Football is officially the most popular sport in the world.
It draws in huge crowds at stadiums and on television, but the fans give all of their focus to the players, the managers, the match officials, and the club owners. One key ingredient that is usually overlooked, is the ball.
It’s a fact that without the ball itself there would be no game to watch, and it’s also a fact that the way the ball is made plays a huge role in the game. Probably more than most people realise.
You only have to go back and look at how balls used to be made to realise how the stars of today would struggle to impress had they played with the sort of footballs used back then.
Here is a look back at the history of how footballs were made in the past, how they developed over time, and how they are made today.
The First Footballs
Many people would be able to tell you that footballs used to be made from pig’s bladders, but beyond that, general knowledge tends to dry up.
There is evidence of the Chinese playing a game not dissimilar to football during the Han dynasty – that started in 200 BC! Back then they used stuffed animal skins, a method that was also used in Roman and Egyptian times as well as by the Greeks.
It was in Europe that pig’s bladders are thought to have been first used as footballs.
The problem was that pig’s bladders were not round, so the ball you got would depend on the pig it came from. They were all slightly different, and they also had a tendency to burst. To reduce the rate of decomposition and the chance of the ‘balls’ bursting, during medieval times people had the idea of encasing the bladder in leather.
When you think about it, they were just covering an internal organ with skin again, so you can understand the logic. This also increased the control people had over the shape, but they obviously didn’t have the tools to make all balls the same so they were still more plum shaped than round. Plus, the bladders inside were different shapes and sizes, so each ball would behave differently when kicked.
It was a much better solution to the crude stuffed animal skins, but it was far from perfect. Even so, it would take until the mid 1800s for a real solution to be found.
Richard Lindon – The Inventor of the Modern Football
The move away from using pig’s bladders came about because of a tragedy.
A man named Richard Lindon, a leather worker from Rugby, had a business making shoes. However, he also made balls for the local school using the old pig’s bladder method.
He soon found himself with more orders for balls than shoes, so he and his wife set up production of these balls. His wife was in charge of blowing up the bladders, but this was done by blowing through a clay pipe directly into the bladder. This was a potentially dangerous job, because if the pig was diseased, the person blowing up the bladder could catch it.
This is exactly what happened to Mrs Rebecca Lindon. She contracted a lung disease and died.
Understandably, Richard was devastated, and set about finding safer ways to manufacture the balls. He had 17 children to feed, so he couldn’t exactly stop working.
He began using Indian Rubber to create the bladders instead, and when they were too tough to blow up using your mouth, he drew inspiration from a medical ear syringe and created a bigger brass version to blow up his bladders. The balls were still finished by stitching leather panels together around the bladder, but because the bladders could now be made much more spherical, he had more control over the shape.
The modern football was born.
Size, Shape and Weight Regulations
When the Football Association was created in 1863, the game of football started to become more organised and regulated. The extended to the balls too.
Now their size and shape could be controlled during manufacturing, the Association decided they all needed to be a uniform size, shape and weight.
On top of this, improvements to the ball were being made over time. Mitre and Thomlinson’s of Glasgow began to mass produce balls, among others, using leather from cows to create the best quality products. It was found that the rump produced the best leather for footballs.
The quality of the stitching was also improved, as was the rubber ‘bladder’ inside the ball, and the way in which the leather panels were stitched went through various different stages too. This is why the pattern changed over the years.
As the quality and reliability of footballs improved, so did the skills of the players. With all balls now being the same aside from perhaps some very minor differences, they could hone their abilities knowing exactly how the ball would react.
In terms of the weight of these older balls, it is an enduring myth that they were heavier than the balls of today.
Since 1987, regulations have stated the weight of a ball must be between 14-16oz, and they haven’t changed. Before that the regulations actually stated the ball had to be lighter.
However, due to the leather being used as well as other absorbent materials such as the stitching, in wet weather the balls could absorb water and become heavier during the game. This wasn’t something that could be controlled so they accepted it at the time, before attempting to water proof balls with paints among other things in 1950s.
It’s not a problem anymore of course, because the materials used to create the balls would change once again for the modern day.
100% Synthetic Footballs
The first 100% synthetic – and so waterproof – football was invented back in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that they were used around the world.
This brought uniformity to the sport on a global scale, with the ‘Buckminster’ ball of the 1970s offering the most spherical design the sport had ever scene, thanks to it’s pattern of hexagonal and pentagonal pieces of material being stuck together.
As always, the balls went through changes and many minor improvements, such as moulding the pieces together rather than stitching them, and improving the strength of the rubber inner part (what used to be the bladder) to increase responsiveness when kicked or headed.
In 2006, Adidas created a ball they called the Teamgeist especially for the World Cup. To the untrained eye it just looked like a ball with a different panel design, but actually, the design was what set it apart.
They did away with hexagons and pentagons and instead used a smaller number of curved panels moulded together. This meant the barely perceivable edges found on older balls where to shaped panels were joined no longer existed.
For the first time, football could claim it had a perfectly spherical ball. Regardless of where the foot connected with the ball, the outcome would be the same. There would be no slight deviation caused by the design.
We are talking extremely fine margins here, but by now football had been flooded with money, and those fine margins mattered.
Introducing Technology
Just when we thought the ball design had been perfected, along came technology.
With the introduction of goal line technology, VAR, and the many statistics and analysis companies out there, football needed to find ways to monitor the games in minute detail.
Although not yet widespread, technology such as sensors have been added to goals, areas of the pitch, and even into the footballs themselves.
In 2022, ‘smart balls’ with ‘connected ball’ technology were used for the first time.
These footballs have inertia/motion trackers suspended inside them, as though they have been caught in a spider’s web. When the ball is kicked, these tiny units measure the angle, force, speed etc., and that information is instantly relayed to a logging system somewhere. Essentially, the ball is precisely tracked.
This means referees can know for sure if someone got a toe to the ball or if if it crossed the line. Analysts can find out how fast a ball was moving when a goalie pulls off a miraculous save. The data that can be collected is almost limitless.
For the players the ball feels no different, but for the game itself, these new ball are at the heart of big changes.