Notably, the Trionda consists of only four panels, which are thermally bonded together. It\u2019s the fewest panels ever for a World Cup ball and five times fewer than the version used at the previous edition of the tournament in 2022.<\/p>\n
When The Athletic took a selection of footballs to Loughborough last May for testing<\/a>, we spoke to Ieuan Phillips.<\/p>\n He\u2019s a researcher there and a colleague of Harland, and carried out research on the Qatar 2022 ball. Phillips has a huge trolley of 30 footballs from different eras that he has analysed to understand their differences.<\/p>\n \n Phillips\u2019 ball trolley, pictured in May 2025 (Liam Tharme\/The Athletic)<\/p>\n \u201cAdidas\u2019 2004 Roteiro was the first ball that went from being hand-stitched to being thermally bonded,\u201d he said. \u201cIt took basically the same panel design. It\u2019s got an inner carcass, so a woven layer around the bladder onto which the panels are thermally-bonded, which allows no stitching because it\u2019s all glued as one piece.\u201d<\/p>\n Harland offers some reasons as to why a ball might be designed with fewer panels, with the caveat that he and Phillips just test the balls \u2014 it\u2019s Adidas that creates them.<\/p>\n \u201cThe smaller number of panels, generally speaking, lowers the assembly costs,\u201d he says. Something called \u2018mould tooling\u2019 is needed for all the panel shapes and component parts, so more and different pieces require greater materials.<\/p>\n \u201cWith more straightforward production and more straightforward assembly comes greater reliability, so there are going to be those advantages. Every ball is, give or take, the same now. It\u2019s not like it was back in the handmade days, when there were big discrepancies between balls.\u201d<\/p>\n Harland contrasted this year\u2019s ball to the one produced for the 1970 tournament in Mexico, the first time Adidas created a bespoke ball for a World Cup. The iconic Telstar design, made of leather, it took hours to craft.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had, of its day, probably the world\u2019s most-advanced 32-panel hand-stitched soccer ball used on the elite level,\u201d Harland says. Twelve of the panels were black pentagons, to make the spin of the ball visible for the TV audience. \u201cThe champagne colour and the coloured graphics\u2026 I still meet people who say it was their favourite ball,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n So what\u2019s changed in half a century since? Materials and manufacturing have improved, leading to \u201ccheaper and faster (manufacturing) and higher quality controls,\u201d Harland explains. Because panels are custom-designed, there\u2019s much more creative licence, which helps explain the switch from a 20-panel ball four years ago to a four-panel one this time.<\/p>\n \n The Trionda in action during the Spain vs Cape Verde group game (Roberto Schmidt\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n \u201cThe specifics of this tournament, which has games played at sea level and at altitude, mean that there\u2019s an added complication,\u201d says Harland. The highest stadium is Estadio Azteca in Mexico at 2,200m (7,218ft), which provides aerodynamic challenges in addition to physiological ones. At higher altitudes, balls tend to fly straighter and curve less.<\/p>\n That, of course, was shown at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where the Jabulani grabbed headlines for its erratic and unpredictable movement \u2014 so much so that there\u2019s a Wikipedia page dedicated to its criticisms<\/a>.<\/p>\n Simulation tests by Austrian researchers the same year as that tournament predicted that the combination of the Jabulani ball and altitude could have \u201ca major effect\u201d on shots and direct free kicks. By their models<\/a>, a ball launched at the same speed, angle and trajectory for a top-corner free kick in Durban (sea level) would not go in at six of the other nine South African stadiums at higher altitudes.<\/p>\n \u201cJabulani was the first ball that featured the grooves in the panels,\u201d Harland explains. \u201cIf you compare how many grooves that design had and the dimensions of those grooves with where we are now, then, for good or for bad, the decision has been to make the balls considerably rougher.\u201d<\/p>\n The smoothness of the Jabulani was considered to be a cause of its wobbliness in flight. \u201cThere\u2019s no value in re-opening the Jabulani debate,\u201d Harland says, but adds that \u201cyou need a certain amount of what we would call roughness \u2014 what the general public would recognise as being seams\u201d.<\/p>\n What goes into making a World Cup football?<\/p>\n Liam Tharme and Rachael Tinde<\/p>\n He explains that it\u2019s an oversimplification to equate roughness with drag (resistance) and rather about ensuring the ball flies more consistently and predictably. \u201cAt different speeds, the ball will have a very different drag,\u201d he adds, typically being higher at lower speeds.<\/p>\n These principles are how, mathematically, they can provide an explanation for dipping shots: balls start to decelerate as soon as they are kicked, slowly at first and then rapidly once it transitions from a smooth into a rough flow state, which is when the drag increases. \u201cIt\u2019s not dipping necessarily, it\u2019s just slowing down and gravity is having a more noticeable effect.\u201d<\/p>\n Panic not, though, about any Jabulani-esque goals in Mexico over the coming weeks. Adidas, in its press release announcing the ball last October<\/a>, said it has added \u201cintentionally deep seams\u201d and \u201cstrategically-placed debossed lines\u201d into the ball to ensure the drag is \u201csufficient and evenly distributed\u201d, thus guaranteeing stable flight. Designers Solene Stoermann and Hannes Schaefke told VERSUS<\/a> that they tested the ball in seven of the tournament\u2019s 16 host cities to check its versatility.<\/p>\n \u201cThis ball has no alarms associated with it,\u201d Harland says. He first saw it \u201ca couple of years ago\u201d as a plain-white ball, which is typical of how they receive prototypes. How did it perform? \u201cIt\u2019s not at any extremes. It\u2019s not the fastest, not the slowest. It\u2019s a ball that evolved from all the learnings in lots of different aspects,\u201d he says, adding that minor changes to the final version could have been made after they tested it.<\/p>\n At its HQ in Germany, Adidas has replicated the kicking robot which Loughborough created in 2006, so most of the work at the university these days is done in the wind tunnel.<\/p>\n \n Another busy day for the Trionda at the 2026 World Cup (Alfredo Estrella\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n \u201cWe have a test routine that we go through,\u201d Harland says. \u201cWe look at changing all the flow speeds. We call it \u2018sweeps\u2019, from low to high speeds, and then we\u2019ll sweep from high to low speeds sometimes. We do a yaw sweep. That means we position the ball at different orientations towards the flow to make sure that there aren\u2019t any particular orientations that are unbalanced, and we\u2019ll do some spin tests to look at the side forces.\u201d<\/p>\n All this gets calculated, charted and sent to Adidas. Exactly what they are testing for, Harland explains, could be anything: \u201cphenomena, concepts, even sometimes thoughts or questions, hypotheses, characterised by (someone saying), \u2018We don\u2019t currently have a way of measuring this. We think it might be a feature of the ball or something that we want to control for\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n They also do some mechanical testing, having developed procedures in-house over multiple decades. \u201cMost of them are now being done at Adidas,\u201d Harland says.<\/p>\n Some of those are similar to the Quality Programme for Footballs that FIFA introduced in 1996. That eight-step process analyses balls according to eight criteria, including circumference, water absorption, rebound height, shape and size retention, and sphericity (a measurement of roundness). They have standards with upper and lower boundaries. So long as the ball lands between those, it can be designed however.<\/p>\n \u201cI dare say if the very first soccer ball that was produced was perfectly spherical and perfectly smooth, the game would have been a farce and it wouldn\u2019t have taken off,\u201d Harland says with a chuckle. \u201cIt was the fact that the ball naturally behaved itself in the air in a predictable way \u2014 a little bit like the evolution of golf balls from smooth to dimpled.\u201d<\/p>\n The only thing Harland can\u2019t provide a good answer for is just how many balls he and fellow researchers have tested at Loughborough. But this is men\u2019s World Cup ball number seven they have been involved with.<\/p>\n \n The display case in the Institute of Sports Technology at Loughborough, showing the men\u2019s World Cup and European\u00a0Championship balls that they have helped test (Liam Tharme\/The Athletic)<\/p>\n \u201cI know that I am under quite considerable pressure from my technical colleague, who has pretty much given me the final ultimatum to clear the store cupboard out,\u201d he says, half laughing and half serious. \u201cBecause a lot of the balls that we have tested are one-off prototypes, some have unique value to them, and we\u2019ve managed to put those away. But then you\u2019ve got the disposal of these things \u2014 they can\u2019t just go in the domestic waste.\u201d<\/p>\n He reckons the number of ball models is in the hundreds, and into the thousands for total balls.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause we\u2019ve had at least one, but normally two, soccer ball research programmes running at any one time.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re quite good at this in the sense that we\u2019ve been doing it for a while now. We\u2019re pretty confident that, if Adidas or another brand wanted to supply us with an example ball, we could position that ball within other tournament balls \u2014 probably if you just give us one, right? If you want to be doubly certain, then give us two, and we\u2019ll confirm that they\u2019re the same.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The ball is a defining feature of every World Cup. It\u2019s the game\u2019s equivalent of the artist\u2019s paintbrush…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":651382,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[177767,90,1671,416,3564,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-651381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-fifa-mens-world-cup","tag-science","tag-soccer","tag-space","tag-sports-business","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/651382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/IMG_9129-scaled-e1781887266602.jpg\")
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