A Story of Football in 30 Episodes, Part Three
A Story of Football in 30 Episodes, Part Three
It's time to come into the modern era with the final part of our series about football through the medium of footballs.
It’s time for the final part in this whistle-stop fly past of the history of football through its actual footballs (parts one and two are here and here). We’re in the modern era now, but that doesn’t stop the innovation a-comin’.
10. Mitre Ultimax
Looking back at thirty years remove, the extent to which the early Premier League can feel surprising, to those of us who’ve become used to the extent to which it’s sharper surfaces have been ironed out. The aftermath of Hillsborough left clubs scrambling to convert to being all-seater by the summer of 1994, meaning that a good number of matches were played against a backdrop of building sites. while even the minutae of the game—the goals, the balls and the kits—still carried a degree of variety that wouldn’t be allowed in our sterilised brave new world.
But the early 1990s came the first true flourishing of a phenomenon that has come to circle the game. Nostalgia. In that first season of the Premier League, some clubs went back in time, with large, round-necked shirts and string collars which were Edwardian in design. But if this was intended on the part of Umbro, it was muddled, reaching back to a time that vanishingly few could actually remember. It was almost as though they were extremely keen to push that lineage angle, that this brave new world was continuing a story that already stretched back 100 years.
By the time of the League’s launch in 1992, FIFA and Adidas had already been cashing in with their link up, and the same was in place between Adidas and UEFA. And when they finally did, that lineage angle was on display. Rather than partnering with a sports brand with a ‘lifestyle’ orientation, the league opted for Mitre, the oldest football manufacturer of them all, and surely the most English of all. The Pro Max came first, in 1992, with the Ultimax following three years later. Their use was far from commonplace in the first place. This didn’t come until later. After all, clubs had pre-existing contracts to fulfil. Both Manchester United Chelsea stuck with their Umbro Supreme Ceramicas until 1998.
But a change was coming. It sounds like exaggeration, but the Mitre Ultimax was everywhere by the late 1990s. There was a cheap versions, for kids to kick around in the park after school. There was a plastic version, for those whose pitches were covered in tarmac. There was a slightly more expensive but still affordable that could be bought in bulk by Sunday League teams. And there was the match version, beamed into millions of homes every weekend via television aerials and satellite dishes.
Nostalgia sure can be a powerful drug, he said, without a hint of irony, but there is one likely reason why the Ultimax has stuck so firmly in the mind. It remained the official ball of the Premier League for five years, an amount of time that would surely be inconceivable to modern money-wrenchers. One word is thrown around a lot when people discuss the Ultimax; ‘iconic’. And while I usually recoil at the use of such a word, there aren’t that many others on this list which surpass it, in this respect. That this is the case is almost certainly down to that lengthy usage period.
By the mid-1990s, it looked as though Adidas had cornered the market as the match ball supplier for the European clubs. The Ultimax was the MLS ball of choice and South America preferred the Penalty Matis for both the Copa America and the Copa Libertadores. But whither Nike? Their first football kit came as late as 1978, and the first European club to wear one was Sunderland, five years later. And just as they were slow to the kit market, they were also slow to the ball market.
But when they landed, they landed in style. In some respects, 1998 was a golden year for Adidas, with France winning the World Cup in Paris using one of their balls and in one of their kits. But the times were changing. Brazil, the team they beat in the final, were already in a Nike kit, and UEFA had just announced that for the first time the official ball to be used in the Champions League would be made by them rather than Adidas.
Of all the things that they could have done with the design, Nike went for simple for their first design, a plain white ball with a large black ‘swoosh’ printed across it, which also became the official match ball of La Liga. There is something arguably charmless about about it. There’s no attempt here to make the ball look good, to create any sort of optical illusion using its natural movement patterns, no thought towards aesthetics. All that mattered was The Brand. A portent for the 21st century? I couldn’t possibly comment. UEFA returned to Adidas in 2001 and haven’t been back since.
Nike’s last season with UEFA was their first with the Premier League. They may have lost the Champions League, but they’d taken the Premier League contract from Mitre and it would be almost a quarter of a century before they lost it again (it's a-comin’). The 2000/01 season, then is unique in that the official ball for both tournaments is effectively the same one, the Geo Merlin.
Launched as “the roundest ball ever made” (and if you think that sounds stupid, consider the Premier League’s apparently irony-free use of the phrase “precision sphericity” in the above link), the Geo Merlin did at least see Nike make some concessions towards actual design, rather than just slapping a big tick on it and hoping that would be enough.
And it’s at this point that I have to put the handbrake on for a second to ask a question. Is it just my imagination, or does the outward bulging design of the Neo Merlin create the optical illusion of making the ball look bigger, or is my imagination—which, as we’ve already established, already gives up far too much time to this sort of thing—just playing tricks on me? (It’s just me, isn’t it?)
Football loves a bit of hubris doesn't it? The Premier League’s badge for more than thirty years now, for example, is a lion wearing a crown (I do not think this receives anything like enough attention), while the Champions League has not only its very name, but also the fact that for much of the last quarter century its official match ball has been covered in stars. When Nike’s contract with UEFA wasn’t renewed after 2000, they reverted back to Adidas, who arrived with the Finale.
For almost 25 years now, this has been the look of the competition and it is, considering the desire of marketers to sell new stuff every year, somewhat surprising to see that the Finale has become—and I’m going to whisper this, because it might just set some people off—the Tango of the 21st century. The essential design has remained largely unchanged for more than two decades, only with different levels with colourisation having been employed, and while there is something deeply disturbing about the fact that the wild and wacky colours that they’ve used since 2018 make the Finale look a tiny bit as though it might have been purchased from a petrol station, the stars are still there to reassuringly remind us that the teams taking part are the indeed the “CHAMPPIONSSSSS”. Add a pint of Gazprom to the mix, and you’ve pretty much got both the sight, sounds and smell of Champions League football from 2000 to 2022.
I mean, it was probably always going to be controversial. After 24 years, Adidas were finally getting rid of the Tango look, which had been through six World Cups and six European Championships. But the response the Adidas Fevernova, was feverishly angry. There were complaints that it was too light and that it was more difficult to make out on the pitch rather than a white ball must have been, while others mocked the decision to describe its off-white beige colouir as ‘champagne’. It was also, as things turned out, the last 32-panel ball used in the World Cup finals (they’d been in use since 1970) and the last hand-stitched ball to be used, with glue being used to hold it all together thereafter.
But how much of the outrage was genuine? David Beckham loved it, but he was an Adidas endorsee. The Brazil team apparently hated it, but they were deep in the pockets of Big Nike by this point. Adidas described it as “the most accurate soccer ball ever produced", whatever the hell that was supposed to mean, with breathless press releases claiming that the ball would “entertain fans with faster, harder shots and more goals than ever before in international play”.
The ball retailed in 2002 at $160, or $282, adjusted for inflation. That’s a whopping £223, in real money. It was used as the official ball of the J-League and by several clubs in the Bundesliga (the German league didn’t even adopt an official ball until 2010), but the churn of different designs would mean that ball designs would have substantially shorter lifespans in the 21st century. And even the ball’s inevitable reboot was relatively low-key. When the design reappeared in the latter stages of 2023, it was as a low bounce futsal ball.
As the Champions League swing away from Nike towards Adidas, the American manufacturers had one significant consolation prize to console them. In 2000, they became the official ball supplier to the Premier League and, as we’ve already seen from the Geo Merlin, things were never going to be quite the same again. But while the Geo Merlin, while a clear and obvious break with the past, it doesn’t seem to be the Nike Premier League ball that fans seem to remember. That honour goes instead to its successor, the Total 90 Aerow.
While the Geo Merlin had been elegantly patterned, the Total 90 Aerow was almost brutal in its simplicity, a plain white ball with three large stripes around it, the outer two in a two-tone blue and black and the middle one just in blue. And if you want to know just how successful that fundamental design was, Nike stuck with it for four years from 2004 on, changing only the blue on the stripes to red for one season and one season only. Furthermore, the Total 90 Aerow also became the Premier League’s first ‘hi-vis’ luminous yellow ball, to be used during the winter months.
It was abundantly clear by the early years of the 21st century that the future of the football was not going to be white. It is, after all, difficult to sell the same design to people every year (for league competitions) or every two to four years (for international tournaments). The Fevernova had changed the equation for this, and two years later Adidas came up with another ‘revolutionary’ design with the Roteiro, which was introduced to the world at the end of 2003.
For the first time in a major tournament, every single ball at Euro 2004 was personalised for each game, with an inscription of the name of the teams playing, the date, the name of the stadium, and the longitude and latitude of the centre spot of the pitch. But otherwise the design was pretty much unexceptional, with a couple of large black crosses stamped across it, as though the designers believed that the ball being silver would draw all the attention, meaning that they didn’t really need to do anything else with it.
Designed for the 2008 African Cup of Nations in Ghana, the Adidas Wawa Aba took its name from the seed of the wawa tree, which had become synonymous as a symbol for strength and persistence in west Africa. Now, I have to admit that this might not necessarily be the most practical of footballs, particularly for a major tournament. It’s difficult to imagine it being the easiest ball in the world to see in flight. But look at it. Just look at it. Perhaps placed upon a plinth, front and centre in your living room, is the best place for it, just to admire it as an objet d’art. Certainly no design had been seen like it before.
If Adidas were looking to make a splash, well, that was understandable. This was the purpose-designed ball for the AFCON, with previous tournaments having used balls by Diadora and Umbro, as well as previous iterations of Adidas World Cup balls. But for the remainder of their time as the provider to this tournament could be rather less imaginative, with the luminous yellow version of their rejigged Tango, the Comoequa, which was used in 2012. When the World Cup finals finally landed in Africa in 2010, meanwhile, critcism of the match ball reached a peak with the Jabulani.
Technology was coming, whether we liked it or not. Goal Line Technology was the trailblazer, and capacity for it was written into the games laws in 2012. But by this time the first experiments had been already been run. The Teamgeist had been the Adidas ball for the 2006 World Cup in Germany, becoming in the process the first to have a different, golden version for its final. But it was the Teamgeist II that would turn out to be the true revolutionary.
Described (somewhat vaguely) as “intelligent technology” which “uses a magnetic field to provide real-time feedback to a central computer, which tracks the location of the ball on the field and sends the data directly to the referee”, the version of the Teamgeist II used for the 2007 World Club Cup in Japan was the first senior competition to trial this new technology, after a youth tournament a couple of years earlier. After Frank Lampard’s shot bounced quite clearly over the goal-line without being given without being given during a match between England and West Germany at the 2010 World Cup finals, the clamour for it to be introduced.
This method doesn’t seem to have lasted, though. It was licensed to be used (along with other systems such as Hawk Eye), but the costs of installation and the fact that it added 15g to the weight of a ball seem to have been prohibitive in its wider adoption. But with the outside of footballs having changed repeatedly over the years, it was the inside that was starting to change now.
In the space of less than a decade from the 1960s on, Adidas came up with arguably the two definitive designs for a football. The Telstar had been reborn once before by 2018, a decade earlier for the European Championships in Austria, but Adidas really got it right for the World Cup in Russia with a design that skilfully walked the tightrope between looking back to the past and embracing a more futuristic design. The original Telstar had been named for the satellite which made the global live broadcasting of matches a reality.
At the end of the group stages of the 2018 World Cup, the black and white design of the Telstar 18 was replaced with the red and white Telstar Mechta. Entirely predictably–since this seems to have happened for just about every World Cup since the very first one–there were criticisms of the ball’s performance throughout the tournament. It was also the first ball to contain an NFC chip, meaning that those who came into close contact with one could connect it to their phone and receive marketing guff from Adidas, should they wish to. The marketing machine will rumble on forever.