It’s All About the Bamboozling Ball

January 30th, 2008 | by: Laurie | View Comments

South Africa goalkeeper Moeneeb Josephs thinks the ball design is making him look bad.

“The Nations Cup has produced 58 goals in 18 games, many of them spectacular efforts from long distance.

But Josephs believes the glut is down to the unpredictable, multi-coloured ball rather than the skills of the forwards.

‘It’s terrible, absolutely terrible,’ he told reporters on Tuesday. ‘It’s not goalkeeper-friendly at all. It’s the ball’s movement that’s the problem,’ he said. ‘You’re expecting it to do one thing and then it does something totally different, which is hard for a goalkeeper because you’re going in one direction and it changes direction in mid-air. It makes goalkeepers look like idiots. It isn’t that the guys have been scoring good goals, it’s the ball which has been making the guys look good.’ “

I was ready to put this down to unjustified whining from a keeper whose team has one point out of a possible six. But then I started doing a little research on ball aerodynamics, and it seems that he may have a point.

I found an article about the official World Cup ball from 2006, which had a very similar design. And scientists in 2006 said it would “bamboozle” goalkeepers.

The new ball has only 14 panels with fewer seams compared to the traditional soccer ball that has either 26 or 32 panels in a hexagon pattern.

Scientists say that this change is going to “bamboozle goalkeepers” during the game this year. The reason they believe that the new soccer ball will cause problems is that its design resembles the aerodynamics of a baseball. The new soccer ball when hit with a slow spin will make it more likely to give an unpredictable trajectory when kicked in the air.

“With a very low spin rate, which occasionally happens in soccer, the panel pattern can have a big influence on the trajectory of the ball and make it more unpredictable for a goalkeeper.”…

“In baseball, pitchers often throw a ‘curve ball’ which is similar to a swerving free kick and the rotating seam disrupts the air flow around the ball in much the same way as a soccer ball does. Occasionally though, pitchers will throw a ‘knuckleball’ which bobs about randomly in flight and is very disconcerting for batters. It happens because pitchers throw the ball with very little spin and as the ball rotates lazily in the air, the seam disrupts the air flow around the ball at certain points on the surface, causing an unpredictable deflection. With the world’s best players in Germany this summer, there are bound to be plenty of spectacular scoring free kicks. But watch the slow motion replays to spot the rare occasions where the ball produces little or no rotation and where goalkeepers will frantically attempt to keep up with the ball’s chaotic flight path.”

So there you have it, folks. The official and scientific reasons for why it is really and truly NOT the goalkeeper’s fault.