If you ever want to consider how far football’s developed, just look the greatest match balls of all time. And consider, how far that football has really developed.
This silly, stupendous sport started life, essentially, as a fight over a pig’s bladder between Victorian gentlemen. The centrepiece of the beautiful game has since evolved and expanded, though – literally – to become rounded, softer, lighter, technicolour and packed with more technology than a space shuttle. Our forefathers wrote the laws of the game to apply to a lump of leather: now, match balls are tested in laboratories for years before they even touch a blade of grass.
