- 2 days ago
The Jabulani: If you've heard of it, you know where this is going. The official soccer ball of the 2010 Men's World Cup was not popular. It was prone to knuckling at high speed, which made long passes and hard shots behave unpredictably. Goalkeepers in particular were furious. This episode of Big Deal talks about how that played out, but it's also interesting to remember why.
Adidas produced and marketed THE soccer ball, truly. If you close your eyes and imagine a soccer ball, you're probably picturing an orb of black and white pentagons and hexagons. That's the Adidas Telstar, which they started producing in the late 1960s. It's so rare to come up with such an iconic piece of equipment, and yet in the early 2000s, Adidas started to futz with the design. Gentle tweaks below the surface gave way to more obvious changes, which culminated in the widely loathed Jabulani in 2010.
Let's talk about how the Jabulani failed, but also why it came to be in the first place.
Adidas produced and marketed THE soccer ball, truly. If you close your eyes and imagine a soccer ball, you're probably picturing an orb of black and white pentagons and hexagons. That's the Adidas Telstar, which they started producing in the late 1960s. It's so rare to come up with such an iconic piece of equipment, and yet in the early 2000s, Adidas started to futz with the design. Gentle tweaks below the surface gave way to more obvious changes, which culminated in the widely loathed Jabulani in 2010.
Let's talk about how the Jabulani failed, but also why it came to be in the first place.
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00:00Horrible. Appalling. Difficult. Disaster. These words all come from the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
00:09Not to describe players, nor the refs, nor the games, nor FIFA itself, but an object.
00:16So many World Cup participants, representing different teams, playing different positions,
00:23agreed on one common enemy. The ball. That's right.
00:28The 2010 World Cup featured a brand new ball, and people hated it.
00:34The Jabalani was a big deal.
00:40I'd like to begin with an exercise. You can try it wherever you are, and we'll do it live on
00:45screen as well.
00:47I guess, Jajan, you've already seen the script, so can we get Phil, the motion graphics artist, for a sec?
00:52Cool. Okay. Hi, Phil. Here's my task for you, and for you guys at home.
00:56This is it. Draw a soccer ball.
00:58Don't think too hard about it. Don't get cute with it. Just draw a soccer ball. Take like 10 seconds.
01:03Well, I recorded this in advance, so I don't actually know what Phil drew or what you drew,
01:08but I'm hoping, for the sake of my point, that you drew something roughly made of pentagons and hexagons,
01:15maybe some light ones and some dark ones. Did I get it right?
01:17Either way, my point here is that there is one soccer ball design so familiar that it's become an icon.
01:25Literally, it's the soccer ball emoji.
01:27If that's what you drew, then congratulations.
01:30Congratulations. You just drew an Adidas Telstar.
01:33Most soccer balls before, like the mid-60s, were pretty indistinct.
01:37They were designed basically the same as volleyballs.
01:41In the mid-60s, a former Danish footballer named Egil Nielsen designed this for his company, Select Sport.
01:48It draws obvious inspiration from the mathematical stylings of Buckminster Fuller.
01:53And when Adidas became the official World Cup ball maker, they used a version of Nielsen's design.
02:00They called it the Telstar because people thought it looked like a communications satellite.
02:0532 panels, 20 hexagons, 12 pentagons.
02:09It's wild to me that such an iconic design was created so recently.
02:14I never really thought about it before, but it deserves that status, I think.
02:17It's such an aesthetically and mathematically satisfying pattern.
02:21This ball, or more accurately, this truncated icosahedron, has a lot going for it.
02:27It's straightforward to manufacture.
02:29It holds up pretty reliably.
02:31It works just fine.
02:32And the vivid contrast between the dark pentagons and the light hexagons made it easy to see on a black
02:38-and-white TV broadcast.
02:40In the era of color TV, Adidas messed with the pattern and then the color on the World Cup ball,
02:45but made no significant tweaks to its construction.
02:49And then they tweaked hard.
02:51The 2002 World Cup ball presented major changes, though you couldn't quite see them.
02:57It was still 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons on the outside, but weird, ostensibly high-tech stuff going on beneath
03:04the surface.
03:05People complained.
03:07Adidas had to deny using child labor, too.
03:09Bad look.
03:10The 2006 ball was even more of a departure from the iconic design, and this time you could tell with
03:17the naked eye.
03:18No longer was the ball made of 32 ordinary polygons.
03:21Now it was made of 14 roundish, oddly-shaped panels, thermally bonded together instead of stitched.
03:29Going from 32 stitched panels to 14 melted-together panels made the ball more of a ball, less of a
03:39truncated icosahedron.
03:41That sounds like a positive development.
03:43A smoother sphere with less variety and texture makes for a more uniform kicking surface.
03:49Fewer dead spots, more accuracy, they said.
03:53All good stuff.
03:54But here's the thing about texture.
03:57Balls meant to fly through the air should not be perfectly smooth.
04:01The right amount of texture actually makes a ball more aerodynamic.
04:05The dimples on a golf ball, the stitches on a baseball, they promote rotation, which promotes directional travel.
04:13This article offers a good example.
04:15Imagine kicking a beach ball really hard.
04:18Or imagine this handsome stock image guy doing it.
04:21For a moment, the ball will travel in the direction it was struck, and then rather promptly, it will experience
04:27a rapid shift in drag, spin way less, and veer off in a seemingly random direction.
04:34That is knuckling, and it happens not only because a beach ball is very light, but very smooth.
04:40A thrown or kicked ball will lose some speed as it flies through the air.
04:45Depending on that ball's size, weight, texture, and whatnot, there is a measurable range of speed above and below which
04:53the airflow around it changes, causing drag.
04:56This is me attempting to explain physics.
04:58If I am misspeaking, please be nice.
05:01It's not my expertise.
05:02I strongly suspect that smooth 2006 World Cup ball had too high and too wide a range of speed at
05:11which it experienced a so-called drag crisis.
05:14It knuckled at velocities typical for a kicked soccer ball.
05:18It moved unpredictably, too much like a beach ball.
05:21So players complained again.
05:24Mostly goalkeepers, but some field players too did not like that, you know, long passes weren't traveling as intended.
05:31But Adidas sold hella soccer balls to regular people.
05:35The new balls were different, and they looked cool, and non-pros don't kick the ball that hard anyway, so
05:41there's that.
05:42Approaching the 2010 World Cup, the soccer ball manufacturer faced a decision.
05:47How to design their next ball.
05:49How much to respond to commercial sales versus whining from the elite players.
05:55Stick with 18 panels and hope that people got used to it.
05:58Maybe make some tweaks to reduce knuckling.
06:01Just go back to the 32 panels.
06:04If you answered A, B, or C, you're incorrect.
06:08The correct answer was D.
06:10Make the problem even worse.
06:13Introducing the ball for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
06:17The Jabulani.
06:18Sep, you have never looked more trustworthy and uncorrupt than you do in this picture.
06:23Ooh, my God, I stand corrected.
06:25That one's even better.
06:26Ladies and gentlemen, these balls are smooth as eggs.
06:30We are down to eight panels now, heat-bonded together.
06:34The Jabulani is very round and very uniform.
06:38Aerodynamically, the Jabulani is as close to a beach ball as a World Cup soccer ball has ever been.
06:44Of course, Adidas painted that as a feature, not a bug, when the Jabulani dropped in late 2009.
06:49They said the ball's smoothness would make it fast, eliding the variable of accuracy.
06:56And they said, yeah, it's got eight panels, but those panels have little dimples on them, so goalkeepers can't get
07:01mad.
07:02Come springtime, players training for the tournament started getting their hands and feet on the Jabulani and said,
07:08Well, this pre-tournament Luis Fabiano quote is my favorite.
07:12He talks about the ball like it has a spirit and a will of its own, and it hates him.
07:16Goalkeepers spoke the soonest and the loudest, just like last time.
07:20These guys' whole job was to make split-second decisions based on the trajectory of the ball,
07:25and that trajectory seemed almost random.
07:28But it wasn't just those sensitive, finicky keepers.
07:32Field players and their coaches found that hard shots and long kicks were not traveling in the intended direction.
07:39With pretty much any hard kick, the ball knuckled.
07:42People of all stripes hated the Jabulani, except, I guess, the people wearing three stripes.
07:49Adidas-sponsored players fell in line to be like,
07:51I don't know, I think the ball is fine.
07:53I don't see any issue with it. Ha ha ha.
07:56Once the actual game started, those guys fell quiet and most everyone else got grumpier.
08:02And this time, regular civilians didn't have to rely on stats or player testimonies to see the effect of the
08:09new ball design.
08:10Any fan watching from home could see this slow-motion replay in which a KSK Honda free kick
08:16basically stopped rotating and hung a left in mid-flight.
08:20People blamed the ball for unfavorable match outcomes, if not for ruining the entire tournament.
08:27Meanwhile, Diego Forlan led Uruguay to their first semifinal in decades.
08:32After some gorgeous goals, Forlan was alternately dubbed the master of the Jabulani,
08:37a mole inside Adidas, or, you know, just a guy who benefited from some lucky knuckleballs.
08:43Then, the Netherlands eliminated Uruguay thanks in part to perhaps the finest Jabulani strike of the whole tournament,
08:51Giovanni von Bronckhorst's left-footed bullet in the 17th minute.
08:55He had tamed the Jabulani, they said.
08:59Whatever the case, this is way too much attention on a piece of equipment.
09:03More than any ball at any prior tournament, the Jabulani dominated headlines,
09:09and it did so despite the presence of another extremely annoying new product present at every game.
09:15Soon enough, actual data arrived to suggest something was indeed off with the ball.
09:212010 was the second-lowest-scoring men's World Cup to date.
09:25Statistical analysis during and after the tournament suggested shots missed their target more than usual.
09:31Long passes were down, too.
09:33It kind of evens out, though, doesn't it?
09:35Keepers complained that they couldn't handle the shots on goal, but there were fewer shots on goal.
09:40No? Not convincing? Okay.
09:43Nasty headlines, damning videos, and discouraging correlational data were not enough to trigger a change.
09:49Certainly not during the 2010 World Cup.
09:51And, I mean, Adidas scrambled to adjust the ball in time for the 2011 Women's World Cup and gave it
09:57a new name and everything,
09:58but it was very similar to a Jabulani.
10:01After those tournaments, scientists, including NASA, actual NASA, got the Jabulani in a lab to show that the players were
10:09not nuts
10:10and the correlational data might have represented at least a little causation.
10:14Wind tunnel studies demonstrate that a traditional 32-panel soccer ball knuckles when traveling around 30 miles per hour.
10:23For the Jabulani, the drag crisis happened at about 55 miles per hour, and it didn't recede until after a
10:30lot of deceleration.
10:3255 miles per hour is a pretty common speed for kicked soccer balls in the World Cup.
10:37That's bad.
10:39Adidas had to course-correct for the next World Cup, and they did.
10:43The 2014 ball actually had fewer panels than the Jabulani, but more texture on each panel and deeper seams between
10:51the panels.
10:51The added texture significantly lowered the speed at which drag crisis occurred.
10:56This ball did not make news the way the Jabulani did, which is good.
11:00You do not want people talking about the ball.
11:02So, what can we learn from the Jabulani?
11:05You might say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
11:08Or, to quote the great Charles Oakley, if it ain't broke, don't break it.
11:12That's good advice, but big corporations don't always operate by that principle.
11:17The urge to stay relevant, to stay fresh, to stay expanding, incentivizes companies to pretend things are broken simply so
11:25they can sell fixes.
11:27Adidas had themselves a genuinely iconic product, widely beloved, and imperfect in ways that could be improved upon subtly.
11:36But instead of leaning into that, they tried innovation for the sake of innovation, novelty for the sake of novelty.
11:43So, I think the aphorism goes backward, too.
11:46If it ain't fixed, was it ever really broken?
11:49Or you can throw out all that philosophical stuff and leave with just this one lesson.
11:54A ball can be too round.
12:01Thank you so much for watching.
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12:12Okay, bye.
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