The official match ball for the upcoming FIFA world cup, the Adidas Jabulani, features a newly developed Grip'n'Groove surface for enhanced grip in all conditions and an exceptionally stable flight path... Thanks to a new spherical-molding process for the eight thermally-bonded panels, the ball is perfectly round and thus more accurate for passes and shots on goal...
Adidas has been manufacturing close to 1,800 of these a day since April 2009... What still remains to be seen, however, is whether a perfectly round ball is actually better for the game than hand-stitched ones, whose idiosyncrasies were said to keep goalkeepers second-guessing the ball’s flight path...