A few days and it will be the starting whistle for the European football championships. For fans, the opportunity to cheer for their national team and see Mbappé, Cristiano Ronaldo and Nicolò Barella in action. In every match of the continental event there will also be another protagonist in addition to the 22 players on the pitch. An indispensable but unknown protagonist, indeed literally kicked: the ball.
In Germany, for example, the Fussballliebe (which in German means "love for football") will make its debut: a ball with a tech heart, which contains a sensor capable of processing 500 images per second and precisely identifying infringements and offsides . A futuristic sphere that promises great help to referees also in determining touches with hands and arms. A sphere that is the fruit not only of technological innovation, but of a long history and tradition that is told to us by Étienne Ghys, mathematician and secretary general of the Paris Academy of Sciences, in his new book “The incredible story of soccer ball” (Sonda Editore, 2024, euro 18, pp. 144).
The soccer ball, in fact, has come a long way since it was a simple brown leather "case", with hand-sewn pieces and a protruding valve to inflate everything. That was the ball of heroic times, the ball that in case of rain swelled with water and became a boulder capable of stunning players who hit it with their heads. Then, with the 1970 World Cup in Mexico - Italy-Germany 4-3, so to speak - the first modern ball arrived: the Telstar, with its surface featuring white hexagons and black pentagons. It was the first ball that could be seen well on television and a jewel of craftsmanship and also of... geometry and mathematics.
As a good scientist, Étienne Ghys demonstrates how to create a ball that maintains the right trajectory, that rolls regularly and that allows players and goalkeepers good control that is anything but obvious and the result of improvisation. For example: have you ever wondered how many pieces are “sewn” together in a traditional soccer ball? How many are white? And how many blacks? To answer you need to involve geometry, mathematical calculations and physics. Starting from the Telstar of 1970 up to the Fussballliebe (to which the afterword by the Gazzetta dello Sport journalist Filippo Maria Ricci is dedicated), Ghys recounts the evolution of the soccer ball through world and European championships. The engineers have tried to simplify and change the ball to make it more aerodynamic, more controllable and even more elegant - because the eye also wants its part -. They didn't always succeed: the ball used for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa was called Jabulani, which for South Africans means "to be happy". It's a shame that he didn't make almost anyone happy on the playing field because he was uncontrollable!
However, Jabulani makes us understand how even the names given to the balls make them even more fascinating: just think of the Teamgeist of the 2006 World Cup in Germany, which in German means "team spirit" or the Brazuca of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, a portmanteau between the words “Brazil” and “bazooka” to arrive at the official ball of the Qatar 2022 World Cup, called Al Rihla (in Arabic, “the journey”), made up of eight triangular pieces and twelve kite-shaped pieces. In geometry we could define it as an icosidodecahedron, that is, one of the polyhedra studied by Archimedes. To find out what exactly it is, all you have to do is read “The incredible story of the soccer ball” by Étienne Ghys to the last page.
<p>The cover</p>
