Bundesliga season 23/24: match ball of hearts – comeback of a classic

2023-08-21 15:04:10

Culture Bundesliga 23/24

game ball of hearts

Status: 21.08.2023 | Reading time: 2 minutes

More than a ball: The Bundesliga Brillant Classic from Derbystar

Quelle: picture alliance / foto2press

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The best thing about the first day of the 2023/24 Bundesliga season was the official new match ball. Not only does he look like he did before football was a hysterical entertainment business. Its shape also tells centuries-old stories.

When the Bundesliga kicked off again last weekend, the ball was the star. A classic icosahedron made up of twelve black pentagons and twenty white hexagons. The Bundesliga Brilliant Classic, that’s what Derbystar, the manufacturer, calls the ball, intended to commemorate the beginnings of the game 60 years ago. The leather strip ball filled with a pig’s bladder from the founding days of the league only turned into such an Archimedean object in 1970. But because the ball is so beautiful, one should not be fussy.

The ideal shape of a sphere that is not round was celebrated as early as the Renaissance. Kepler and da Vinci drew them. Even before football became an icosahedron, the architect Buckminster Fuller resorted to the geodesic and built domes consisting of 32 regular pentagons and hexagons, the most famous of the so-called Buckys from the 1960s is in Montreal. Fullerenes, or buckyballs, are named after him, C60 molecules in which 60 carbon atoms form a body that functions as a sphere, as in the game ball of the season.

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The footballs, whether they were called Tango, Tricolore or Fevernova, depending on the country in which the World Cup was taking place, consisted of sewn and later glued pentagons and hexagons. Until the 2006 World Cup in Germany and a game ball called Teamgeist made of grotesquely curved patches. In the Bundesliga, such balls, which came from Adidas, were replaced by classic buckyballs from Derbystar in 2018/19 – but you could only see their shape up close because they were so colorful, it was as if children had painted them.

Now the ball is back to actually not being a ball at all, but a ball made up of black pentagons and white hexagons. Unfortunately, he will be replaced again on the third match day by one of Derbystar’s colorful design sins. Why? One does not know. All you know is that when the ball is that ugly, the players must be the stars everyone is looking at, which is anything but good for football.