Why Don't ⚽️ Look Like ⚽️?
Ballgate alert!
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, Jacob talks balls.
It’s been too long since we had a good ‘ole stupid sports scandal. The Luka-to-LA conspiracies are just depressing. The Mahomes favoritism debates lacked any semblance of whimsy. I’m talking about misshapen three-point lines, disrespectful statues, banging trash cans, Urban Meyer reportedly kicking a kicker, “sticky stuff.”
Which is why I’m glad to share the latest brouhaha from Britain: it’s ballgate!1
In the middle of an underwhelming Manchester City season, manager Pep Guardiola complained over the weekend about the FA Cup’s Mitre Ultimax Pro model.
“The ball is not right,” he said. “In many years it's happened in the FA Cup and Carabao Cup. I know it's a business and they come to agreements. You know how many shots went over the post? Look at other games."
To my American ears, the most fascinating part of this debate (which isn’t altogether new) is the way soccer leagues have commercialized the very center of their competitions.
This season, Man City will play with at least four balls—Nike’s in the Premier League, Adidas’ in the Champions League, Mitre’s in the FA Cup, and Puma’s (which Arsenal’s manager ripped in January) in the Carabao Cup. Next year, the Prem is switching to Puma balls under a new deal. And in between, every competition rolls out new designs at rates that rival NBA jersey reveals.
There’s no way American athletes would put up with that kind of inconsistency. You could even say it’s…
Imagine a football. A baseball. A tennis ball. Now picture a soccer ball. Pull out your emoji keyboard if you need help.
“It’s that iconic—the black-and-white,” says Subomi Kushanu, who reviews the newest soccer gear.
The only problem is they don’t look like that anymore. And at the highest level, they haven’t since the 1970s, as catalogued by the amazingly titled website football-balls.com.2
The Adidas Telstar ⚽️ was reportedly designed with TV in mind, replacing a series of balls boasting different shades of brown with a high-contrast look that popped even on black-and-white tellies.
The earth is not perfectly round, and soccer balls shouldn’t be either.
Since then, each sporting goods company has since put their own spin on the ball. Attempting to create their own signature (and sell more product), they increasingly have touted pseudo-scientific branding to explain reinventions of the form. The trend peaked in 2010, when Adidas—with David Beckham’s help—delivered the Jabulani model for the World Cup, “a technological revolution… the most accurate ball that we ever made.” The only problem was players complained the ball was actually too spherical and light, making its flightpath hard to predict.
The earth is not exactly round, and soccer balls shouldn’t be either, it turns out.
In 2020, Nike took inspiration from golf balls, adding grooves to improve flight consistency after creating a kicking machine as part of its development process. Adidas dropped dimples into its ball for the 2024 Euros. In a reverse-razor situation, the balls also use fewer and fewer connected panels, going from 32 pentagons and hexagons in 1970 to 20 triangles in 2022 and a rumored four-panel structure coming for the 2026 World Cup. What will they think of next?
I find it ironic that soccer, the beautiful game, in many ways the simplest sport, the one that was once played with a stuffed pig bladder, now has the most galaxy-brain designs being kicked around.
But it’s not like the average player can tell the difference. Even Kushanu admits that, were the various balls spray-painted black and dropped at his feet, “there’s no way I’d be able to tell [which is which].”
Still, the recent changes have generally been for the better, Kushanu said, with improved aerodynamics, water resistance, and foot-feel.
Just like with jerseys, companies also now capitalize on nostalgia with retro releases. MLS’ 2025 ball is a throwback to its original blue and green colors, retailing for $170 at the high end, with new “debossing elements” for accuracy. Kushanu recently acquired a new Premier League ball inspired by ‘00s designs and released by Nike as a farewell gesture—“the first time I bought the Premier League ball in God knows,” he said.
There is a benefit to the unrelenting turnover, Kushanu pointed out. When reviewing old clips, it’s instantly clear to eagle-eyed viewers which year they’re watching action from.
However the constant change also means no design is likely to take the place of the Telstar. There appears to be no pressure on the Unicode Consortium to update its soccer ball emoji. Generations from now, kids might look at ⚽️ the same way they do ☎️ or 💿.
Kushanu thinks that’s for the best. “It’s a universal thing,” he said of the symbol. “People see that and think football.”
Just don’t make Pep play with one.
Eben’s ⚡ Take: Retired soccer goalie here, and I’d just like to affirm that perfectly round soccer balls are the devil’s work. Outside of that, iterate away! Pep Guardiola wouldn’t have said a peep about this if Man City wasn’t in the middle of a horribly disappointing year. Should there be just one pro soccer ball? Maybe. But if there was, he would find something else to gripe about.
BTW, pro tennis players reading this essay are probably nodding their heads vigorously. The underlying reasons are different, but pro tennis is also in the middle of its own ballgate, a great scandal that includes supply chain woes, pressure treatment and ball “exfoliation.”
Programming Note: The Pick Six now comes in a separate post, in your inbox every Saturday AM.
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I assume Brits don’t actually use the -gate construction for their controversies?
It’s for this reason that I’m comfortable using “soccer” instead of “football” in this story. “Football balls” breaks my brain.