LONDON — Rollercoaster though the results of the opening games in the 2010 World Cup have been, the winners and losers are now emerging both on the field and behind the scenes in an equally ferocious design contest.
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.No sooner does one World Cup end, than the designers at sports brands like Adidas, Nike and Puma start to develop new boots, balls, shirts, socks, towels and whatever else might be needed for the next one. The investment is huge, but so are the rewards, though World Cup design flops can be equally spectacular. So what are the winning and losing designs in this tournament?
1. The boot
Let’s kick off with a winner — the best-designed soccer boot. All of the boot manufacturers devote years of research and mountains of cash to trying to ensure that their World Cup designs will be lighter, stronger and so on than their competitors’. They then present the results in seemingly endless lists of technical specifications that make NASA’s safety manuals seem slack.
Yet Nike carries off the boot trophy for the 2010 World Cup, not because its boots are any lighter or stronger than its nemesis, Adidas’s, but thanks to its cunning color strategy. Nike designed four boots for the tournament, each for a different type of player, but colored them all in specific shades of purple and orange, chosen to create maximum contrast. This helps the players spot their teammates’ positions, and to pass the ball more accurately. It also enhances Nike’s branding. “It seems that ‘everyone’ is wearing Nike boots, just because they’re so visible on television,” said the German designer Konstantin Grcic.
2. The shirt
Nike again. Firstly, it scores eco-points for making its 2010 World Cup shirts from recycled polyester. Each shirt is made from up to eight plastic bottles, rescued from landfill sites in Japan and Taiwan, then melted down to produce polyester yarn. Nike claims that this will save as many as 13 million plastic bottles from clogging up landfill sites, as well as using 30 percent less energy.
Secondly, Nike scoops my personal prize for designing the most stylish shirt. Infuriating though it was to see its wearer play quite so well in his team’s opening game against (my favorite) England, it goes to the graphically patterned orange and black shirt of the American goalkeeper, Tim Howard. Even the patterned sleeves have a practical purpose. The contrasting colors and shapes were designed to attract the attention of menacing strikes, and then to distract them, because the fragmented pattern distorts the goalie’s silhouette. This makes the striker — or so Nike’s color theory goes — likelier to kick the ball nearer to the keeper.
Although Nike also wins the booby prize for lumbering the rest of the U.S. team with the ugliest shirts in the tournament — those dreary blue ones with white “sashes” that make the players look like wannabe cheerleaders.
3. The logo
On to another loser. As a Londoner, I’m treading on thin ice here, given that my city is threatening to unleash one of the direst logos ever designed for the 2012 Olympic Games, but this loser is the official symbol of the 2010 World Cup.
The designer — Gaby de Abreu of the Johannesburg design group Switch — did at least try to liven it up by depicting a map of Africa in the colors of the South African flag. But the end result is too fussy, and blunders by showing a soccer player doing an illegal “bicycle kick.”
That said, this logo isn’t as bad as London 2012’s atrocity. It commits the lesser design crime of being as mediocre as its predecessors. Can you remember any of them? Thought not. Depressingly, it has been all of 40 years since the design of the most memorable World Cup logo — the deconstructed ball and trippily striped lettering of the emblem of the 1970 tournament in Mexico.
4. The ball
Now for that ball. FIFA, the World Cup organizer, commissions a new ball for every tournament in return for a multimillion-dollar licensing fee from the manufacturer — usually Adidas. A blazing argument over the ball’s design has become a World Cup ritual as the players adjust to it. The loudest grumbles come from goalies, who usually complain that it swerves, spins or slips too much.
That is exactly what happened in 2006, and has happened again with Adidas’s new Jabulani ball, though the criticism has been unusually fierce this time. That said, some experts believe that the problems stem not from the ball, but the dramatic difference in altitude between the South African cities where the games are played.
“I’ve yet to see anything to suggest that the ball is behaving erratically, but the change in altitude and air density — 20 percent between Cape Town and Johannesburg — will make a difference,” said Steve Haake, professor of sports engineering at Sheffield Hallam University in England.
“The ball is likely to swerve less in Johannesburg, fly higher. Its position could change by two diameters in a typical goal shot, which is confusing. We saw the same problems in the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, the last one when altitude was a key factor.”
Mr. Haake is confident that the players will adjust to the impact of changing altitude as the tournament continues. But it will take rather longer for sports scientists and designers to crack the underlying problem — the extreme complexity of the aerodynamics of spheres, including soccer balls. Brace yourself for another storm over ball design at the 2014 World Cup.
Finally
Any skeptics who’re wondering what design has to do with sport should consider the following. What was the best-designed World Cup? Mexico in 1970, not just because of the logo, but the Telstar ball that has been the default design for soccer balls ever since. And which World Cup treated us to the best soccer? Ditto.
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