#ICYMI - Cosmic Queries: FIFA World Cup Edition

Have you caught the World Cup fever? We’ve got it bad! Hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice sit down with physics professor John Eric Goff and answer your fan-submitted Cosmic Queries on the 2018 FIFA World Cup and the football world. Don’t miss an episode of Playing with Science. Please subscribe to our channels on: Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/startalk/playing-with-science Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/playing-with-science/id1198280360 TuneIn: tunein.com/playingwithscience GooglePlay Music: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Iimke5bwpoh2nb25swchmw6kzjq SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/startalk_playing-with-science NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/cosmic-queries-fifa-world-cup-edition/ Photo Credit: Adidas.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:09Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 0:10Chuck Nice?

  And I'm Chuck Nice.

• 0:12Gary O'Reilly?

  And this is Playing with Science. And because we get constant requests for this, we are going to do a cosmic query, which means you get the steering wheel. You are driving this show. Yes, our listeners are in charge. We are merely servants.

• 0:28Chuck Nice?

  Conduits, as you might say. And the great thing is that our show today is all about World Cup and football. We have to call it football because we're talking about soccer and the World Cup.

• 0:40Gary O'Reilly?

  And plus, I told Chuck he can't call it anything else.

• 0:42Chuck Nice?

  I can't call it that way, not during the World Cup itself. So it's World Cup football. And to help us, of course, we have none other than our soccer expert.

• 0:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 0:51Chuck Nice?

  And all-around physics sports expert, I have to tell you, from University of Lynchburg as of July 1st. That would be Professor Eric Goff. What's happening, Professor Goff?

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm just stoked for the World Cup, really enjoying the early action. I'm anxious to see what happens with Spain and Portugal, but having a lot of fun talking about this new ball and the science and the World Cup.

• 1:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:14Gary O'Reilly?

  It is, and there is more science than really people can imagine, and this is where we're going to drill down into. But let's start with the ball. We've touched on it before. It's not likely to be that different from the ball used in terms of the way it performs in Brazil in 2014. Is that correct?

• 1:33Speaker 02

  That's correct. The mistake of Jabalini was not repeated in 2014 and 2018. The ball that we're using now, the Telstar 18, we've tested this and the aerodynamic properties are very similar to the Brazuca that was used four years ago.

• 1:50Chuck Nice?

  So, speaking of touching balls, this particular Telstar, is there any physical difference that makes it stand out from the Brazuca? Like, when you look at the ball itself? Aside from the color scheme and the fact that it's black and white and, you know, what are the physical differences of the two balls? And what is that going to lead to in terms of performance?

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Let me, let me talk about the differences between the two balls. So 2014, you've got this Brazuca right, right here that was used in Brazil, six thermally bonded panels. The panel shapes look like little helicopter blades for a couple of them. The colors were quite spectacular. Now we've got 2018's Telstar 18 for Russia, and it's a black and white paying homage to the original Telstar. Six thermally bonded panels as well, but the panel shapes are very different from Brazuca.

• 2:47Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  And in fact, the total seam length on the Telstar is 30% longer than it is on the Brazuca. And in order to make sure that ball isn't too rough with that added seam length, what Adidas did was they made the seams a little bit shallower and a little bit narrower. And the surface texturing is a little, little shorter than it is on the Brazuca. If you hold the Brazuca and you run your fingers along the grooves, or just run them along the panels, it feels a little bit rougher. But Telstar was able to make up for that by having a longer seam length.

• 3:23Chuck Nice?

  So now what would a longer seam length do? Let's just say that they kept the seam length the same. Okay, I'm sorry, not the same. 30% more seam length, but kept the depth and the width the same as in the Brazuca. So you have a deeper, wider seam, but 30% more of that. What's that going to do to that ball then?

• 3:40Speaker 02

  So the overall ball would have been rougher compared to the Brazuca. And what that does is it moves what we call, and I know Chuck loves this phrase, the drag crisis.

• 3:49Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Move the drag crisis to a smaller speed.

• 3:54Chuck Nice?

  You knew I was waiting for it. You know it.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  For these two balls, about the same. Uh, if you make them a lot rougher, a lot smoother, you change that drag crisis and it makes the aerodynamics noticeably different for the players. They're going to notice some changes. Whenever you start messing with the seam shapes and the design of the panels, you can't make the aerodynamics exactly the same.

• 4:16Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  But Adidas did a reasonably good job of keeping the drag crisis at about the same, uh, speed. And the knuckling's going to look a little bit different. The Telstar's, uh, going to fly a little less far than the Brazuca did for really high speed kicks. So there are some differences like that, but, but nothing like 2010. You're not going to notice this massive change in the ball dynamics.

• 4:39Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, professor, a true drag crisis. Is where I have to lip sync for my life bitch.

• 4:46Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, anyway. You're happy now? Yes, I'm sorry. Good. So, do we have any sort of parameters not, not absolutely? Calm down. Absolutely definitive unless you can. If I hit that ball, the same, the same, same power, same force each ball. Do we have a definable distance that we say will travel further or less than? Or within a sort of bandwidth of percentage? Oh, good question because the, won't players have to adjust to that? Yes.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  So, if I were to kick one of these balls, um, or probably get Gary to, I don't think I could do it as well. But if I could kick one of these balls about, say, seventy-eight miles an hour or so off my boot. Maybe twenty-five degrees off the ground. The ball's gonna travel about two hundred feet, uh, normal atmospheric conditions. The barzuka is gonna travel about eight percent farther than the Telstar will. Because the drag coefficient associated with the barzuka is just a tiny bit smaller than it is for the, the Telstar eighteen. So, these really long kicks, the, the goalkeeper's hitting it down the pitch. Trying to get their, uh, you know, two-third, three-quarter of the, the pitch, uh, length on the kicks.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  Those things might, you'll no- notice a little difference in the, in the distance.

• 6:03Gary O'Reilly?

  It will also affect corner kicks. So the corner kick. So the corner, corner kick, uh, you're, you're looking to hit. Mm-hmm. Half, just over half the length, the width of a football field. Right. In which case you are going to have to put force through it to carry that distance. Now, as the professor's touched on, if you use the same foot, it doesn't carry as much. And now players are putting, having to put more force. Behind it. Right, the more force you put through a ball. Right. Bit like a car. If I put a big V twelve engine in a little Mini. Mm-hmm. This is too much power. That's right. You know, you turn left, the engine goes straight on. Exactly. And so. Which. You'd lose the accuracy, you'd lose that ability to control the true destination you want to find. If there's that difference.

• 6:46Gary O'Reilly?

  So players, players, once they get hold of these balls, trust me, they'll be pinging these things around to find out what the maximum length for the, for pass is for them. If there's a team that has a very direct style, say for instance, Belgium. Who are one of the outside favourites for the tournament completely. They have a rather statuesque striker called Ramalulu Kaku. Ramalulu? Ramalulu Kaku. Ramalulu? Yeah. Yes.

• 7:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, Professor. So, the thing, the thing is, you're gonna, you're gonna play to him, because he's six foot five.

• 7:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:20Gary O'Reilly?

  And you're gonna hit long balls up to him, so players are gonna have to come to terms with that. Anyway, that's enough of me, let's get to our question.

• 7:26Chuck Nice?

  By the way.

• 7:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 7:27Chuck Nice?

  Ramalulu kaka sounds delicious, I just feel like I should have it for dinner at some point.

• 7:33Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm gonna introduce you to Ramalulu kaka, and if he punches you out, that's fine by me.

• 7:38Chuck Nice?

  It's fine with me too, I'll just be like, I got punched out by Ramalulu kaka.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  You better go study up on the Krav Maga episode, man.

• 7:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, good point, good point, Professor.

• 7:47Chuck Nice?

  I'm having for dessert, I got punched out by Ramalulu kaka, and then I had Krav Maga for dessert.

• 7:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, gosh. All right.

• 7:55Chuck Nice?

  Here we go, man.

• 7:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so, Belal Nawaz on Facebook has this question, Professor, how much can the aerodynamics of balls with different leather patterns differ from each other? Can it have any significant effect on the behaviour on the ground? Interesting question, can you follow up?

• 8:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, because.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  So, you're talking about with the dribbling now?

• 8:18Chuck Nice?

  Well, yeah, with dribbling and also passing, passing across, yeah. And also, also for the long kicks, can it, you know, change what happens when it strikes the ground, from the air travel to striking the ground? You know what I mean?

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, I actually, just yesterday, we were doing some filming here for another media appearance, but the students we had down at our field here at the University of Lynchburg were kicking these balls around, and I will say that they thought that playing with the World Cup football was a little different from the ones they were using in their high schools, and they quite enjoyed it. And they could tell the difference when they're dribbling, because the texturing on the ball surfaces are different. So the. I told you the Brazuka, the panels have the slightly higher texturing and they noticed that on their boots when they're dribbling. They actually felt that the Telstar was a

• 9:13Speaker 02

  little easier to dribble, wasn't quite gripping as hard whenever they were moving the ball back and forth. And whenever they kick it, of course, that's going to play a role. So these synthetic materials that are being used here to make these balls, and when you put the surface texturing on there, then you go out and dribble them, there's a different feel on the ball when you're doing the dribbling based on these surface textures.

• 9:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Now, see, I think that's the first time I've heard anyone mention the actual, I'll call it stickability of the ball itself. Now, you want to have good, tight, close control, like ball handling in a basketball game.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 9:50Gary O'Reilly?

  But I think what the professor's highlighted and his students have experienced is you can have too much, and it kind of gets stuck on your boot.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  It feels tacky almost.

• 10:01Gary O'Reilly?

  It's not moving as well in front of you as you want, so you can't dribble at the speed you want to dribble at. So that, I think, is what Adidas have done. Because you said just now, they changed the kind of pattern, the raised pattern on the ball for Telstar 18, is that correct, professor?

• 10:17Speaker 02

  That's right. I mean, I'm holding the Brazuka here in one hand and the Telstar 18. And the Brazuka's surface feels rougher because the surface texturing is a little bit taller, and the grooves are a little bit wider and a little bit deeper than on the Telstar. So the players we had down on our pitch actually noticed the difference just dribbling the two balls, taking turns one after the other. And they felt that the Telstar 18, they had a little bit better control with it.

• 10:45Chuck Nice?

  So Gary, let me ask you this then. So looking at the current field of play and players, are there any particular players that may benefit from a ball handling standpoint using the Telstar 18?

• 11:00Gary O'Reilly?

  How long do we have?

• 11:01Chuck Nice?

  Hahaha.

• 11:02Gary O'Reilly?

  See, the thing is, so what the governing body of world soccer, FIFA, have done here is create a ball that will have a certain amount of unpredictability in flight, which goalkeepers hate. However, the chance of scoring a goal is higher. Now, the next most exciting part of the game is when a player goes on a really fast dribble.

• 11:22Chuck Nice?

  Of course.

• 11:23Gary O'Reilly?

  That then has been accentuated and given a better chance. By making the surface of the ball less grippy.

• 11:29Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:30Gary O'Reilly?

  And therefore FIFA have, and I credit them for that along with Adidas. That they've thought this through and created something that achieves that. So you're gonna look at players like. Okay, the top three right now in the conversation, Messi, Ronaldo and Neymar are not in, not in any particular order. That's just the way they came into my head. So they will do things and they have such an intuitive feel for the ball.

• 11:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:54Gary O'Reilly?

  That, that, that, give them five minutes with that new ball and they have, will have worked it out.

• 12:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:00Gary O'Reilly?

  They'll know exactly how, what, why, where. Will it be better to be done this way? And they would just in a smallest little way, adjust how they kick, how they dribble.

• 12:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:10Gary O'Reilly?

  To achieve the dribbling that they would always experience with other balls.

• 12:14Chuck Nice?

  Right. And those soft touches could be the difference in like jukeing a player left or right and then being open to make and kick a score, right?

• 12:21Gary O'Reilly?

  It's everything. It's, it's all of a sudden, you've given, you've given them a software problem to solve. And they immediately downloaded, they're, they'll work it out. They'll, they'll calculate, they'll work it out and it'll all be done through touch.

• 12:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Gary O'Reilly?

  And it's just when you see players and we are, we are in soccer players, when you give them balls and change the situation, they are immediate problem solvers.

• 12:41Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Gary O'Reilly?

  They will, they will find a way to bring the best out of that particular ball.

• 12:47Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 12:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Chuck Nice?

  All right. Well, that's exciting stuff.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Gary, let me, let me ask you something, Gary.

• 12:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Go ahead, please.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Um, you know, playing on Chuck's food theme that Nacho just scored for Spain and they're up three to two now over Portugal.

• 13:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Ooh.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Uh, Spain is really good for, you know, they've been known, they, they certainly exploited this uh in 2010, but I mean, they've, they've been known for their shorter passing and. And their dribbling and all this. So.

• 13:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, whenever you're, you're talking about they can work this thing out and they're good problem solvers. Do they wanna be good problem solvers? I mean, we don't hand a new basketball to the NBA final participants a month before they play. We don't give a new baseball to the. World Series participants. I mean, you know, you're talking about the world's grandest stage and, you know, a couple of months ahead of time, here's a new ball you get to learn how to use.

• 13:39Gary O'Reilly?

  They don't get a couple of months. They, Adidas won't release those balls for a certain period of time. They come onto the market, then they'll work with them.

• 13:49Gary O'Reilly?

  I just think the ball will be the same for every player, every team. It's standardized throughout the whole World Cup tournament.

• 13:56Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 13:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Therefore, it's up to you. It's a problem or not a problem.

• 14:00Chuck Nice?

  Right, because it's the same for everybody.

• 14:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 14:03Chuck Nice?

  So it's either a problem or not a problem, but it really depends on if it's a problem for you.

• 14:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. And it's also something, as an individual, you you might need, your game might be uh a player that passes forty yards quite regularly. You'll need to know how your technique needs to be changed minutely to get the best strike on that ball. If you're a player that plays it very short or is dribbling, you'll again work out your style. The other thing is you go to a macro level and look at the team. And you highlighted Spain, they have a very short passing game.

• 14:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 14:37Gary O'Reilly?

  And there's a there's a standard kind of maxim from many, many years back. The ball will always move faster than the player. So keep passing the ball.

• 14:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 14:47Gary O'Reilly?

  And that destroys opponents' systems and takes them out and overloads defense and.

• 14:53Chuck Nice?

  That's funny, it's the same way in basketball.

• 14:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly.

• 14:55Chuck Nice?

  It's all about ball movement. If you can actually move the ball faster than guys can get to it, then you'll be able to hit an open man and score.

• 15:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Guess guess who goes and watches lots of basketball games? Soccer coaches.

• 15:07Chuck Nice?

  Really soccer coaches.

• 15:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, gosh, yeah. They are open, I mean, I know soccer coaches in the Premier League, top managers, and they talk to me about NFL.

• 15:15Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:16Gary O'Reilly?

  They talk to me about basketball because they see synergy in the pattern that of the play. They'll think they'll think about tactical movement and how it relates to their game. Can is there something in there that I can borrow, might give me one or two percent extra? They'll take it, they'll take it every time.

• 15:36Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, Eric, you just came up with a brilliant idea. You know how we love to change sports here at.

• 15:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Where we headed.

• 15:43Chuck Nice?

  Science, and here's what I'm saying. Every championship game, gotta change the ball right before the championship. Yes, yes, that's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about baseballs with an extra seam thread running through it. See how that changes the play? That would be pretty awesome. Or maybe football with two sets of laces. Who knows? I don't know. You know what I mean? Like, just change the ball right before the championship. Let's see how good you really are.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could you could probably deflate those a little easier if you had that extra seam in there, you know.

• 16:15Chuck Nice?

  I know, that's what I'm saying. And you know what's funny? It probably wouldn't even make a difference.

• 16:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Professor, you're encouraging him. You're encouraging Chuck, and that's never that's never really a good thing. We're going to take a break, Professor. When we come back, the knuckleball and the physics within. I think we're going to have to jump straight on that because that is so, so interesting. Let's take that break, and we'll be back with Playing with Science very, very shortly. Don't go away. Welcome back to Playing with Science, our little cosmic query with a World Cup 2018 specific show with questions programs. Yes, questions that you are throwing in with our very, very good friend, Professor Eric Goff from University of Lynchburg in Virginia.

• 17:01Gary O'Reilly?

  So Professor, before the break, touched on the knuckleball. If we were to do that in 2010 in South Africa with a jubilani, it would be like a beach ball. Do we think a knuckleball with Telstar 18 will have a similar or very different reaction to that kind of kick?

• 17:25Speaker 02

  So first of all, what what really makes a knuckleball, and I'm just going to use a baseball here as an example, because this is where we get the knuckleball term. So when you hit a baseball, or when you're sorry, when you're pitching a baseball, if you don't have a lot of spin on it, and you release the ball out of your fingers or your knuckles without much spin, if I've got a little seam on one side and a little smooth patch on the other, the air will separate farther back on the seam than it will on the smooth side, and it'll move, the ball will get deflected toward the seam. And if you have a little bit of a turn, a good knuckleball might have a quarter to a half turn thrown on the way to the plate.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  And if I can switch that orientation, so that the seam's on the other side and the smooth patch is switched, then it moves toward the seam again. So that's where the wobble comes from. So when you're kicking the soccer ball, you kick it right through the center so that you don't get any spin on it. And you might have an area over here where you've got the groove where the seam is that makes one side a little rougher, and maybe just the patch on the other side. So you move toward that rougher side.

• 18:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh huh.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  And then the ball will have a little bit of a turn and then it'll start moving back again toward the rough side if it's switched. So that's where this wobble is coming from.

• 18:47Gary O'Reilly?

  So what if I get really clever? Maybe not me, but someone clever. Um, and kick through the aperture of the ball where you inflate the ball. Can I then deform the shape and affect the way that the ball reacts to the force I put through it with a kick?

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Well, there there's certainly going to be a a little bit of a wobble coming right off the foot. I mean, when you look at the, you know, high speed, high definition, slow motion, the really, you know, large number of frames per second. We've looked at these things at 2,000 frames a second coming off a boot. And there is a little vibration of the ball when you compress it coming off the boot. And then it decompresses, there's a slight vibration, but it's actually a pretty firm ball. I mean, it it doesn't, you know, it doesn't stay deformed very long. But as it starts to turn through the air, when you start alternating where the roughness is, even if you tried to kick it right through, uh, the part where you're going to inflate it.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  It's not perfectly symmetric. The the seam structure is not such that you can find a nice symmetric way to get the boundary layer shed. So you're always going to get some little asymmetric shedding and cause this thing to wobble when it comes off.

• 19:59Gary O'Reilly?

  So the actual configuration and shape of the panels themselves will have a direct effect. If I start to put that much force and if I use the aperture to kind of

• 20:15Gary O'Reilly?

  amplify that, there we go.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  That that's right. So, you know, one of the problems that Jabalani had, we talked about the drag crisis was at too high a speed. So its panel shapes, the the grooves and stuff were not as circuitously rooted as they are on these other two balls. And what you're doing by trying to make that roughness more uniform around the ball is to try to avoid that Jabalani effect, that beach ball effect. So if you kick this Telstar eighteen in any different orientation coming off, you know, the pitch, I mean, there's, you know, infinite number of ways I could orient this ball. Mm hmm. You're gonna get all kinds of different wiggling. And the fact that these seam shapes and the texturing and the groove depth and all this

• 20:58Speaker 02

  are different from Brazuca means that the way that the knuckling effect is gonna take place is actually different. So they're still gonna notice knuckling effects, they're just gonna be wiggling a little bit different from Brazuca. So, I mean, that even that knuckling has to be, uh, practiced and looked at by the players ahead of time. For sure.

• 21:16Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, because the whole idea is just you're, uh, you're minimizing spin, you're taking away the spin, which is what, what creates that. So you have to, you have to be able to kick the ball to do that, right? The same way when you throw a knuckleball, you have to, the reason why they call it a knuckleball.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:31Chuck Nice?

  Is because of the way you hold your hand when you throw it, right?

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so. Go ahead. When you're, when you're throwing the baseball, you, you, you will typically have the ball, you could use two or three, sometimes players will put like a, a pinky down, they'll even put a thumb behind it that's not even gripping it. And you'll try to release this thing by pushing the ball out so that it doesn't have any spin. Right. But when you're kicking it, all you really need to do when you're kicking it is just go right through the center of the ball so that you don't have any lever arm off that center, there's no torque to create a spin on the ball.

• 22:03Gary O'Reilly?

  So the thing is, the technique normally for kicking the ball is through the instep of the foot.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:09Gary O'Reilly?

  So you come through, so basically laces. If you watch a lot of players that go for a knuckleball style free kick from a dead ball position, they open up with the inside of the boot and come through the central area as the press professor described on the ball. Now, the thing is, is it better if I have a foot that is slightly smaller or one of those big old Fred Flintstone's feet that looks enormous?

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Wilma!

• 22:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Well, certainly, if you've got a larger foot, I would think you'd be able to, you know, do the spin a little bit better. You could get a little bit more friction between the ball and your foot whenever you're spinning because you've got more contact with the boot and the ball.

• 22:54Chuck Nice?

  Is there ever a time that you kick the ball with your toe?

• 22:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes. It's called a toe poke, and invariably, it is a moment of desperation.

• 23:04Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 23:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes. It's not a drag crisis. It's a moment of desperation where you cannot bend your leg back, engage the lever, and get a clean strike and sweep through the ball to kick it. You are now getting, the space that you're about to play in gets condensed by players coming in, and particularly in front of goal. If I'm a short distance from the goal and I don't have time to pull my leg back and swing, I'll just stab it with my toe.

• 23:32Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 23:33Gary O'Reilly?

  And hope, because you lack complete control because there's such a minimal amount of surface contact with the ball.

• 23:39Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:40Gary O'Reilly?

  That's the way it is. So unless the professor has a more academic thought to that.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Gary, but whenever you see a lot of toe kicks, do they typically go a little bit lower than the center mass? Do you see a lot of backspin with the ball with those toe kicks?

• 23:56Gary O'Reilly?

  I think that because I said it's a moment of desperation, you're not conscious of going underneath. You're just stabbing at the ball because you have to execute that ball's movement immediately. So you don't have the time to think, you just stab it.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Because if you get that, that little bit of backspin on it, it has that kind of sail effect because now you've got this Magnus force with an upward component trying to give the ball a little bit of a rise.

• 24:23Gary O'Reilly?

  So if you're, if you're like chipping, as you would as a golfer, out of the bunker and dropping it into a spot on the green.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:30Gary O'Reilly?

  You're able to take that swing, you get under, right underneath the ball, and you get that backspin on it, which goes upwards, but there's no power involved because you're not putting the power through the central area of the ball. You're going underneath it, dissipating the power, but causing that spinning effect. That would inquire me to have a lot of time to swing. With a tongue poke, I don't have that time. I am so time poor, hence the point of desperation.

• 24:54Chuck Nice?

  Right. So basically, you're just, you're, you're kicking and hoping. That's it.

• 24:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Absolutely. So it's not, it's not, I mean, it's a clearance just to get rid of the ball from your goal, or it's an attempt to score at their, in their goal, just by having no time or space to operate in.

• 25:09Chuck Nice?

  Cool. All right.

• 25:11Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, next question up.

• 25:12Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's move on. Um, this is, uh, Michael Schmidt from Facebook, and he wants to know this. Uh, why do we Americans know that soccer is awful, yet everyone else thinks it's not? Uh, Professor, what are the laws of physics to describe this phenomenon best?

• 25:28Speaker 02

  Okay, well, let, let me give you this to ponder. Uh, think about what a, uh, organization FIFA is, uh, not that we've ever used the word corrupt or anything like that. Uh, but, but we're gonna need FIFA to come in and help us better our relations between Mexico and Canada come 2026. So, uh, that's my physics reply to, uh, the beauty of what soccer is gonna give us in, in 2026, when Canada, US, and Mexico are hosting the World Cup.

• 25:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. Football, soccer, your preference is yours, I prefer football, has the capacity to bring people together in such a wonderful way. And hopefully, as the professor has highlighted, it will do exactly that prior to the World Cup in 2026.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 26:18Chuck Nice?

  So, so take that, Michael, you hater.

• 26:20Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, well, Michael asked a question, and Michael now has an answer that he can choose to like or dislike.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Oh, and, and then thing is.

• 26:27Chuck Nice?

  You guys are so diplomatic, man. Gosh, I love it.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  I mean, you, you gotta, you gotta get this stuff when you're young, right? I mean, you know, we in the US grew up with things like football and basketball and baseball, and then, uh, you know, as you, you, th- those become the sports, and the timing of the sports, you get used to how quickly goals are scored in basketball, and the pace of the games. And then you watch something else where you don't see scoring quite as often, and it has a slow feel to it. But give it a little time, you know, it is a beautiful game, you know, there's a lot of intricacies and a lot of athletic, uh, talent on display when there's no goal being scored. It, it's a fun game to watch.

• 27:08Gary O'Reilly?

  It's funny, when American football came to the UK, people just saw big guys. Hitting each other and they didn't look beyond.

• 27:15Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Just saw that line of scrimmage and nothing else.

• 27:18Chuck Nice?

  It looks like a game of brute force and nothing else.

• 27:20Gary O'Reilly?

  And and if you come to the UK now and Europe, there are so many NFL fans. There's such a desire to see NFL games live, let alone on TV. And the same I find here in the US for soccer, for football. There are so many clubs, so many teams, it's across ages and genders. There is such a presence and desire for the game here. But I, you know, it's it's it's not a case of it will take off. I think it's taken off. When you have that many clubs, that many participants, it's here. Just in it in the light of NFL and NBA, it looks small.

• 28:00Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 28:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Because they are two massive, massive properties.

• 28:03Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  And you're right. And you see the NFL playing in London and other places. You know, they're they're trying to get the uh the game a lot more known internationally, so.

• 28:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, we have NFL games and NBA games in London.

• 28:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 28:19Gary O'Reilly?

  And long may it continue. And I think we may even find that an NFL team gets based sometime in the near future in London, which would be a very, very interesting. Yeah, because the travel time from the East Coast is the same going basically to London as it is to go to the West Coast.

• 28:36Chuck Nice?

  Pretty cool, man.

• 28:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 28:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  You could you could stop off in Iceland and hop in the Blue Lagoon on your way over.

• 28:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Or or not.

• 28:45Chuck Nice?

  I'm looking forward to seeing the London Cockneys play the New England Patriots, yes.

• 28:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, my word, let's take a break.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  It'd be like Lexington and Concord all over again, wouldn't it?

• 28:54Chuck Nice?

  Except this time I'm actually rooting for London.

• 28:58Gary O'Reilly?

  What a surprise. Let's take that break. Uh, more from the good professor and football, soccer and the World Cup when we come back. Stick around, we'll be back very, very shortly.

• 29:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back to Playing with Science, I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 29:16Chuck Nice?

  Chuck Nice.

• 29:17Gary O'Reilly?

  And of course, this is our Cosmic Queries World Cup special for 2018. And Russia, so if you've got some thoughts, be quick. We've got the good professor, Professor Eric Goff from the University of Lynchburg in Virginia, author of Gold Medal Physics.

• 29:32Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 29:33Gary O'Reilly?

  One of our Christmas specials, if I don't remember.

• 29:35Chuck Nice?

  Yes, he was.

• 29:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, it was, yes.

• 29:37Chuck Nice?

  Hey, how about Diana Klakva? Klakva, is that right?

• 29:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Klakova.

• 29:48Chuck Nice?

  Klakova, there you go.

• 29:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 29:50Chuck Nice?

  And speaking of Russia, Diana Klakova, my god. She says, "I've been to Russia in the summer and it's hard to sleep with so many hours of daylight. Does this have an effect on the players' biorhythms, especially for teams closer to the equator, where they aren't accustomed to seasonal changes in daylight hours?"

• 30:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, that's interesting, Professor, because we've got a number of venues in the World Cup this year, such as St Petersburg, which at this time of the year, with their northern latitude, the sun's not going to set. And if you've got games during the evening, an evening kickoff, you're looking up and you're thinking, "It should be dark now, what's going on?" And if you're trying to sleep and it's still daylight, it's going to mess with particularly people who have never experienced that in their lives before. Have you got a thought on that one, Professor?

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Well, a lot of the stadia that I've seen, the openings are such that I think the sun's going to be pretty low on the horizon, so I don't know that they're going to get a lot of, you know, strange shadows or anything like that. But as far as sleeping and stuff, yeah, I mean, you know, I've been in higher latitudes and it is kind of challenging to get used to where you're used to it being dark at a certain time and then if it's not, you just don't feel like going to sleep.

• 31:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 31:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, it's interesting, equatorial countries where the sun will set that much sooner in the day, if they have never experienced that before, it is going to... Potentially mess with their whole biorhythms for sure.

• 31:19Chuck Nice?

  So I believe the answer here is blackout curtains. That's uh, that's what these teams better travel with.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  Especially in the morning when it starts getting light about four o'clock or so.

• 31:29Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. So uh, where do you think is uh, the best and worst place to play? I'm not talking about from a biorhythm standpoint. When you said, when you talked about environmental factors, that makes me think about weather conditions and how that might come in. Where would the best and worst place be to play uh, football? I'm talking on the planet. I'm not just talking this World Cup series here on the planet. Where would the best and worst place to be to play the game?

• 31:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, Professor, and I'll have a thought after you've given your thoughts.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, that's an interesting question because if you're talking about worst as being connected to lethal, I don't know that I'd want to be playing at the Poles. You know, you gotta kick a few penguins out of the way, I guess, if you're down in Antarctica, but uh, you certainly wouldn't want to try playing down there. I mean, I know in 2010, you had about half the matches were played at altitude. Um, and, and Spain had a huge advantage also based uh, on the places where they played and where Netherlands played. Um, if you're playing a mixture of your matches at altitude and some at sea level, uh, that can really mess with you as well. I mean, if you're playing it at, at a mile high, I mean, if you're playing in like Mexico City or someplace like that, you can kick the ball with more speed because you've got less air resistance on it,

• 32:48Speaker 02

  but it's not going to curve as much. Your Magnus force is going to go down. So just like a pitcher pitching in Colorado has a better fastball, but doesn't have a, as good a curve ball. You know, if you start playing at elevation and you're used to a sea level environment, the whole type of kicking that you're going to be involved with at that high elevation is going to change. But yeah, I'd, I'd prefer to stay away from the Poles.

• 33:11Gary O'Reilly?

  I think from my point of view, if you know you're going to be playing games at altitude, you've then got to go and train to acclimatize to that thinness of oxygen air.

• 33:21Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 33:22Gary O'Reilly?

  And then if you're coming down to sea level, well, that's a bonus because your body's

• 33:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 33:26Gary O'Reilly?

  acclimatized to taking in more oxygen. But if you have to go backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards, which over the course of a couple of weeks, you might find yourself playing in three different locations, two maybe altitude, one maybe sea level, that can play with things. But I think back four years ago to Brazil and Manaus was one of the locations and that's Amazonian rainforest.

• 33:47Chuck Nice?

  Mmm, nice and thick and humid, lots of moisture in the air.

• 33:51Gary O'Reilly?

  And it just, uh, you, you are going to lose weight naturally in a game because of sweat and everything like that. If you then put somebody who's running, I don't know what, fifteen kilometers in a game.

• 34:05Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:06Gary O'Reilly?

  They're gonna lose an awful lot of weight and that then distresses the body quite intensely. So what happens is it's not so much that you can't prepare for a game, it's how you prepare to play for the next game and the recovery procedures that you go through.

• 34:20Chuck Nice?

  Right. So let me ask you this, how do you guys hydrate during a game? When you're playing a match, you don't get these breaks like you do in other sports. There's no, you know, you have timeouts in other sports, you have, you know, a TV timeouts, you have a, with this kind, how do you hydrate?

• 34:33Gary O'Reilly?

  What happened was they, they came to the point where they thought this is going to be critical for elite athletes. Don't forget, these players are playing for their country, but every day of the week, they are club players.

• 34:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 34:49Gary O'Reilly?

  So the clubs have a greater say in their ownership than they do for the national team.

• 34:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, absolutely. You can pray for, you can play for pride all you want, but I'm paying your check.

• 34:58Gary O'Reilly?

  And, and that conversation has been had a number of times.

• 35:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I'm sure.

• 35:01Gary O'Reilly?

  So what they have is a two-minute break. During each half.

• 35:05Chuck Nice?

  Uh huh.

• 35:05Gary O'Reilly?

  To ha- to hydrate.

• 35:07Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 35:07Gary O'Reilly?

  And I think that's a vital thing for going forward. And I think what we might find, and and don't forget, this World Cup is just about underway in Russia twenty eighteen. In four years' time, we're going to be seeing a World Cup, as far as we know right now, in Qatar, in the United Arab Emirates.

• 35:23Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 35:24Gary O'Reilly?

  That's going to ramp up the heat and the the stress even more. We might find, we might not, that in the future, we have four quarters. And that way, you're allowed.

• 35:35Chuck Nice?

  Allowed to cut, yeah.

• 35:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, you're allowed to to work your squad that much better and then not just because the players are becoming more and more athletic.

• 35:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:44Gary O'Reilly?

  And therefore, you're taking more and more out of their bodies. So to just make them play for forty five minutes solid, ouch.

• 35:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  Don't forget that the World Cup in Qatar is going to be played late November to December. I mean, they're they're not playing in the in the full summer months there.

• 35:59Gary O'Reilly?

  And that's another issue because that's smack.

• 36:01Chuck Nice?

  So you mean it'll only be ninety degrees instead of a hundred and twenty eight degrees? Is that what you're saying?

• 36:06Speaker 02

  I'll take that.

• 36:08Gary O'Reilly?

  The thing is, Professor, the big powerhouse clubs in Europe, and they are the biggest clubs in the world, that is right in the middle of their season.

• 36:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 36:18Gary O'Reilly?

  And you're not just taking them out for the tournament, you are going to have tournament preparation. And then, once they finish that tournament, you're going to drag them back and put them straight. They're going to need time to recover from such an intensity.

• 36:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:31Gary O'Reilly?

  I I still think the big clubs in Europe are going to have a lot of things to discuss with FIFA regarding a World Cup in that part of the world.

• 36:40Chuck Nice?

  Sweet. All right. Hey, Josh Masofiliak wants to know this.

• 36:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Get all the good names.

• 36:46Chuck Nice?

  I got the good names. Josh Masofiliak, who says, are all fields made out of the same identical type of grass? And can different surfaces make diff- make a difference in the way the game is played and the outcome? That's a great question because, you know, we have that in football. We have natural turf and we have AstroTurf. And then you have all different types of grades of AstroTurf. And then you have different types of grass as well. So what

• 37:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Professor.

• 37:14Chuck Nice?

  What kind of deal is that going to make for the ball and the players and, you know?

• 37:19Speaker 02

  So, you know, they, different stadia have different turf. I mean, they're different synthetic turf manufacturers. You know, one of the kicks that I looked at, uh, let's see, this would have been back in February of this year, was, uh, when Real Madrid's Cristiano Ronaldo, Ronaldo on, um, Valentine's Day in the 45th minute, he blasted a ball into the side of the net and it looked like when he planted his boot, that the turf had come up a little bit and they were calling this, you know, Ronaldo's, uh, black magic, that he could kind of approach the ball and that the ball would look like it was popping off the turf.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  Uh, but if you know exactly where the seam is in the turf, you can get, as he did, he planted a foot, his left foot down and you can see the ball rising slightly off the turf when his right foot comes down to smack it.

• 38:12Chuck Nice?

  So, wait a minute, are you talking about like, like a seesaw effect? Like, he slapped down on the turf itself, which caused...

• 38:20Speaker 02

  So, right when the, right when the ball is placed on the turf, then his left foot plants, and when that plant happened, right at the seam where the turf joined another bit of the turf, it caused a little wrinkle in the turf and it kicked the ball up slightly.

• 38:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So, it, it acts as, uh, it acts as a launcher for the, for the ball itself.

• 38:40Gary O'Reilly?

  I don't think that's intentional. So, what I'm, what I'm thinking here is like, you've got the crust on, uh, on a lava flow, right?

• 38:48Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:49Gary O'Reilly?

  And that's, that's mobile. It's not fixed to the rest. So, what, once he's planted his foot next to the ball, if there's a little bit of looseness in the top surface, top layer of turf...

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Right. It causes the wrinkle there.

• 39:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, because the pressure, he's, he's not just gonna tippy toe up and kick it.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  No.

• 39:06Gary O'Reilly?

  He's gonna be slamming right down to anchor his body. He's gonna use that, and Professor, correct me if I might get my, my science completely wrong here, correction coming. Uh, he's gonna anchor that down so as he can pivot through with his right foot. In doing so, if there's any looseness in the turf, that's gonna just, just push itself up.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Just enough.

• 39:25Gary O'Reilly?

  And then that might just inadvertently, or as it is, positively, bring the ball up and it's almost like an automatic tee, rising out of the ground and boom!

• 39:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Which means, of course, you're gonna get more power on the kick and you're gonna get, uh, a completely different reaction to the ball just resting on the ground, right?

• 39:43Gary O'Reilly?

  See, the thing is, don't forget soccer fields, football fields... Will be generic grass types of that region, that continent, that area, that tropical zone, temperate zone, or whatever it is. But there's a lot more standardized, certain grasses are grown. Mm hmm. And then you can find that there is a certain hybrid where there's some gels in there that just keep the the grass together. And you find that a lot of the top fields that have been playing now don't wear out. They're they're manicured, they're precise, even to the height of the grass. The height of the grass is cut to a specific dimension under the instructions of FIFA. Children in labor camps. No, I'm joking. Go ahead.

• 40:29Gary O'Reilly?

  No children in labor camps. No, they have groundskeepers. And so they will specify, so I, correct me, you might know, professor, I think it's twenty seven millimeters. You gotta be kidding me. No, twenty seven millimeters, and that's that. So the thing is, back in the day when I was playing, if we were playing a team that played a lot of football on the ground, like a lot of quick passing, we'd leave the grass long. Oh, yeah, you're you're totally screwing up their game. Absolutely, yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  I mean, that used to happen in baseball, right? I mean, you used to, weren't the Dodgers, uh, accused sometimes of having the grass a little long on, you know, but with like slowing down for months and stuff when they used to be a real uh, running team like back in the sixties and stuff. I mean, you know, you that that, yeah, you could play with turf in all kinds of different sports.

• 41:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Professor, have you got any thought, have you, I know you modeled a Tour de France, which is something that is, I find incredibly impressive. Have you done anything similar for this World Cup?

• 41:25Speaker 02

  No, I mean, it's it's it's a lot different trying to model a a, you know, a a football match. I mean, um, you know, with with the Tour de France, you have a terrain, you have a, you know where the cyclists are gonna be, you know what the altitudes are gonna be, you have uh, all kinds of information that you can put in there and and you don't know what the peloton's gonna do or team strategies, but you you know, you have the route and you know ahead of time what a typical cyclist, elite cyclist can output with power. But I mean, something like this, uh, it's a you know, I mean, you're talking about playing a uh, an Xbox or a, you know, some kind of video game and just

• 42:04Speaker 02

  simulating it, you know, a couple hundred times like that as and, you know, playing statistics is probably the best way you could do it.

• 42:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Too many variables, do you think?

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I mean, you know, with the Tour de France, I mean, they're following a route. I mean, you don't know which way the players are going to be moving at any given time on the pitch. So, uh, yeah, I think it's a much harder problem to try to actually model that ahead of time.

• 42:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Interesting. It's a story, but it's as of before kickoff, yet untold. There you go. With the Tour de France, as Professor was highlighting, you kind of know what's happening. Right. With a football game, anything within a certain parameters. Nice. Yeah. Well, the one thing we always know is that Ronaldo's going to be adorable. Oh, Professor, um, thank you for your time. Oh, I'm gonna have to leave you with that. You're gonna go on your own. Right, so Professor, thank you once again, Professor Eric Goff from the University.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  You're welcome, always glad to talk about it.

• 42:59Gary O'Reilly?

  It's a pleasure as ours, thank you, from the University of Lynchburg in Virginia. So, uh, I'm gonna leave Chuck to go off and have dreams, wonderful dreams about Cristiano Ronaldo. And, and I don't see if, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Apparently not. Um, I've been Gary O'Reilly. And I'm still Chuck Nice. Number one Cristiano Ronaldo fan, allegedly. Right, this has been Playing with Science, been a pleasure to have your company, and we look forward to your company in the very near future. I think I'm gonna take off my shirt.