or control it with chest before it drops on the ground.

Players who try to control the ball after it's bounced are being deceived by the bounce as the ball seems to move off the pitch like it's very wet (but it doesn't look that wet on the TV). Passes over the head of the forwards (for the forward to run onto) are going straight to the keeper or out unless the forward is very quick.

Why do they have to introduce a new ball for the world cup anyway? Surely it reduces the quality of the play to have a ball that nobody is familiar with. Not the best advertisement for the game for the casual viewer to see people making mistakes all the time.

I guess they want to sell the new World Cup ball to all the fans.

I remember as a kid loving the look of the tango ball and trying to draw it using a compass and an eraser. I was really pleased with myself when I managed it finally

Love the '70 and '74 ball, also the evolution from '66 to '70 seems huge.

The 66 world cup was in black and white the 1970 was in color!

The ’70 ball was designed to be visible on TV and somehow ended up becoming the archetypical soccer ball. That is, I think, a pretty cool story. The soccer ball I grew up with, the one I drew whenever I wanted to draw a soccer ball (always looked ridiculous because drawing icosahedrons is hard if you don’t know what you are doing) as a child is actually just forty years old!

But I don’t think that difference is actually that big. Sure, there is the color and it’s a icosahedron, but just look at a volleyball. They still look like the ’66 ball looked. So this change of shape didn’t have to happen. (Recent design also abandoned the icosahedron – it’s quickly becoming a thing of the past.)

I was actually surprised by the 1970 ball. I grew up thinking that the 1970 design was the design that's always been there.

So how did this design become the synonym for "soccer/football" while the others have not?

The first soccer ball that wasn’t boring and actually recognizable as a soccer ball? Many more people than before were able to see the Worldcup in the 1970s (because many more had TVs)? It was the first sponsored ball and Adidas put a lot of money in Marketing?

I don’t know but those seem like plausible explanations.

The first sponsored ball angle makes a lot of sense.

Is there a non-flash version?

Sent from my iPad. ;)

NYTimes.com always has nice Flash infographics. When they started the use of Flash was probably justified, today nearly everything they do would be possible with HTML, CSS and Javascript. This infographic included.

But, I guess, it’s also a question of process. Doing this in Flash is probably a whole lot of easier and they already know how it is done. HTML5 needs a development kit.

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