Physics of The 2022 World Cup with John Eric Goff

What physics are at play in The FIFA World Cup? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly explore all the science of soccer with physics professor John Eric Goff. Is this year’s official ball made for scoring goals?

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So enjoy the sporting moments and the excitement you feel. And please remember, you could feel just as much excitement from the science behind everything you're watching.

• 0:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Hallelujah.

• 0:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love it. I love it. That is one of our threads of our DNA.

• 0:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk, Sports Edition. And you guessed it, this is a FIFA World Cup special. And we've got Gary, Gary Riley. Dude, are you, are you giddy, Gary?

• 0:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, getting there.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Getting there, okay.

• 0:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Getting there.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. At the time of this recording, only a few games have been played out in Qatar. And all right, and Gary is like feeling it because this, the man, this was, what he did professionally. And Chuck, this is not what you did professionally.

• 1:03Chuck Nice?

  No, this is not. However, I, I, I am one of the governing members of FIFA.

• 1:11Chuck Nice?

  So just know that I, I too am excited because let's just say that there's a couple more zeros in my bank account today.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're gonna make up some crazy rule that people will complain about later.

• 1:28Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got you. So Gary, what have you cooked up for us today?

• 1:32Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. Um, as we've just discussed, the World Cup is underway this year. It is in Qatar. Maybe the greatest show on earth along with the Olympics. But each tournament, the sportswear giant Adidas design a new ball. What is interesting about a new ball, you ask? And it's a fair question. Firstly, the material science will have changed. The number of panels will have changed, their shape will have changed, the seams that connect them. Will have change. There'll be a unique pattern on the surface, which is an intentional construction. All of this will change the physics and the aerodynamics of the ball. Therefore, the style of football that can be played

• 2:15Gary O'Reilly?

  in this Qatar World Cup. Now, for someone to know all of this, they've had to put it in a wind tunnel, throw a whole load of equations at it, and come up with a whole load of results and conclusions. And that someone is a dear friend of ours, Professor Eric Goff. Professor! Yes, that Professor. And for those of you who don't know Eric Goff, now we'll need a refresher. Here we go. He is Professor Eric Goff, Professor of Physics at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia, with expertise in quantum mechanics and classical mechanics. Author of Gold Medal Physics, which is a science eyes view of sporting greatness, as well as another publication, The Physics of Krav Maga. He is a first degree black belt

• 3:01Gary O'Reilly?

  in karate, a purple belt in Krav Maga, which is an Israeli military martial art. So the basic fact here is don't mess with the prof.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Glad to be back on StarTalk. Happy to be talking about the beautiful game here.

• 3:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Eric, just a curious thing here, in the design universe, it seems to me, something such as a ball should achieve design maturity by now, yet apparently not. So are they just changing it up just to change it up? Or is there real advances in this? And are those advances something you can detect and measure with your tools of physics?

• 3:41Speaker 00

  Adidas has had the contract for the World Cup ball since 1970. And all the way up until 2002, and including 2002, we had the traditional 32 panel ball. And in the old days in 1970, the pentagons and hexagons were black and white, so you could actually see the ball on a black and white television. All the way up till today, of course, everybody's got phones and color televisions and you don't need that kind of color scheme. But the beauty of having a new World Cup ball is that the country who's hosting gets to name it, there's a color scheme, and they get to come out with a new surface design.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  And as we heard, these things, $150, $160, they fly off the shelves for the World Cup. So there's a reason why a company like Adidas wants to make a new ball every four years. And of course, the goal is to make a ball that's round. What a great starting point.

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Start, A, ball must be round. Okay, we got that, we're with you.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Must be spherical. Well, think about how challenging that was to put pentagons and hexagons together into this kind of bucky ball, Epcot center shape. And now you've got these crazy paddle shapes where it looks like you need a degree in topology in order to put one of these things together. So these interlocking paddles, the paddle numbers change, the surface textures change. But the main point is, this right here is the most important piece of equipment in the most important sporting event in the world's most popular sport. So it has to behave in ways that players are familiar with.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  You can't, as what happened in 2010, you can't dump a ball out onto the pitch and it's behaving in ways that they're not used to.

• 5:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's some standards, so there are physics standards within which, if you fulfill them, everything else is just window dressing, is that correct?

• 5:42Speaker 00

  So there are certainly aerodynamic properties that you would like to have with the ball so that it flies in ways the players are familiar with. But as far as that goes, if you can make the panels in arbitrarily crazy looking shapes and the surface texturing be in a certain way to create a certain roughness for the ball, as long as it behaves in the aerodynamic ways the players are used to, it's a good ball.

• 6:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what happened in 2010?

• 6:07Chuck Nice?

  Oh, we had to-

• 6:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They tried a cube, is that what they-

• 6:12Chuck Nice?

  Nearly, might as well have been.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So-

• 6:14Chuck Nice?

  World's Cup Rubik's Ball.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  So, we have this lovely fact in physics that seems counterintuitive, that if you take a ball and you smooth it, you polish it, you actually increase the air drag on it at a given speed. The roughness of the ball is very important, so things like baseball with those lovely 108 double stitches and the 330 odd dimples on a golf ball, that roughness helps lower the drag at given speeds. So, what happened in 2010, the paddle number from 2006 on the Teen Geist Ball at 14 dropped to 8. So you only had 8 paddles on the Jabalani Ball. But it turned out to be, even with some surface texturing, it was too smooth.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  So this lovely drag crisis that we talk about in physics, where the high-speed flow of air around the ball that we call turbulent flow, transitions to a lower speed that we call laminar, and the drag coefficient skyrockets. And that happened at too large a speed. In fact, around 50 miles an hour is where this transition happens. So what would happen with a Jabalani, and I don't have one with me, but the Jabalani would be flying through the air, it would pass around 50 miles an hour, the transition of the air around it would go from turbulent to laminar, the drag coefficient would skyrocket, and the ball would look like it's just slowing too fast. Almost like a beach ball that you'd hit really hard and it would just seem to slow very quickly.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  So it had a very erratic flight, the players were not used to it. And Adidas has not made that same mistake. The Brazuca that was used in Brazil, the Telstar 18 in Russia, and this year's Alriola, all have an aerodynamic profile that are very similar.

• 8:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got one last question before I hand off to my co-host here. So, how long do teams have to practice with the brand-new ball for the new World Cup?

• 8:16Speaker 00

  So my understanding is they get a couple of months, and the fact is you can buy this thing off the shelf. So, I mean, players can go and get a ball, it's not like it's, you know, only held until the World Cup. So they could certainly play with this thing even in practice.

• 8:31Chuck Nice?

  For $180 in this economy? I don't think so.

• 8:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, this tournament is at sea level in Qatar. If it were, say, in Mexico and we were playing Mexico City, we're at altitude. So we would acclimatize. We'd be having to work with the balls. I mean, even back in my day in the eighties, if we were playing a team from another country in their stadium, we would need to get the ball that they use. So we didn't walk out onto the field and all of a sudden be surprised by a ball that had a whole different set of characteristics. We knew and we will tell the difference. We could blind test balls. So for instance, the Jabalani that Eric was talking about would virtually, if you hit it at distance or with power as a shot on goal, the thing would basically knuckleball and goalkeepers weren't very happy.

• 9:23Gary O'Reilly?

  This then affects the coefficient goal ratio within games, which FIFA quite like because there's a chance there's more goals. So therefore it's more entertaining. It's therefore better global spectacle in markets they're looking to explore. However, the players didn't like it because there's a long, there's a long history of long diagonal passes. Sixty yards, fifty yards, forty yards. And for that, you're going to clock over the fifty mile an hour speed when you hit the ball. In which case, well, the accuracy disappears. So now, all of a sudden, if your team is based upon a long ball game, a direct game, forget it. Because now you're having to play shorter. Your style of football has changed.

• 10:06Gary O'Reilly?

  So therefore the ball has become a disadvantage to your style of football. And you're going to have to not just evolve as an individual, but evolve as a team to be able to accommodate this ball. Gary, that's just home field advantage. No, no, there's no, no, no home field advantage. It's all of a sudden you're predisposed with a group. Home ball advantage. Yeah, but the thing is, when you come into a World Cup tournament, the ball is the same for everybody. So you take away that it's whose style of football suits this type of ball better? Is there an individual that has a skill set that works better to this particular type of ball? Now, what we need to get into is not just the design aspect of it. But once you put it in a wind tunnel,

• 10:49Gary O'Reilly?

  what do you find out? What have Adidas done this time round? That makes this ball another Jabalani? Or is it closer to Brazuca or Telstar? Where are we gonna go? Because this will give us an idea of the kind of thing that we might be seeing as the games progress in the tournament. That's, that's interesting because that's something nobody quite knows yet.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  And it could have just be that Adidas needs to make $180 a ball every four years. Because that's my vote.

• 11:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, we're talking about Adidas, right?

• 11:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, Adidas.

• 11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I grew up, it was Adidas, I'm sorry. Can I hear from Eric about his, his? Do you actually put these in wind tunnels, Eric?

• 11:31Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, I have colleagues at the University of Skouba in Japan, and they will put these things in wind tunnels. And the sad thing is when you put one of these, this is the Brazuca, when you put this in a wind tunnel, uh, you have to destroy it because you gotta put a support sting in, in one side of it. And we can measure the forces felt when the air is blowing over the ball. We could vary the, the airspeed throughout the entire range that, uh, players would be playing, uh, the sport of soccer.

• 11:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you don't, it, it sounds like if you're supporting it, you can't spin it.

• 12:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, I was gonna say, how, how do you get an accurate measurement? Because the ball is in spin.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  There are ways, there are ways to spin it where you have the sting coming in from the side and you can spin it. We could also do trajectory analysis where the ball can be actually kicked or even shot through a ball launcher with spin. And then by analyzing the trajectory, we could extract the aerodynamic coefficients from that.

• 12:22Gary O'Reilly?

  That sounds cool.

• 12:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  It's very cool.

• 12:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And why can't you just do all that digitally? Like just get the mass of the ball and the texture and everything and just, just model it?

• 12:32Speaker 00

  The models are actually really, uh, gotten quite nice, but the... Computational fluid dynamics is still just a little bit behind where the wind tunnel results are. Trying to actually get the individual little textures and surface features programmed into a CAD file and then have those things put into some fluid software, whatever you're using, is still a bit of a challenge. Gotcha.

• 12:55Gary O'Reilly?

  What happens is when we used to have those black and white 32 panel, that was all hand stitched. Now, there's a whole

• 13:02Chuck Nice?

  Craftsmanship.

• 13:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, thank you. There is now no longer leather balls. There are no longer hand stitching. You've got a whole way of thermo coupling these panels together. Their shape, their size, the seam itself has to be analyzed so as you know exactly what this ball will do. Will it knuckle at 40, 50, 60 miles an hour? Will you be able to do anything with it? What, you know, how is it going to react? And we need to know these things.

• 13:32Chuck Nice?

  Hey, do you know this, Gary? Because, or Eric, because all these balls used to be made of leather, like even baseball, even baseballs. But now, nobody does that. It's all synthetic with a bladder inside, except for baseball has a core. What, what, what, do you know what the material is? Like, what are they covering that bladder with now? What is the, what is the synthetic?

• 13:52Speaker 00

  I don't know the actual composition of these. I mean, it's certainly just a synthetic material is the, is the best that I could.

• 13:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Is it not a polyurethane? And this new ball, the Al Rila, which in Arabic stands for the journey, just so as you want to know.

• 14:06Chuck Nice?

  How romantic.

• 14:08Gary O'Reilly?

  And it's called Speed Shell. Now that

• 14:11Chuck Nice?

  It's called what?

• 14:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Speed Shell.

• 14:13Chuck Nice?

  Speed Shell.

• 14:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. So you can imagine there is a coating over the ball. I mean, as far as I'm aware, the, the inks that are used are water-based. The glues that are used to seal and couple the panels are water-based.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  They're more environmentally friendly, yeah.

• 14:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. So hopefully it doesn't fall apart in the rain.

• 14:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you want to eat the ball, it's environmentally, it's organic, right? Dude, we got to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to get all in on what Eric does with these balls. Because I haven't, I'm still trying to figure that out. All right. This is StarTalk Sports Edition FIFA World Cup Special. We'll be right back.

• 15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition, FIFA World Cup special. And Gary's been giddy the whole first segment.

• 15:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Yay.

• 15:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can't even shut him up. That's uh, we got a guest here. And Gary is talking. So, so let's find out just a few more things from our guest, Professor Eric Goff. Professor, when you should be like doing your quantum physics, why are you worrying about soccer balls?

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Oh, there's a lot of, there's a lot of fascinating physics in these and their balls.

• 15:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, but there ain't no quantum physics last I checked.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  Well, Bohr's correspondence principle, we gotta remember, we gotta take quantum mechanics to the classical level. So it's all quantum mechanics.

• 15:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. No, yeah, at the end of the day, it's all quantum.

• 15:54Gary O'Reilly?

  The physics of D.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  But also, I really think it's important to get a little bit of science on the sports pages. A lot of people who are interested in sports may not get exposed to a lot of good science ideas.

• 16:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the whole point of StarTalk Sports Edition.

• 16:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The entire point. Gary, Chuck, you got more questions for our man here?

• 16:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. So, okay, when you put this ball in a wind tunnel, what sort of speed will the arela begin to knuckle and behave in an erratic way? Because you've got to, you've got to push it outside of its envelope at some point for the testing to be accurate.

• 16:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, to say knuckle is to borrow a term from baseball.

• 16:34Gary O'Reilly?

  That's okay.

• 16:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is the ultimate source of all other sports terms.

• 16:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so we're borrowing from a good, we're borrowing from a good place. That's fine.

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, just to be clear, I want to explain that in case people don't know or remember. So a pitcher throwing a knuckleball, their knuckles are what touches the ball, not their fingertips. And when they release the ball, because their fingertips aren't touching the ball, there's less, the ball is less likely to rotate. And so the ball just sort of moves without rotating, which makes it hugely susceptible to any wind currents or anything going on between the pitcher and the catcher. And often the catcher. Can't track the ball and there are a lot of dropped balls or passed balls or wild pitches when that happens. And so when you say, so Erica or Gary, whoever, which of you said at the beginning,

• 17:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  where many of the goalies could not track the ball. It wasn't following some arc.

• 17:31Gary O'Reilly?

  So this is, this is a total replication of pitcher hitter. The guy who's shooting at goal as to opposed to the guy in, in the goal that's trying to save it. If that goalkeeper has the same scenario of, I don't know where this is going, up, down, left or right. You've got the replication of a knuckleball.

• 17:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And normal laws of physics are not guiding you, you know, of, of a projectile.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  Well, certainly not the, the vacuum laws of physics and kinematics, but so when, when you throw a knuckleball, the idea is you want like maybe a half turn on the way to the plate. So with a little bit of roughness on one side from a seam that can delay the separation of the boundary layer. On the other side where it's a little smooth, the boundary layer will separate early. So the wake of air behind it gets deflected to one side. So just like a boat rudder moving the wake of water off to the side. Newton's third law comes in. If the air is getting pushed by the ball one way, the air's got to push the ball the other way. So then when the ball rotates a little bit and you get a little smoothness on one side and a little roughness on the other,

• 18:37Speaker 00

  then you move back toward the roughness. So you get that little wobble. And the, the same thing happens with the soccer ball where you might have a little bit more of a rough side with a little bit of a seam on the face on the side here, a little bit of a smooth area over here and you can get a little movement toward the rough side and a little bit of rotation and you can make these things wobble quite a bit.

• 18:57Chuck Nice?

  So if you're a player, are you, are you telling me that you're able to learn how to kick the ball to create that movement, the same way Neil talked about the pitcher doesn't touch the ball, you're able to do that? So Gary, how do you do that? Cause that sounds insane.

• 19:16Gary O'Reilly?

  If you look at the profile of a soccer ball and you went north, south, east, west, right? So you went the pole to pole, then did an equator. Depending on which quadrant you contact with, you can then impart the rotation. You can then, if you're more central to that point where the pole and the equator crossover, you will drive on a more. Power through the ball and therefore less rotation to either left or right. And then if you go underneath, then you put backspin. If you come over the top, you can impart that forward spin.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Eric, is it fair to say that you could kick the ball with the same speed foot?

• 19:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And all that energy goes into the ball, but from what Gary is saying, depending on what quadrant, either all the energy will go to propel the ball forward or some will do that and some will go into the rotation.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  That that's right. The, the, if you kick it right through the center of the ball, your, your, your, your linear impulse is big, your angular impulse is small. You move it with a little bit more of a lever arm away from the center. You get more of that torque to get the ball rotating and you get those lovely banana kicks.

• 20:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love those.

• 20:27Gary O'Reilly?

  The thing is, Neil, we will learn, as we've discussed just previously in the show, each individual ball, and then we will learn to adapt our skill on doing that to each individual ball. I mean, it's, I mean, okay, here we go. So Adidas claimed that the Arilla is the fastest ball of any of the World Cup balls that they've designed. Um, you've stuck it in a wind tunnel, you've thrown the equations at it, are they telling the truth?

• 20:54Speaker 00

  So in some orientations that we've tested, the drag coefficient at a high speed is a, is a tiny bit smaller. What we did notice is that the drag coefficient at small speeds, so something in the 20 mile an hour range, uh, was the smallest of the World Cup balls that we had tested. I don't know if players are going to notice that small change in the speed of the ball with some of their intermediate, you know, range passing, uh, but they could notice a slight difference in that. But it's certainly at the high speeds, there is a reduction in the drag coefficient, but very, very tiny. Uh, it very much models the drag curves we saw with the Telstar 18 and the Brazuca.

• 21:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is Gary right? Is it the fastest ball ever? If you have the lowest drag coefficient, it's the fastest ball ever.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  For some orientations, I would say it's, it's faster than the other balls, yes, but not for other orientations.

• 21:50Chuck Nice?

  So it's a, it's a marketing, it's basically a technical marketing point.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  Probably, but I can't speak for Adidas' motivation, other than to say, hey, this ball is really cool. I mean.

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And costs $180.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why not just put 303 divots in it like we do golf balls?

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think making a sphere this large that's got to be inflated and have a bladder like that is going to be a little more challenging because you're going to have to have, you're still going to need panels. In fact, the Alreel ball, unlike the texturing of past balls, is not coming out of the ball. It's not embossed, it's debossed. You actually get the texturing going into the panels of the balls.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like a golf.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  Like a golf ball. It's more.

• 22:39Gary O'Reilly?

  So you're absolutely right, Neil. They have replicated a golf ball.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  Now, this has 20 panels. You have these eight triangular panels. You get the 12 panels that look like drumsticks that you used to get out of the freezer for dessert. Those are the panel shapes that we have on the new ball. So they actually raised from six panels in the last two World Cups all the way up to 20. But they made sure the roughness was the same because they brought down the total seam length. The total seam length of this ball, it's only about 6% longer than Brazzuka, and Brazzuka had six panels. I'm stuck on frozen drumsticks for dessert. I miss them. That's what those panels look like to me. They look like drumsticks.

• 23:23Gary O'Reilly?

  So what difference, what difference does the panel shape make? Apart from, you know, if you've got more panels, then you've got long, you've got a greater seam length. But it, then there can't be just, you know, make it a drumstick. No one will notice. There has to be a reason. These things aren't just thrown together.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  That's right. So talking about Brazzuka, you know, how did they fix this from the Javelin disaster in 2010?

• 23:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  So Brazzuka has six panels. You know, they, it has two fewer panels than Javelin. But the panel shapes follow these circuitous lines. It has a panel total seam length that was 68% longer than that on Javelin despite two fewer panels. The seam widths, the seam depths on Brazuka, where it was wider, it was deeper. It's also, when you touch the seam and the surface parts of the panels, it feels rougher. So they raised the texturing on it. So they actually made the ball rougher despite two fewer panels. And that's what made the drag crisis at a smaller speed.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  Tilster 18, that ball that was used in Russia, who is not allowed to play with the current World Cup participants because they don't play well with their neighbors. Well, this ball right here has six panels as well, but very different shapes. And its total seam length here is about 30% longer than Brazuka. But to make it the same amount of roughness, it took the seam width, the seam depth, made it a little less wide, a little less deep. The texturing isn't quite as high. It feels a little bit smoother on the panel. So all these things are compensating. When you change the panel number, you change the total seam length, the seam width, the seam depth, the texturing type, all of that has to be compensated in a way to give the ball essentially

• 25:13Speaker 00

  the same roughness as the previous ball.

• 25:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, it sounds, it sounds like to me they're just changing it to change it.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  That's what I'm saying.

• 25:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not like they're making it better, they're just making it different.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  I agree.

• 25:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Go back to Chuck's point about this being a little bit commercial or a lot commercial.

• 25:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got to repeat $180. Okay, go ahead.

• 25:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, give or take, depends, depends on your preferred sports goods place. All right, Professor, we look at NFL and you see a quarterback with a long Hail Mary pass and it's spin stabilized and really quite accurate. So do we have a concern about spin stability?

• 25:53Gary O'Reilly?

  With the new World Cup ball, I mean, do you test for that? Because if we're going to see not such a short passing game, but a longer diagonal press passing game, because in the in the modern game, there's a high press, like in a basketball, a full court press. So rather than get caught up in that and lose possession, you bypass it with a long diagonal pass, a pass over the opposing team, which takes them out of the equation. So to do that, you need accuracy. And if the ball just wobbles and wobbles and becomes this knuckleball, beach ball kind of affair, have we tested for that kind of spin stability on the Arilla?

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Well, certainly, if you're kicking a knuckleball, it's not going to have a lot of spin, so you don't have the spin stability there. But the wet tunnel test that we've done, as I had said before, a couple of orientations do look to have a little bit more knuckling than some of the previous balls. Some other orientations, not as much knuckling. Now, we're talking about an infinite number of orientations that you could have that ball facing the oncoming air. And, you know, players aren't going to be able to ascertain whether the ball they're about to kick is going to be in one of those magic orientations or not. I mean, it'll be rolling on the pitch and then they're going to be kicking it down at some long pass. So I'm definitely looking to see if there's much knuckling going on at some of these high speed kicks.

• 27:14Chuck Nice?

  Is there, is there any team that will derive a benefit and some teams that will have a detriment because of this ball? Like that you know of, off the top of your, because I know both of you are really into, you know, the game and the teams and the competition.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  Well, I'm hoping the US team is young enough not to care about it too much. They're just going to kick it and play with a lot of reckless abandon at times and a lot of energy. So, you know, I'd like to think that our youth could at least prevent us from worrying too much about the physics of the ball.

• 27:50Chuck Nice?

  In other words, we're effed. No, no, you just said.

• 27:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Actually, the USA.

• 27:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, he did just say that. Chuck, he did.

• 28:00Chuck Nice?

  In other words, what he just said is, our team is not skilled enough that this will make a difference.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  No, no, I didn't say not.

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They will just have fun.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  I didn't say not skilled enough. I said, I hope they're young enough to not let that get in their heads.

• 28:15Chuck Nice?

  By skilled, I mean experienced enough. But yeah, I got you. I got you.

• 28:19Gary O'Reilly?

  The USA are in the group, in the group stage with England, Iran, and Wales. Um, so there's a very good chance, and the USA haven't played yet as we're recording this.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  No, they haven't, yeah.

• 28:30Gary O'Reilly?

  The USA will do very well in the group stage. So, uh, just to add to the professor's point, there's a lot of encouragement. There's a lot of really, really good talent in the USA team. So I don't think England will be taking them for granted at all. What I would say, Chuck, in addressing your question, a team like Spain, who historically have a very short, sharp passing game. A team like Argentina, who, uh, basically play at times, it's like death by a thousand passes. So they will pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass. And in doing this, they distort an opposition. They overload them to create space in other areas, and then they make this very sharp, penetrative pass.

• 29:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Those teams that play the shorter passing game on the ground, that will be advantageous. Because if there's any kind of wobbling and knuckling with the longer passing, if their, if their game is predisposed to do that a lot, then that game will then become less accurate.

• 29:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary just, just influenced the Vegas odds.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Recitation. He's saying whoever, with this ball, whoever, whose ever game depends mostly on short passes, will have an advantage.

• 29:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's did that Eric, did that sound like?

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Well, in the short pass speeds, the measure of drag coefficients look like they're a little smaller for Al Rila compared to previous balls. So there could be a slight increase in speed for some of those shorter passes.

• 29:55Gary O'Reilly?

  They're speeding, they're speeding. Neil, FIFA and with their best friend Adidas are speeding the game up. It's already got faster and faster. Now, when these short passes that are passed along the surface of the grass, it gets even faster, then yeah, then you really are testing a team's defense. You're testing a whole lot of organization. So it's, you know, these are the minute little bits and pieces that go into understanding how this will take place due to the fact that you've got a different design of the ball.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yes. So we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, I'm going to start off by asking Eric, what about the valves on the ball? Nobody's talked about that yet. I want to know. And then we'll chew the fat on the beauty and majesty of the sport itself being so international and so timeless on StarTalk Sports Edition, the FIFA World Cup Special.

• 31:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition, FIFA World Cup Special, and Gary is giddy because he was a former professional soccer player. Gary, you played with who over in the UK?

• 31:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Um, oh, I didn't play at international level. I played at club level with Tottenham, with Crystal Palace and Brighton. They are all currently doing quite well in the English Premier League.

• 31:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. England's got a fame, you know, they're famous for their Premier League, right? I mean, shows are made about it.

• 31:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. I mean, we, the English invented the modern game of association football. However, we are no longer any good at it.

• 31:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 31:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, wow. Yeah, we handed that mantle over to the Brazilians, the Italians, the French.

• 31:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it was after you left the sport. That's when England started going down the tube.

• 31:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Most likely.

• 31:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Eric, we've spent all this time talking about stitching and drumsticks from the refrigerator. And it's distracted, Chuck.

• 32:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And shapes of the panels. What about the valve? This seems to me to be a profound asymmetry in its structure and its design.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Well, the valve setting in Alreila actually appears to be a little bit more recessed than some of the recent balls. So when you rub your finger over the valve, you could actually feel that corner edging. But it's actually quite small. And you know, when you're looking at the size of that valve, it's only perhaps about one and a half times the width of the seam. So it's not a huge asymmetry on the ball.

• 32:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, but it doesn't weigh the same.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  Oh, that's right. You're talking about a slight mass asymmetry. Yeah.

• 32:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a, yeah, you've changed the mass distribution of the ball.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Very slightly. That's right. We haven't measured that little change in mass asymmetry to see what kind of effect that would have with a spinning ball. So I certainly couldn't talk to how much that would have influenced.

• 33:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I can ask Gary, Gary, doesn't, when they do a place kick or whenever the ball is just sitting there, do they align the valve in one way or another on purpose or by accident?

• 33:16Gary O'Reilly?

  They can and they do. If the ball, if the free kick, right, is more central, then it's most likely a direct strike on goal.

• 33:28Gary O'Reilly?

  If, and I've seen players place the ball meticulously and you realize.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought I've seen that. I was just imagining it. Right.

• 33:35Gary O'Reilly?

  They are placing it so as the aperture of the valve is directly where the contact of their foot will be. This then invariably ends up as a knuckleball. Now, there must be most certainly a greater change in deformation as for if you were to kick another part of the surface. Now, I would like to know what the physics are behind contacting what is a vulnerable point on the ball in terms of changing how things are inside and obviously.

• 34:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Eric, you're letting us down here without having checked the valve. What kind of amateur, rank amateur operations are you running?

• 34:16Speaker 00

  It's just funding. That's all it is.

• 34:22Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man, that's great.

• 34:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Good answer.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  We don't have that Middle East oil money to fund our project here, so.

• 34:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let's take spend a minute just talking about Qatar as a location. Uh, we learned earlier that it's sea level, but are the temperatures going to go high? And when you have high temperatures, that usually gives you a thinner, uh, a lower air density. Right? So how do, how do these climatic factors matter? And the stadium is open, if I remember correctly.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  They, they have open stadia. In fact, they're going to be air conditioning these open stadia.

• 34:57Gary O'Reilly?

  There's one, there's one stadium that's got a roof.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and even the ones that are open, uh, they're, they're going to be air conditioned.

• 35:04Chuck Nice?

  They're still air conditioned. Yeah. Even though they're open. Uh, yeah. Well, thanks a lot. Uh, Earth, the earth thanks you.

• 35:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, wait, wait, Chuck, wait, wait, just let's, let's settle this. Um, do you remember, and it's still the case, you can go into a grocery store. Uh huh. There'll be a, an open surface of refrigerated items and you'd reach in and pull it out. Because the cold air stays there.

• 35:31Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 35:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's denser than the air you're breathing five, six feet above it.

• 35:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. So it's gonna, it's a cold air falls, it stays put.

• 35:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not as energy inefficient as it might seem.

• 35:43Chuck Nice?

  I, I got you.

• 35:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you're still bed off if you cover it.

• 35:46Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't get me wrong. But if you have a stadium and they're air conditioned, the air is not going to fly out of the stadium. It's going to stay right where everybody is.

• 35:53Chuck Nice?

  You're absolutely right. I mean, that's why, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm.

• 35:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Let me just, like, let me get by and Eric, we agree on that.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  We, we agree on that and, and we also agree that if we're going to play the world cup in, in Qatar, that we better do it in November and December and not in July.

• 36:07Chuck Nice?

  That's right. Yeah. Well, uh, cause you'd be playing, uh, uh, now at what temperature does this ball melt? Because. From what I understand, it gets to about a hundred and 25 degrees there in the summertime. So thank, thank God we're playing it in, in November.

• 36:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm hmm. The interesting thing, Chuck, uh, you'll, you'll like this. One of the stadium is made from something like 700 and something containers. And once the tournament is finished, that will be dismantled and then brought out into others. So that as much as you say, that's, that's a contentious place. They are making some effort to address sustainability and, uh, reusability of products and materials.

• 36:51Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know, uh, listen, I, I don't have, I guess I do. I have a real problem with the whole thing.

• 36:58Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, I'm not here to excuse anybody. I'm just saying that's the fact.

• 37:03Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna, I was gonna try to go along to get along, but I got a real problem with the whole thing, you know? I got a real problem with FIFA. I have a serious problem, the same problem with the Olympic Committee, the IOCC. I just, I feel as though the amount of corruption that goes into moving these games around the world is just unacceptable, it's untenable, and that it leads to, it leads to a siphoning of resources unnecessarily so. It leads to an incredible amount of waste, and $330 billion went in to a few weeks of this game.

• 37:44Chuck Nice?

  I understand it's the most popular game in the world, but $330 billion went into sports washing to try to give a reputation to a country that should not enjoy any type of reputation. And the same thing was tried in Germany under Hitler. Thank God for one black man that ruined his plans. And we are seeing, we see this happen all the time. I just think that it's, it's time for us to come up with a different model. It's time for us to come up with a different model.

• 38:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eric, what's the physics of that?

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Don't forget the 1934 World Cup went to Mussolini's Italy, so they've been doing this a while.

• 38:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  And 1978 Argentina.

• 38:29Gary O'Reilly?

  People have come out and said that the World Cup in Qatar was a mistake. I think that's come from the higher-ups in FIFA.

• 38:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm not just talking about Qatar, dog. I'm really talking about the grand scheme of how things are, how business is conducted. You know, I just feel as though, you know, they need to really start at the top. The fish rots from the head. They need to start at the top, they need to remove, you know, the people who are running these sanctioning bodies, and they need to come up with a new model. And a model that most of all has an eye towards sustainability, because I think it is, I'll say, the number one.

• 39:16Chuck Nice?

  Um, focus uh in the world where we could turn our collective lens towards making a difference uh when it comes to the most compelling existential threat that mankind has ever faced. And that might sound hyperbolic, but it really is.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Well, we're gonna get our chance in in four years, Chuck, when when North America's hosting.

• 39:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 39:40Chuck Nice?

  Uh, we're [__]. Oh, I'm sorry.

• 39:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. I wasn't up on that. Who's who's hosts in?

• 39:45Gary O'Reilly?

  So it's Ca- it's, am I right, Eric? Uh, Canada, Mexico, and the USA?

• 39:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, Canada, Mexico, and the US.

• 39:51Gary O'Reilly?

  It is, yeah. The three, the three, the three nations.

• 39:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very nice. So it's a, it's a, it's a continental.

• 39:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 39:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  World Cup.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Well, and next year, the Women's World Cup will be in Australia and New Zealand. And, you know, it'd be interesting to see, you know, they have some pretty uh science uh savvy leaders down there. So it'd be nice to see uh, uh, you know, what Ardern and others are gonna be doing for that World Cup.

• 40:15Chuck Nice?

  I think New Zealand will do a great job. I, and I think that they'll actually take the responsibility of having the world's eyes on New Zealand and use that as a means of being able to further the message that we all need to do something. Not as, not as convinced about Australia, to be honest.

• 40:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just to, just to be clear, Chuck, I don't mean to interrupt your public service announcements, but, but.

• 40:38Chuck Nice?

  I know, I know. People right now are watching the show like, what, where, what? Where are the jokes? Oh, shut up. Oh, shut up and give us some jokes.

• 40:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When did Chuck be, when did Chuck become NPR Central? No, so.

• 40:53Chuck Nice?

  Screw your conscientiousness, Chuck.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, yeah, we've, right. So just to be clear, yes, the World Cup is every four years.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, and I didn't know they split the men's and the women's. So that means, that means every uh, two out of every four years.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a World Cup. There's an Olympics, one out of every four years. There's a Winter Olympics, one out of every four years.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  Right.

• 41:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which tells us we have four such occasions in four years to drive whatever global message we want.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 41:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I don't know that it's. It's, you know, to put the full weight of a public service announcement on one country in one year, I think it does not do justice to the fact that the world does get together more than this, more than on this occasion.

• 41:40Chuck Nice?

  Oh, no, that was my point. That was my point is that I have a problem, as I said, with the entire scheme. It's, it's not just these games. Like I said, it's been going on, you know, the, the, the sports watching I have a problem with. That's been going on since Hitler, but uh, what I really have a problem with is the entire scheme of how business is conducted, how countries are selected, um, and uh, the fact that there is no acknowledgement that, hey, we have global problems and this is a perfect opportunity to acknowledge our global problems and then collective solutions.

• 42:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would say, I would say Chuck, uh, just, uh, cause I like reading and studying history. I would say that there were many years, several years of the 20th century where there was no international competition at all because we were at a world war.

• 42:39Chuck Nice?

  Correct.

• 42:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I think we should at least celebrate the fact that countries can get together and do this at all. Just.

• 42:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, there is that.

• 42:48Chuck Nice?

  Guess what? That, that I can't argue with.

• 42:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can't argue with that.

• 42:52Chuck Nice?

  Can't argue with that. The fact that we come together and that, you know, this is a means of, you know, as you would put it, friendly competition.

• 43:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's it. That's a start.

• 43:02Chuck Nice?

  That's a start.

• 43:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a start. Okay.

• 43:05Gary O'Reilly?

  See Chuck, to your, to your point, um, we have younger generation now that is intimately focused on sustainability.

• 43:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 43:13Gary O'Reilly?

  And they are going to, they are going to be the audience that these governing bodies are going to hope to harvest for their hard earned money.

• 43:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 43:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Now, that audience for me will be the driving force for, you know what, we'll turn up, we'll buy the product, we'll buy your hundred and eighty dollar football or whatever it is. However, I want this, this, this, this, and this box ticked. And I want this done and this done and this done. And this will then have to be brought to bear on location, on bids, on everything else that goes into making an event like the World Cup or the Summer Olympics.

• 43:46Chuck Nice?

  That's for me, that's my thing.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Chuck mentioned the $330 billion. Not enough of that went to those migrant workers whose backs this, these cities were built and stadia and hotels and stuff. I mean, there's some

• 43:58Chuck Nice?

  Another point.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  Very horrific working conditions for those, those people.

• 44:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's true.

• 44:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Eric, what's the, what's the physics of all that?

• 44:08Speaker 00

  What the physics is, I think, is that we need to spend more time learning science and less time focused on seventh century superstitions. How about that?

• 44:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh. Oh. Snap. Oh. Damn. Oh.

• 44:26Chuck Nice?

  Eric, that was profound.

• 44:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not, that's not the only century.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  No, or first century or keep on going. Yes, I, I, I think.

• 44:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't, I don't think there's a century without.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  There's not a century without. That's right.

• 44:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 44:40Chuck Nice?

  However, there's not a century without, but in this particular century, it makes it that much more egregious because come on.

• 44:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, guys, we got it. We got to wrap this, but I, I want to get like one sentence wrapped from each of you. Chuck, give me one sentence.

• 44:56Chuck Nice?

  Uh, you know, I just think, um, if it's a beautiful game, let's make it that for, uh, you know, 360, you know, if it's a beautiful game, let's make it beautiful in every aspect. And that means that, uh, you know, we shouldn't have, uh, slavery, um, uh, involved to create, uh, the conditions under which the games can be played. We shouldn't have corruption that, uh, allows for the politics, uh,

• 45:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for your one sentence, Chuck.

• 45:24Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry. Now moving on. All right.

• 45:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn, that's the longest PSA I have ever heard.

• 45:30Chuck Nice?

  Okay, and, uh, and let me just end with, uh, I love soccer.

• 45:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, fine. Uh, Gary, what do you have for?

• 45:38Gary O'Reilly?

  I hope the new ball enhances the game and we get more goals and more entertainment and people go away happy and, uh, the love for the game grows.

• 45:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. And Eric, take us out.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  So enjoy the sporting moments and the excitement you feel. And please remember you could feel just as much excitement from the science behind everything you're watching.

• 46:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hallelujah. I love it. I love it. That is one of our threads of our DNA is the science in the culture. Yeah. All right, guys. It's been great to have you back, Eric. All right, guys, we got to call it quits there. This has been StarTalk Sports Edition FIFA World Cup Special. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.