The soccer ball V2.0

Loss of pressure test

If the ball loses air during the game, it will be difficult to predict and may not respond consistently, making long passes and deep crosses almost impossible.

For this test, the ball is inflated fully and three days later its air pressure is measured. It must not have lost more than a specified percentage of its air.

FIFA Approved Standard: Loss of pressure max. 20% The adidas +Teamgeist: Loss of pressure max. 11%

The role of Bayer MaterialScience

The outer skin of the adidas +Teamgeist, the Official Ball of the World Cup 2006, is no longer made up of 32 pentagons and hexagons but rather 14 large panels with shapes resembling propellers and turbines. Special measures have been taken to protect the novel surface, which is partly responsible for the superior play properties of the +Teamgeist: An aliphatic polyurethane (PU) topcoat formulated with raw materials from Bayer MaterialScience AG essentially places it and the printed design “under glass,” making the cover extremely resistant to abrasion. Polyurethane products from Bayer MaterialScience are also responsible for several other outstanding properties of the +Teamgeist.

“Our mission was to find a coating that can be applied evenly to the new, disparately shaped panels. The coating could not be sticky, and it had to ensure that the ball would retain its unique appearance for a long time,” said Thomas Michaelis, an expert for textile coatings at the Coatings, Adhesives, Sealants Business Unit of Bayer MaterialScience. The coating technology developed by his team and used here satisfies all of these requirements. Whereas the topcoat of Impranil ELH-A is primarily responsible for the abrasion resistance, the aliphatic intermediate coat with Impranil® HS 85 LN makes the ball very durable and extraordinarily elastic.

The total length of the panel lines of the +Teamgeist is more than 15 percent shorter than with the previous model. This revolutionary construction is one of the reasons why the outer skin of the World Cup ball is very smooth and perfectly round. Measurements of the diameter at 16 different locations per ball show that the deviation between the largest and smallest diameters is not more than one percent. Another important factor for the exact curvature is that the thickness of the layer with the syntactic polyurethane foam of Impranil has been increased from 0.9 to 1.1 millimeters compared to the Roteiro, the ball used at the 2004 European Championships. This foam is comprised of evenly-sized, gas-filled and resilient microcells and makes the +Teamgeist especially dimensionally stable. It is also responsible for the ball’s high restoring forces, which guarantee a precise trajectory.

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