> The ball was designed with *sustainability* as a priority; indeed, Al Rihla is the first FIFA World Cup ball to be made exclusively with water-based inks and glues.
From the same organization organizing the construction of 6 air conditioned stadiums in the middle of the desert...
I wish we wouldn't put up with this kind of lip service, and had a better index of who really gets to make what claim. Instead we just get these press statements which hit all the right words like sustainability/inclusivity at no cost to themselves.
I've never understood why a new ball in introduced only at the tournament itself - where no players have had any previous experience with using it, and any changes it brings - rather than for the qualifying campaign so that any nuance required can already be learned and thus they would get to use to its full potential. For a tournament featuring the best of the best, where the champions of the world are to be decided, changing the equipment that all participants have been used to in the previous years is a weird idea.
While I agree with you and believe that this is purely for the purpose of making money, the World Cup is still 8 months away. There are a few rounds of international friendlies where teams can get match practice with the ball, and indeed there are still a handful of undecided places (if everyone can please cross their fingers for Scotland I would appreciate it)
A mafioso kidnapped the daughter of a manufacturer to force him to blackmail a national football chairman to bribe a FIFA official, because the mafioso owes a favor to an east Asian gang, who will benefit from increased demand for their slave labour in Burmese factories?
In utilitarian net terms the (BAFTA award winning) scenario you posit is far, far, far, better than the current situation where an estimated 6500+ exploited migrant workers have died building out the stadiums and infrastructure.
The site guidelines recommend an assumption of good faith. That’s something that may just be advised more broadly these days, and you are failing it quite spectacularly.
Given the context here (a World Cup awarded to _Qatar_ of all places) it's arguably more of a good faith assumption that FIFA is indeed corrupt, because the alternative assumption is that its members are mind-blowingly incompetent, to the point where you'd be assuming they required assisted living programmes and round-the-clock care.
The history of FIFA and the actions they have taken means they have lost the right to the presumption of good faith, regardless of what the site guidelines recommend.
It's because it's BS. A football is a football. They make a new ball to sell it, and the players don't complain cause the changes are negligible in a real world environment. Wind and human imprecision have a much larger effect on a ball's flight than the difference in texture between a regular ball and a world cup ball.
Why write so confidently about something you know nothing about? Some of the footballs are wildly different in how they curve when you hit them, for instance, which even an amateur will notice.
Jabulani wasn't the worst in that decade of World Cups' balls: Fevernova had the crazy curving ability and was significantly faster than others at the time, Teamgeist is the lowest diameter possible and feels like a rubber ball for kids.
To GP: a difference in texture results in a slightly different technique in ball control and trajectories possible due to a friction drag.
As for GGP's comment: a professional football player can adapt to a ball in a couple of training sessions.
It was supposedly the a keeper's nightmare (because of its chaotic trajectories) yet this world cup was the cup with the lowest amount of goal scored in the past 20 years and came with the record of the fewest goals scored by a world cup winner, so we can argue that it didn't have the effect people feared…
Cynical old man here says that all this talk of the ball making a difference is made up by marketing people to sell more balls.
It's not hard to coax someone into saying Coke tastes different to Pepsi. It does, but not enough to make a real difference to anything.
Similarly you can get someone to say one ball is different to another. And you will, if you want to get people to buy this special world cup ball.
We've all played with different balls at times. Did it ever matter at all? I think that prior has to stand until there's some quite compelling evidence that isn't just advertising in disguise.
Depends. CONMEBOL has a pretty arduous qualification process, eighteen matches against the likes of Brazil and Argentina :-O UEFA has ten (and potentially a couple of playoff rounds)
But having the ball available to practice with would still be useful. The ball can indeed make a difference; I seem to recall quite a stir during the Brazil World Cup when the players kept complaining that the seven-panel ball they were using was uncontrollable - like "kicking around a beach ball."
Obviously they want to sell balls, but in addition to that, adapting to a new ball is a skill that itself can be developed and is regularly put to test.
changing the equipment that all participants have been used to in the previous years is a weird idea.
Does the Italian Serie A use the same ball year to year? Do they use the same ball as the Spanish La Liga? Does either league use the same ball as the Champions League? Usually not. Top players are used to working new balls pretty regularly. It is part of the game.
> I've never understood why a new ball in introduced only at the tournament itself
Well, its a simple answer I think - its the way to sell the most amount of balls and maximise profit.
Footballers (all professional sportsmen really) are entertainers - they are there to harness the energy we have for what they do, and turn it into profits.
And because of the insanely corrupt way it awarded. Bidding for a summer World Cup then deciding (after it awarding!) that it's far too hot in the summer to play football in a desert.
I thought this was debunked and that the death rates were lower per capita than if the migrants had remained in their home countries. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33019838
The poor treatment of migrant labourers in Qatar has certainly not been debunked. I did not hear about the death rate being different, but having your passport confiscated and your wages withheld is about as close to slavery as we are likely to see among developed nations
I've also boycotted sportsball for the same reason.
Its stretched too far. Its about now about the money and power, not playing the game.
Entertainment used to be watching people slaughtered in arenas.
Now the entertainment is watched after people are worked to death building arenas. The death cost for enertainment is still there, just in a different place.
Why is any of this considered entertainment if that's what it costs?
Ironically, the laborers that have had their passports taken away from them during the construction of this tournament aren't allowed to make "the journey" back to their homes.
It's a bit disappointing that they announce a ball with new panel shapes and print and then only show a cropped image, from one side only, as hero image.
I don't think they did, but imagine they designed an asymmetric ball, only incompletely revealing it just long enough that all bootleg manufacturers set up their lines to build an extrapolation of the revealed side and then derail them with a surprise "far side of the ball looks completely different, gotcha!".
Come to think of it, for the print part of it (as opposed to the panel setup) I suspect that an unrevealed surprise design isn't even that unlikely, perhaps with two tiers of "official design" where the premium version is only revealed much closer to the event (with only the lower tier design made available even for training/qualification of official teams). Thinking a bit more of this, I suspect that this isn't me hypothesizing at all, but just murky memories of past cup seasons resurfacing?
They usually do a special variant of the ball for the final. I don't think the regular ball changes, although the balls used in actual matches at big tournaments have the specific match they're intended for printed on.
From the same organization organizing the construction of 6 air conditioned stadiums in the middle of the desert...
I wish we wouldn't put up with this kind of lip service, and had a better index of who really gets to make what claim. Instead we just get these press statements which hit all the right words like sustainability/inclusivity at no cost to themselves.