Neat: How Adidas Created the Perfect Soccer Ball for World Cup 2010 [Video]

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© Jabulani, Deconstructed: Adidas via PopSci

A fun story, both on its own and as a way to ease into a year of us providing you coverage of the Beautiful Game. And before you suggest that “providing” actually means “inflicting on,” keep in mind that the debate over soccer can end up in one place. It’s like Climate Science. Yes there are ticky tack issues that can be raised about any particular area – low scoring, faked injuries, etc. But the mass consensus of experts on the “inside,” which we can plainly see from the “outside,” is a telling indicator. After everything is untangled and measured, we know how the scales will tip.

Genocidal border wars get suspended during great soccer matches and peace is allowed hold, as used to be the case during the Olympic Games in Antiquity. You’re can’t push back against that by pointing out that big games sometimes get settled by penalty kicks. The arguments just don’t balance out. Especially not when free kicks can sometimes look like this. Honestly. The guy is simply not of this world. How does physics even work that way?

All of which is a roundabout way of saying, neat!

With the 2010 Cup’s Jabulani ball (‘to celebrate’ in isiZulu), Adidas claims it has surpassed its own Teamgeist from 2006 in constructing the roundest and most accurate ball ever played… Teamgeist achieved its improvements by reducing the number of panels from 32 to just 12, by thermally bonding the panels thereby eliminating inaccurate stitching and by forming the outer panels in 3-D versus making them flat and bending them into shape. Jabulani takes another step towards perfection with just eight EVA and TPU panels that provide a 70% larger striking surface due to fewer seams… Jabulani attempts to stabilize the flight pattern of the ball through what Adidas is calling ‘aero grooves’, essentially long indentations along the panels. The grooves divide the ball up into additional pseudo-panels.

In addition to being about as round an object as we can manufacture in material reality, Jabulani is also totally waterproof and perfectly weighted at 440 grams. Video:

Commercial space flight, vodka pills, and now the perfect soccer ball. We live in wondrous times, friends, wondrous times indeed.

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