{"id":13034,"date":"2026-06-08T09:31:56","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T09:31:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?p=13034"},"modified":"2026-06-08T09:31:56","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T09:31:56","slug":"why-this-years-world-cup-ball-may-not-fly-as-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?p=13034","title":{"rendered":"Why this year\u2019s World Cup ball may not fly as far"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>\u201cThe simple picture is that Trionda may very slightly punish extreme distance, but it should reward clean technique and predictable flight,\u201d says team member John Eric Goff, who researches sports physics and is an incoming professor of engineering practice at Purdue University.\u00a0 \u201cGoalkeepers, defenders hitting long passes, and long-range shooters are where I would look first for visible differences.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video\"><video style=\"aspect-ratio:1080 \/ 1080\" controls=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/wp.technologyreview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/wind-test.mov\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Researchers used a wind tunnel to study the Trionda ball at the University of Tsukuba. <\/figcaption><p>TAKESHI ASAI, SUNGCHAN HONG, AND RICHONG LIU<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<p>Adidas has been designing new balls for each World Cup since the 1970s. Some of the design changes in the first few decades were aesthetic: The 1986 ball featured graphics inspired by Aztec temples for the Mexico tournament, and 1994\u2019s had space graphics in honor of the moon landing\u2019s 25th anniversary. There were some structural differences too, such as upgraded foam cores and improved water resistance. But by and large, the balls used the same design of 32 pentagonal panels stitched together.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>That changed in the 2006 World Cup in Germany, when Adidas introduced the +Teamgeist ball. It featured just 14 curved panels, which were thermally bonded together rather than stitched. The design helped keep moisture out so the ball wouldn\u2019t grow heavier throughout the game, Goff says. It was around this time that he started studying soccer balls. In the years since then, he and his colleagues have followed the transformations as Adidas has released balls with different surface textures and even fewer panels\u2014design changes significant enough to affect game play.\u00a0<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>In-flight motion<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>Goff discovered early on that by analyzing a ball\u2019s trajectory data, he could derive its drag coefficient\u2014a number that determines the air resistance it experiences midflight at a given speed. Shortly after, he began working with a team in Japan to analyze how the World Cup ball\u2019s in-flight behavior changes with each new design.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The experiments, carried out at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, have been purposely consistent over the years because \u201cmaintaining continuity is important for comparing new data with historical data sets,\u201d says Takeshi Asai, a professor there<strong> <\/strong>who works on the experiments. They entail attaching the ball to a metal rod connected to an instrument called a force balance, which measures aerodynamic forces such as drag and lift as the ball is exposed to the same wind speeds it would experience in a real soccer game\u2014seven to 35 meters per second.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The team tests the ball in different orientations, \u201cbut you can only do a few because the\u00a0Trionda ball is $170,\u201d Goff says, and each new test effectively destroys it. The experiments show the team how the drag coefficient changes with speed, and Goff then writes code to simulate the ball\u2019s overall trajectory as it flies through the air.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The team\u2019s analysis has shown how recent World Cup balls evolved since the eight-panel Jabulani ball for the 2010 event. The Jabulani faced much criticism from players\u2014particularly goalkeepers, who said it had a deceptive trajectory that \u201cdipped wickedly,\u201d as one player told the <em>Guardian<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>#years #World #Cup #ball #fly<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThe simple picture is that Trionda may very slightly punish extreme distance, but it should&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13035,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[9906,9289,2287,7559,9905,7534,236,920,9904,438],"class_list":["post-13034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-adidas","tag-ball","tag-cup","tag-fifa","tag-fifa-world-cup","tag-fly","tag-soccer","tag-world","tag-world-cup","tag-years"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-2238873207.jpg",1200,600,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-2238873207-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-2238873207-300x150.jpg",300,150,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-2238873207-768x384.jpg",640,320,true],"large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-2238873207-1024x512.jpg",640,320,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-2238873207.jpg",1200,600,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-2238873207.jpg",1200,600,false],"covernews-featured":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-2238873207-1024x512.jpg",1024,512,true],"covernews-medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-2238873207-540x340.jpg",540,340,true]},"author_info":{"display_name":"admin","author_link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?author=1"},"category_info":"<a href=\"https:\/\/news678.top\/?cat=7\" rel=\"category\">Stories<\/a>","tag_info":"Stories","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}