FIFA World Cup ball revisited: No more worries about smart chip

The Adidas Telstar 2018 suffered many pitfalls at last summer’s FIFA World Cup, one of which was a rather useless smart chip. Well now, those worries have subsided.

Every four years the FIFA World Cup sets up an experimental lab for soccer balls. The latest: Adidas Telstar 18 and Mechta. Each tournament’s new ball always upsets some people. And the latest competition one had two balls: FIFA World Cup 2018 started with the Adidas Telstar 18 and then transitioned in knockout stages to the Mechta.

Goalkeepers took an immediate dislike to the latest FIFA World Cup vanguard ball. It wasn’t just the advanced polyurethane used on the surface. Taking a kitchen knife and dissecting the ball, shown in the following video, reveals the secret:

The Adidas FIFA World Cup ball has an inner air bladder that is perfectly sealed to the ball’s surface. The video also shows other balls that instantly yield a completely separated air bladder when cut open. The perfectly sealed air bladder explains a couple of things unique to the Adidas ball.

• First: touching the outer surface means you’re touching the entire structure of the ball without much give. It’s tighter than any other soccer ball you’ve handled.
• Second: Kicking that ball with all your might puts more risk into the action than any other ball.

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The Adidas ball surprised everyone when it popped twice during France’s game with Australia. Then it popped again when Uruguay played Saudi Arabia. You don’t see FIFA World Cup balls popping every day. On the bursts, Adidas expressed more frustration than anyone because the company insisted it was the most tested ball in their history.

But if the ball pops again, it won’t be this one at FIFA World Cup 2022 hosted by Qatar. And you won’t see this one at FIFA World Cup 2026 hosted by the U.S.-Canada-Mexico either. That’s because every World Cup ball represents a new experiment. Remember?

While meeting all basic game regulations, every ball tries to move through a new advancement. It won’t exactly be a surprise, but the next World Cup ball will have a more sophisticated data chip. If you watched enough of the video above, they used their kitchen knife to cut through a shard of the sphere until they could dig out a chip. They joked that the chip could track your location.

Some people didn’t get the joke when Russia President Vladimir Putin presented U.S. President Donald J. Trump with one of the World Cup balls. Yes, it had the chip in it.

This is the Near-FIeld Communication (NFC) chip. For those World Cup watchers who were really high-tech, they could install an NFC smartphone app and identify which ball was on the field for which game. They might also prompt some Adidas advertising, but in the end, that’s about it. So the smart chip in the ball wasn’t so smart. And that’s the joke.

However, when Putin presented Trump with the ball, politicians piled on about the job. Then came the bloggers. And finally, Trump answered a White House press conference question, confirming that the ball had received Secret Service scrutiny.

Rest assured, the chip in balls for the next two World Cups will be much smarter. Eventually, an app will update you with velocity and altitude, if you’re willing to endure some advertisements throughout use.

That makes the chip at least semi-useful, which is more than can be said for what it was. And that provides hope that the future World Cup balls will not suffer the same pitfalls as 2018’s.