Rounder World Cup Soccer Ball Messes With Goalies

By now you’ve noticed the odd looking World Cup soccer ball.  What you might not know is that the new ball is rounder, high tech, and unfriendly to goalies. 

“When the strikers for either Germany or Costa Rica kick off the first game of the 2006 World Cup today in Munich, they will be doing so with what Adidas is hailing as the roundest soccer ball ever produced. The +Teamgeist (“team spirit”) ball, as the New York Times deftly explained yesterday, was engineered with a “free-flowing” set of 14 pre-shaped panels—fewer than the traditional 32—resulting in a smoother, more consistently round surface that supposedly responds more accurately to the force of a kick. Adidas backs up this claim with its own experimental data, including tests with a robotic kicking machine that diligently shot the +Teamgeist against a wall a few hundred thousand times.” (Popular Science)