Football Facts

The simplicity of the game "football" is based on the fact that you hardly need anything to play the game – except for the football itself. Astonishingly it wasn’t before the World Cup 1970 when the football in use was given a unique name and thereby made to more than just a product. Of course, since there has never been another supplier of FIFA than adidas, that was an invention of adidas.

The evolution of the most important part of the equipment, the football, started slowly. In the beginning of soccer’s development, the ball was most of the time a simple brown leather utensil. Back in these days it was also very common that a ball would burst and make a substitution of the ball necessary.

It also was an invention of adidas to give the ball its now much more common white colour in the first place. The World Cup ball then remained white until the late 1990s. And in the 1950s and 1960s the ball still became much heavier when the pitch was wet, resulting in much sooner exhausted players. Nowadays a football does not change its weight nor its shape when it’s raining or snowing.

The name of the first football that had a name was "Telstar", the ball of the World Cup 1970. With its black pentagons the ball was identifable much easier for the users of at that time widespread black-and-white-tvs. From then on each World Cup tournament had its own ball with a special name, most of the cases being in association with one of the host country characteristics.

For instance, the football of the World Cup in Argentina was named "Tango", the 1986 World Cup football was named "Azteca" and the football of the second World Cup in France was labelled "Tricolore". According to this tradition, the football of the World Cup 2006 in Germany is named after the German word "Teamgeist". For the first time during the World Cup in Germany each football will have printed on it the name of the place, of the teams playing each other and of the specific date of the match.