Adidas Unveils World Cup Soccer Ball

And well might you won­der how a soc­cer ball can be improved, given that tech­nol­ogy has been work­ing on the issue for well over 100 years. The devil is in the detail as you’d expect, but suf­fice to say that the new 14-panel design has resulted in a ball with the most con­sis­tent per­for­mance char­ac­ter­is­tics ever, enabling the play­ers to show their true skills. There are fewer seams, so the ball is rounder and per­forms more uni­formly, regard­less of where it is hit. The more per­fect the sphere is, the more bal­anced it will be, offer­ing greater accu­racy due to the pre­dictabil­ity of its flight. The new panel shape har­mo­nizes the energy dis­place­ment and min­i­mizes the amount of cor­ners, while the larger pan­els allow for a cleaner kick­ing area. Per­haps the biggest dif­fer­ence the play­ers will find with the new balls will be how they play in the wet. Nor­mally, a wet and heavy ball behaves quite dif­fer­ently from a dry one. It flies slower through the air, has a lower bounce and is more dif­fi­cult to curl. A patented Ther­mal Bond­ing tech­nol­ogy makes the new ball vir­tu­ally water­proof with iden­ti­cal per­for­mance char­ac­ter­ist­sics wet or dry. The FIFA Approved Stan­dard for water absorp­tion stip­u­lates no more than a 10% weight increase – the +Teamgeist’s blitzes this with less than 0.1 % weight increase. Sim­i­larly, it has sig­nif­i­cantly improved on all stan­dards for uni­for­mity of rebound and pres­sure reten­tion and shape and size retention.

As a trib­ute to host Germany’s great­est foot­ball moments and its tra­di­tional uni­forms, the adi­das design team returned to tra­di­tional black and white as the dom­i­nat­ing col­ors for the FIFA World Cup Match Ball. The fine gold accents along the rounded pro­pellers are inspired by the golden FIFA World Cup Tro­phy. The rev­o­lu­tion­ary new panel shape is designed to min­i­mize cor­ners and to cre­ate a more homoge­nous sys­tem in terms of per­for­mance and look. The radi­ant lines of the graph­ics sur­round­ing the pro­peller shape sym­bol­ize move­ment and energy.

Looks really cool. I want to go.

giz­mag Arti­cle: Adi­das unveils the soc­cer ball V2.0