The Surprising Math and Physics behind the 2026 Trionda World Cup Soccer Ball
Surprising mathematics and physics behind the 2026 World Cup football ball
Here’s how the new design based on the tetrahedron for the football ball “Tronda” could affect the big game of next year
Each World Cup brings a new fascinating ball design. The Tronda 2026 balloon is in the center.
Every four years, football fans are looking forward to the largest sport event: the Football World Cup of the International Federation (FIFA). But before each dramatic kick -off, artists and researchers spend years designing, testing and revising the official match ball. Recently, images of the ball planned for the 2026 competition have been disclosed, and its design integrates mathematics, physics and style in a surprising way.
Called Tronda (Spanish for “Triwave”), the new ball celebrates the three host nations – the United States, Mexico and Canada – for the first World Cup hosted by Multinational. The ball is sewn together from four panels, the smallest number to a ball of the FIFA World Cup. And it represents a significant reduction compared to the al Rhila ball at 20 panels which was used in 2022.
The design of any football ball depends on a secular question: how can you make rounded shapes from flat material? So far, each ball in the FIFA World Cup has been inspired by some of the simplest three -dimensional forms of Math: platonic solids. These five forms are the only convex polyhedrates built from copies of a single ordinary polygon where the same number of faces meet at each corner.
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The icosahedron, which has 20 triangular faces and a relatively in the shape of a ball, seems promising, but it is still a little too sharp to move. If we cut (or sections) the points of an icosahedron, each of the triangles becomes a hexagon, and each of the points becomes a pentagon.
It is the shape of the classic football ball, originally called Teltar Ball and used in the official FIFA World Cup match in 1970.
The Tronda ball is also based on a platonic solid – the tetrahedron – which first seems to be the least ball of all famous forms. A tetrahedron is made up of four triangles, three of which meet each point. The tip in the Tronda design is panel -shaped. Although they have three points like a typical triangle, the edges of the panels are curves that adapt to give the ball a more rounded exterior.
This method of manufacturing a plot -in -law with a plot -off platonic by curbing the edges of the faces can be familiar to football fans; In fact, the design of the Tronda ball strongly evokes the Brazuca & Nobreak; a six -panel ball based on a cube that played in the 2014 World Cup.
Base the ball triona on a tetrahedron could be a risky choice; The last match based on this form was very controversial. The Jabulani ball, whose name means “rejoicing” in Zulu, could have been a little too happy. The players complained that this was unpredictable in the air and did not react as they were waiting for. The design of the jabulani combined the two methods of transformation of a platonic solid into a sphere: cut the corners to make eight faces and transform the edges of the faces into curves. It also had a unique feature, shared with none of the official match balls before or since: three -dimensional and spherical panels.
Jabulani may have been the most round ball. So why did it not work as planned? The answer has to do with the “trail” and the non-breeze; – The strength of air particles repelling the ball as it flies in space. As a rule, the more a bullet moves quickly, the more it feels like a drag, which can slow it down and change its trajectory. But each ball also has a “critical speed” past that drag on the ball decreases considerably. The more smooth a ball, the higher the critical speed barrier. This is why the surfaces of golf balls have dimples: they lower critical speed and help the balls to move more quickly in the air. These effects mean that the round and smoother are not always better – and can explain the unpredictable behavior of the jabulani.
The minimization of the drag is probably why the Tronda ball has divots on its surface and offers another reason for its winding seams. Balle designers use a surface texture combination, sewing length and sewing depth to just reach the right amount of “roughness” so that players are comfortable with the ball when they enter the field.
Although the amount of roughness is significant, the placement of the seams and the surface texture can also affect the reliability of a bullet in the air. In particular, researchers are concerned about “the Knuckleball effect”, named after a kind of baseball field. When a ball quickly turns in the air, the placement of its rough elements is less important; The ball moves as if these features were distributed uniformly. But if the ball is launched or kicked in a way that minimizes the spin, its rude areas will feel different quantities of drag than the smoother sides, which makes it move in an unpredictable way. This effect is good for a baseball launcher, who wants to make the ball more difficult for the striker to reach, but not so much for a football player, who wants the ball to go precisely where it targets it. To avoid this effect, football designers often try to make the bullets as symmetrical as possible; They want a ball to look like different angles because it turns. Symmetry is a concern that experts have about the Tronda ball; Because it is based on a tetrahedron, it has fewer symmetries than, for example, the classic such ball. While the Teltar ball is precisely alike in 60 possible positions, the triona ball has only 12 rotation symmetries.
Players will closely monitor how all these qualities could affect the way the ball plays on the field. Keeping a mark on the developments of the ball and practicing in-depth with the match ball is “very important”, explains Brad Friedel, a retirement goalkeeper who played in the respective national teams of the United States in two World Cups and two Olympic Games. When you test a new ball, he says, “You just follow a normal training session and [see] What little nuances he has. Doesn’t that have a good grip when it is dry? Is it good when it is wet? What does the flight on crosses look like?
Different forms of ball in general, Julia Grosso, a midfielder from Chicago Stars Football Club, who played in the Canadian team during the last two female world cups, says: “It is more about how to work together in a team to win rather than what type of ball with which we play.” But she adds that training with a particular bullet before the game “really helps” to have an idea of how he will react and adapt accordingly.
The players are not the only ones looking forward to getting their hands on new balls. “I want to hold [the Trionda] To see what it looks like and what the structure of the seams and all this looks like, ”explains sports physicist John Eric Goff from the University of Puget Sound. Once the ball is officially released, he and his colleagues will do blower tests to analyze his precise physical properties.
