Each sport has its iconic ball. Baseball has the red stitching and white leather. American football has the classic pigskin, with white stripes and lacings. Soccer has the predominately white ball, made of hexagons (IIRC), with black pentagons.
Except that for soccer, that was only the actual ball for two World Cups–something like four to eight years. Before that, it was any number of brown or white leather spheres; after that, it’s been any number of multicolored… whatever-made-out-of spheres. Baseball’s pretty much had the baseball for a hundred years or more; American football has had the prolate spheroid for quite a while as well.
What was so special about the iconic “Telstar” soccer ball that made it the defining image of the sport, despite the fact that it hasn’t actually been part of the equipment for decades?
FWIW, from checking threesporting goodschains, most or all of them still have the hex/pentagon stitching, even if they’re not all the Telstar style. The last link does show at least one model with the Telstar coloring, however.
The design was introduced in the 1960s, and became dominant in the late '60s/early '70s. With its contrasting black pentagonal panels it was visually distinctive, and was incorporated into the logo for the 1970 tournament, which probably helped to cement the association with soccer in the public mind.
I think it’s just the absence of a single good alternative.
It’s rather like if I were drawing a comic of some football players. I’d draw them with black boots with maybe a white stripe on them.
Even though you’re just as likely to see eyeball-melting yellow and pink nowadays, and there will be some other colour gimmick in time for the next world cup. But no single design has been as widespread as the classic black boots.
WRT the ball, the Telstar design was maybe the first visually distinctive style, and then sold very well long after the world cup in which it originally featured. It was easily-recognized, and popular, so it became cemented in people’s mind as the standard football.
That hasn’t happened with any other design yet.
It iconifies easily, with sharply-contrasting colours and easy geometric shapes. The colours map to the actual leather pieces. Plus it was the first to use the truncated icosahedron geometry. And Mexico was really the first World Cup to reach the global audience that live, colour satellite TV could provide.
Compare that with the pieces of multicoloured, curvy crap that are the 2010 or 2014 balls, and you can see how, reduced real tiny, those don’t make nice icons.
It’s worth noting that those later balls have fancy curvy designs printed on them, but the basic structure is the same combination of hexagons and pentagons as the Telstar had.
In other words, there isn’t a new design of ball; just a new pattern printed on balls.
yeah, that’s what I meant when I said the Telstar colours map to the actual structure. Because the structure is a basic geometric shape, it makes the whole thing much simpler to render than the printed-on patterns of later designs.
ISTR that the same pattern was used for the explosive lenses on the Trinity and Fat Man atomic weapons. I think it’s a particularly effective way to translate 2D patterns into a sphere.
Those examples are cheap “replicas.” The actual balls used in the 2010 and 2014 World Cups (among others and other competitions) didnotuse the familiar pentagon structure at all. ETA: included the UEFA Champions League ball just for another example.
Get ready to be annoyed if you wacth any soccer, then. Not even the MLS uses the old black and white pattern. To my knowledge, no current major competition does.
The Nike ball used in the Premiership this year is a bizarre variant that alternates between hexagon-y things with concave sides and convex sides.
FWIW, as kids in the 80s in the UK we all played with Mitre balls that had mostly long, straight panels. They looked a lot like the design they are using now. The only Telstar-like balls we used were the rubberized one-piece ones that had the Telstar pattern printed on them.
According to this page the hexagon-pentagon pattern provides for better flight characteristics after being kicked. Perhaps it also helps with accuracy in kicking since wherever your foot makes contact on the ball it’s about the same. If you had, say, just four large panels, I don’t think the ball would be as close to perfectly spherical.
Interesting–I hadn’t realized that the underlying pattern was more or less the same (except, perhaps, in the fairly outrageously expensive balls used in the BPL or World Cup), with only the pattern changing. I find myself a bit suspicious of the claims made for the very high end balls, but that’s a different thing. Thanks all!
Please reread post #13. The painted balls with the hexagon/pentagon pattern are NOT the official tournament balls in a huge variety of tournaments worldwide, but rather cheap imitation “replicas.” The real balls used in competitions have a structure ENTIRELY different from the Telstar ball. See links above. Spectre of Pithecanthropus’s links are NOT the official balls, at all.
Repeat: no major competition in the entire world to my knowledge makes any use of the Telstar ball or its pentagon/hexagon structure.
ETA: the question from the OP has yet to be answered. I have no idea why, myself.
