A Story of Footballs in 30 Episodes, Part One
The ball is round. Well, it was as soon as somebody created an artificial bladder for them. All this and more in a history of the game told through the medium of the ball itself.
As some of you will remember (because I reprised it on here as one gigantic megatron of a post a couple of months ago), during the first lockdown at the start of 2020 my own particular version of teetering on the brink of some form of complete mental collapse manifested itself through detailing the 50 Greatest Goalposts of All-Time. Well, it’s time to go there again, with A Story of Footballs, in 30 Parts.
We don’t talk very much about footballs, but their evolution has mirrored the evolution of the game itself. From actual pig’s bladders to a match ball with an NFC chip inside, they’ve moved from the industrial revolution, through a media revolution, and into the digital age. So over the next three Thursdays we’ll be going on a tour of the history of the football itself.
30. The World’s Oldest Football
Believed to be dateable to the 1540s, the world’s oldest football is kept in the Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum, and is the property of the people of the city of Stirling itself. It was found in 1981 and donated to the museum. This was, of course, mob football, discouraged by the state and periodically banned from the late middle ages on. There’s more information about it on the Stirling Smith’s webpage on the subject.
According to pre-medieval legend, an entire village would kick a skull along a path to a nearby village square. The opposing village would in turn attempt to kick the skull to the first village's square. Fortunately, another (slightly less grisly) custom superseded this; to take pig bladders from livestock killed in preparation for the winter and inflate them, and then kick them about. Early footballs were made by inflating pig’s bladders and encasing them in leather, usually completing the job with laces or buttons.
No reference to the dimensions, size or circumference of the actual ball to be used itself can be found in the 1863 Laws of the Game. This wasn’t included until the 1872 revision, and even then the description given was somewhat vague, stating that it “must be spherical with a circumference of 27 to 28 inches” and that it should weigh between 13 and 15 ounces.
The spherical nature of the ball came about because of the intervention of a Rugby leather worker and shop owner by the name of Richard Lindon. Lindon was a supplier to the nearby Rugby school. At this point, footballs were plum-shaped because of the shape of that pig’s bladder, but that changed–for both rugby and soccer–after Lindon became convinced that his wife had died as a result of inhaling large amounts of actual pig into her lungs in the course of inflating them.
On the basis of this, Lindon developed a new bladder made of India rubber which was not only safer than the pig’s bladder, but was also more durable and could be made into a spherical shape. India rubber couldn’t be inflated by mouth, so he also designed a pump to go with it, based on ear syringes.
Spherical balls still had a button at each end of the ball to hold the stitching together, at the point where the leather panels met, but "Buttonless balls" became something of a selling point for suppliers and manufacturers by the 1880s, while rugby teams requested oval balls to differentiate their game from the association version.
28. The 1893 FA Cup Final Ball
The mass production of footballs started at the end of the 1880s, following the formation of the Football League. Thomlinson’s of Glasgow, a company based in Partick, had been making them for a few years–they provided the match ball for the first international match between Scotland and England in 1872–and switched to mass production. They weren’t the only company to do so. Mitre, a tannery opened in Huddersfield in 1817, also switched to the mass production of footballs.
Intact examples of Victorian footballs are hard to come by. The truth is that the nature of the materials being used and the way in which they were used meant that they didn’t on the whole have a particularly long lifespan. But the ball used in the 1893 FA Cup Final, more than 130 years ago, does still exist. As the historian Pat Quirke explains: “There aren’t many examples of Victorian footballs still in existence because they perish easily. I think the only reason that this one is still going is because it’s caked in gold paint."
This gold paint presumably came about because Wolves won the Cup that year, beating Everton 1-0 at the Fallowfield Stadium in Manchester, a match which Everton tried to get replayed on account of Wolves supporters getting onto the pitch while the game was in progress at an overcrowded stadium. That ploy didn’t work, the ball was painted gold, and consequently it still resides in the Wolves club museum at Molineux.
You’ll notice a bit of a gap in the timeline here, and that’s because… not an enormous amount happened over the intervening three and a half decades. By the 1900s bladders were made with stronger rubber and could withstand heavier use. Most balls produced by this time used rubber bladders, with balls being made from inner tubes covered with heavy brown leather of often variable quality.
Most balls had a tanned leather cover with eighteen panels stitched together arranged in six groups of three strips each, though some retained the older design of eight segments with a ‘button’ at each end. All stitching was done by hand with the ball cover inside out. The uninflated bladder was then inserted with a long stem neck extending from the bladder, which was used to inflate it. Once inflated and inserted—hold your giggling—the opening was tightly laced up.
This was all far from perfect. The presence of external laces and the balls’ propensity to absorb as much water as possible meant that heading them was hazardous, and the variations in weight and stitching were problematic. Balls frequently deflated during matches and had to be replaced or reinflated. The catalogue linked above, from William Shillock of Birmingham (who had produced balls for Aston Villa since the 1880s) shows many of the designs–a lot of which look more like basketballs than footballs at a glance–that were still the most common by 1915.
26. 1930 World Cup Final Ball(s)
Perhaps it was a reflection of the state of things to come that the ball to be used for the first World Cup final between Argentina and Uruguay in 1930 became somewhat contentious. This was a local derby of a World Cup final, played by two countries separated only by the River Plate. Tensions had risen in the days leading up to the match, with provocative articles in the media, and a large number of Argentina supporters crossing to Montevideo by boat.
It had been agreed before the tournament that both Uruguay and Argentina could play their matches with their own ball, but what decision could be reached for the final? Argentina wanted to use a ‘Tiento’ ball made up of twelve rectangular panels which is believed to have been imported from Scotland, while Uruguay wanted to use one that was slightly bigger and heavier and made up of T-shaped panels which had also been imported, this time from England; specifically from the J Salter sports shop in Aldershot.
A persistent urban myth has grown up around this match, that the teams played half of the match with each team’s ball. This probably originated because Argentina led 2-1 at half-time before Uruguay came back to win 4-2 in the second half, but there’s no contemporary evidence that this is what actually happened, with photographs of the match seeming to confirm that the entire match was played with the Argentinian ball after they won a toss of the coin beforehand.
25. Herbert Chapman’s Painted Balls (no picture available)
It can be easy to forget how gloomy football was for much of its first century. In an era before floodlights, kick-offs for this winter sport were routinely brought forward, but even this often wasn’t enough to prevent them from ending in the half-light. Pitches being little more than rectangles of mud by the end of the autumn didn’t help, either.
By the late 1920s there was a growing clamour for white balls to be used, as it was reckoned that they would stand out better against the background. Experiments were carried out in friendly matches. Various methods of keeping the balls white were observed. Buckets of whitewash, for example, were lined up for balls to be dunked in whenever they went out of play at some matches. At others, a single white ball would be used that would fade over the course of the match.
And one of the most enthusiastic initial proponents was Herbert Chapman of Arsenal. Ever the innovator, Chapman’s Arsenal played the first half of their game with a ball covered with shiny, enamel paint – similar to that applied to golf balls – and the second half with one with a matt finish. “I would not go so far as to say it was unsatisfactory,” said Chapman after the match, “but it was not successful enough to justify any departure from tradition.”
Chapman was also enthusiastic about floodlights to the extent that he had them built into the underside of the stands at Highbury. But with the FA issuing a blanket ban on them in October 1930 (a ban that it would take until December 1950 for them to lift), it would turn out that there’d be no need for balls to be anything other than leather brown for more than two decades, yet.
24. The 1946 and 1947 FA Cup Final Balls
By the 1950s, in England footballs primarily came in two designs. The 18-panel ball has survived into the 21st century and can still occasionally be seen, though only very seldom at a senior competitive level. The 12-panel T-ball, in which interlocking T shapes formed the sphere, was first patented by Thomlinson’s of Glasgow in 1921.
But both had one particular flaw, in that longer, thinner patches of leather would inevitably stretch over time, meaning that the ball would become mis-shapen. The T-shape was the more reliable of the two, and the Thomlinson’s T-Ball was probably the best known brand of match ball during this era.
But if this particular ball is particularly remembered for one thing, it’s for the two occasions it failed. With ten minutes to play in the 1946 FA Cup final between Charlton Athletic and Derby County and the score level at 1-1, Jack Stamps of Derby might have scored for Derby had his shot not burst en route to the Charlton goal. Fortunately for the Rams, they scored three in extra-time without reply to lift the trophy for what remains the only time in their history. There might have been hell to pay had they not.
The burst ball of 1946 had been described in the media as a “one in a million” chance, but when Charlton returned to Wembley the following year to play Burnley, the same one in a million chance happened again when, for the second year in a row, the ball burst again. Also for the second year in a row Charlton were taken to extra-time, but this time they won the game 1-0.
Rather than being some sort of intrinsic design flaw with the T-shape ball, it was later confirmed that poor quality materials, as was pretty much standard in a country financially ravaged by six years of war, had been to blame. Thomlinson’s were still a major producer of balls a decade later and didn’t go out of business until 1983.
Eigil Nielsen was, by all accounts, an outstanding goalkeeper. He won 28 caps for Denmark and won a bronze medal at the 1948 Olympic Games in London, and served the Danish club KB with distinction. But football in Denmark was still largely amateur, so Nielsen supplemented his income by working in the shoe and leather industry, forming his own company, Select Sport, in 1947.
And in 1962 Select Sport came up with the world’s first 32-panel football. The design was based on the geodesic dome, a design of the architect Richard Buckminster Fuller in the 1940s and 1950s. This new design featured 20 hexagonal panels and twelve pentagonal panels, and would go on to become the template for the modern football. This combination of shapes was considered to give as close to a perfect sphere as possible.
The days of the 12-panel football were numbered, though the 18-panel ball would remain as an alternative until into the 21st century. One of the ongoing drawbacks of 18-panel balls in the 1950s was that they still often required laces to hold them together. Laceless balls had first been invented in 1931, and the Select 32-panel ball at least did away with them forever, with the squarer shape of the new Select design distributing its own weight more evenly, meaning that they held their shape better without laces. The Select 32-Panel dealt laces a significant blow; centre-forwards and centre-halves’ heads have been thanking them for this ever since.
From the 1960s to the 1970s, the Frido Supreme was the ball of choice for the discerning youth. Marketed by the company itself as a durable training ball, the Supreme became a staple among youngsters because of that very durability. The leather balls of the time were often not waterproof, so playing in the rain with one of them would give it the physical properties of a medicine ball over time. And even in dry weather, a leather ball would quickly start to deteriorate if used on harder surfaces like tarmac, scuffing and eventually (or sooner) tearing.
The Supreme, for all its faults, would at least maintain a consistent weight and shape in wet weather, and would certainly last longer if used on an inner-city playground than a cheap leather ball. Other versions of the same principle for this ball design were also available, mostly notably the Wembley Trophy, which came in a vaguely ceremonial box and, as late as the 1980s, was available in both white and orange.
21. Slazenger Challenge Four-Star
Just as television broadcasting started its shift from black and white to colour, so the colour of match balls started to finally decisively swing from orange to white. Orange match balls were still an occasional sight in the Football League until the mid-1970s, but there is something of a changing of the guard about the ball chosen for the 1966 World Cup final, the Slazenger Challenge Four-Star - unbranded at the time, as per FIFA’s requirements.
And did it cross the line? Probably not. Not the whole ball, and not the whole line. As we’ve learned from recent years the ball can look as though it’s crossed when it hasn’t, and what remains strange about the goal is the absolute certainty with which it was awarded by the Turkmeni linesman. There’s a case for saying that this was some degree of payback for West Germany’s last-minute equaliser which took that match into extra-time in the first place, but we all know that football doesn’t really work like that, don’t we?
Just as the 1966 World Cup final was the first to be shown live on television on more than one continent, so the times would be changing in several other different respects, too. Orange was on its way out, and white–although it should be added that a white ball had been used for the 1958 final while a yellow one was used in Chile four years later–was on its way in. Mitre went on to become the official ball supplier for the FA after the tournament ended, and for the next forty years, the FA Cup Final would be played with a Mitre ball.
In part two: television starts to wield its influence, the children of Britain get branded by Mitre, and the Football League introduces… one of the most confusing-looking footballs ever designed.