How a ball revolutionised the adidas aesthetic History of Teamgeist, the template that defined early 00

Is it possible for a ball to change drastically football’s aesthetic? Yes, it happened frequently and most of the time it had something to do with adidas and their design’s intuitions for the World Cup’s balls. Starting from Telestar, the ball used in 1970 and 1974 that introduced for the very first-time black pentagons on football’s balls. Then along came Tango, the ball used between 1978 and 1998 with always different colors and patterns applied to the immortal curved triangles printed on each of the 32 hexagonal panels.

And then there was Teamgeist, the ball designed for the 2006 World Cup played in Germany that managed to affect the entire adidas’ collection from 2006 to 2007. In the words of Jürgen Rank, adidas’ Senior Design Director Football: “Teamgeist is the result of enormous effort, ideas, and inspiration. We’ve abandoned the hexagonal structure of 32 panels and developed a new design with 14 panels. In this way, not only we’ve created a contemporary, eye-catching, and sophisticated look but we’ve also made the ball way smoother, improving players’ ball control and making the game more dynamic”.

“We realized that the beating heart of football, what connects players and fans, is represented at his best by one element, the most important: the ball. No ball, no football. That’s why we decided to add all the Teamgeist’s elements to all our new kits”, Rank said to explain what led adidas to turn a ball into their most beloved collection. So much so that in February 2022 adidas launched a new revisited version of Teamgeist, the only football kits’ collection entirely inspired by a ball.