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 The design of footballs has changed a few times since the game was established. For a few decades, the most common design consisted of 18 rectangular brown panels, arranged into six slightly curved squares. Many of the football clubs have representations of a ball like that in their logos. I think Bolton Wanderers have a particuarly ugly example, where they try to make each of the letters "BWFC" look like one of the squares. I forgot to take a close-up photograph of it but you might be able to see it on the left of the stadium in this picture. In the 1960s, a new design was introduced, called the Telstar. It was made of 12 black pentagons and 20 white hexagons, the colours being chosen so that it showed up well on black-and-white photographs and television. Road signs giving directions to football grounds, such as this one, have a picture which is meant to suggest a Telstar ball, although the picture actually uses just hexagons. Recently, the design has been changing every year as manufacturers try to design a ball with all the properties that players want. This year, the top division is using balls which are like a Telstar but where each of the hexagons is divided into two trapezia, giving it a total of 52 panels. The next three divisions are using a design with 12 T-shaped panels. I don't know what the fifth division is using, even though I have watched one of their games. UTC Time: 10:08, Thursday 13 August 2015 Local Time: 11:08, Thursday 13 August 2015 Estimate of longitude: 2° 7' 16.18" W = -2.121160° Estimate of latitude: 53° 15' 47.12" N = 53.263090° Possible error on position estimate: 100 metres | |
