2010

I guess this is the blogging equivalent of a retweet, but I think this is a great story by 17-year-old Thandile Ntlebi, who lives in Township Khayelitsha, South Africa about how the children made their DIY footballs:
Firstly you look for old clothes or blankets. Then you put a few condoms around, which you blow up [...]

We’re very proud to announce that The Ball for 2010 will be made by Alive & Kicking in South Africa. This amazing project makes cheap, tough, repairable footballs, netballs and volleyballs, using African skills and African leather. Each carries a message about HIV/AIDS and malaria.

The Ball 2010 will be “an African ball made for the [...]

Winners of the World Cup can now display a badge as well as stars on the national shirt.

The ‘FIFA World Champions Badge’ on the Italian shirt
In fact, it looks like the Italian FA has incorporated the stars into their badge design — previously the stars would circle the national FA’s badge, with a new one [...]

Keeping you up to date on official balls…

A soccer ball identical to the balls to be used in Olympic soccer competition is seen in an Adidas store in Beijing Tuesday July 29, 2008. The ball, called Adidas Magnus Moenia, or Great Wall Star, and featuring the Chinese characters for “China” was specially designed for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

via Yahoo

Since the idea of The Ball is to some extent inspired by the Olympic Torch and the Torch Relay, we’re following the progress of this year’s torch closely.

2008 Torch Relay on Google Earth .kml

If you’re in the UK, this is the route through London tomorrow.

It’s interesting to note that the last time there was a purely overland relay was to the 1980 games in Moscow and indeed how few relays have actually been entirely overland (only three: 1936 Berlin, 1972 Munich and 1980 Moscow). The 2004 games in Athens (the torch relay went global, visiting all the previous hosts of the modern games) seems to have set something of a precedent which has been expanded for this year’s games to a route that seems to be a somewhat aimless promotional tour around the world.

Personally I think this is a pity — and possibly even a mistake — as it seems to detract from the value that the torch has (largely accidentally) accrued as symbolic of the ideals of athletic endeavour. That lofty symbolic quality has been replaced by a return of the torch to its original purpose as something of simply promotional value for the hosts.

UPDATE: Here’s a gallery of photos of the disruptions to the relay

The Ball is not round!

LAW 2 — THE BALL
The ball is spherical.

The early history of football is littered with attempts to standardise the rules by which the game was played. Perhaps the first were the Cambridge Rules, which were first agreed in 1848. Unfortunately, no copy of the original rules survives, but an 1856 copy of them has. Then there is Sheffield FC, who were founded as the first football club with their own codification of the game — the Sheffield Rules of 1858. And, of course, the Football Association was founded with a code derived in part from the Cambridge University Rules in 1863. We at Spirit of Football think that these are the rules that, more than any code, have become the basis for the modern game — which is why we celebrate them at Battersea Park, where they were first deployed in a game.

Nonetheless, there was little agreement amongst those who played the game in its various guises for more than two decades, until a meeting of the Welsh, Irish, Scottish and English FAs in Manchester on the 6th December 1882 proposed the establishment of a permanent board to regulate the laws of the game and to produce a common set of rules under which international matches could be played. This was to become the International Football Association Board (IFAB), which held its first meeting in London on 2nd June 1886. The minutes of that meeting can be read in this PDF (Adobe Acrobat required). You can read the subsequent history of IFAB on Wikipedia, so I won’t repeat what’s already out there.

Fast forward to the present. IFAB met at Gleneagles last week. Apparently. FIFA’s coverage amounted to one press release, a news item and the agenda. But they have yet to release anything that I can find that summarises what actually happened. Nor can I find anything on the FA’s website.

“But why?” I hear you ask. “This is, after all, football’s legislature meeting to decide the future direction of the game.” Well, perhaps there aren’t enough people in the relevant organisations to do that. Perhaps there’s no obvious place to post news of IFAB’s decisions. “But IFAB have their own website, don’t they?” you ask. Amazingly, at the moment, the IFAB archives are hosted in Torrance, California by none other than the Soccer South Bay Referee Association. “What? Who are they?”, you rightly ask. Well, er… um… quite. Unfortunately, the powers that be seem to have missed the boat on www.ifab.com to Industrial Fabricators Incorporated. “Oops!” you say, “that’s a bit of an oversight”.

Oh well. I suppose football never has been and probably never will be run on democratic lines. It’s not like the players can have a vote on the merits of a penalty decision, or put forward a motion of no confidence in the referee. Nor, I imagine, does the average fan particularly care about such administrivia. But it does seem that football’s legislative body is unusually and unaccountably coy.

Links

• Laws of the game 2007/2008
• SSBRA IFAB Full Meeting Archive
• This year’s IFAB agenda

Lots of political and footballing heavyweights seem to be touting Queen’s Park to Sepp Blatter for a FIFA award for their role as “trailblazers of the modern game”.

Queen’s Park’s contribution to football, both on a local and worldwide scale, cannot be over-stated. As the first club to play to the passing style and rules of football in the 19th century, their legacy is the brand of football played across the globe today.

Some of the most fundamental elements of the modern game owe their existence to this special club. I can think of no more fitting recognition than the FIFA Order of Merit.

UK PM Gordon Brown, quoted in The Scotsman

Whatever the merits of the case, it’s good to see that there’s a greater awareness of (and desire to recognise) the significant moments in the history and development of football.

Let’s hope that we can be as successful in raising the profile of Battersea Park as the site of the first game to be played under FA rules — the game that we commemorate as the starting point for The Ball’s journey to the Opening Ceremony of the World Cup — because as it stands, there’s not even a blue plaque to mark the spot.

Thanks to The Global Game for the heads-up.

A little while ago, we entered The Ball into the Changemakers Sport for a Better World competition. The site is dedicated to “building the world’s first global online open source community that competes to surface the best social solutions, and then collaborates to refine, enrich, and implement those solutions.”

Please check out our entry and let us know what you think. Voting by the Changemakers community starts today so we’re keeping our fingers crossed…

[Update] Unfortunately, we didn’t make the short-list of finalists, but we wish all those who did the best of luck and hope that it provides a welcome boost to their projects.

Happy Birthday!
A significant part of the Spirit of Football project is our focus on the origins of the game. We decided from the outset to identify Battersea Park in London as our “Mount Olympus”, but of course historical issues are never quite that simple to resolve. There are many competing candidates for the “inciting moment” [...]