World Cup winners get golden ball

For the first time since 1994, the World Cup ball will be black and white — except in the final. The Times can reveal that football’s showpiece event will be played using a gold-coloured ball that the winners will be entitled to use in all matches for the next four years.

Traditionalists may be aghast at the latest incursion of bling culture into the sport via a marketing gimmick. Last year, Ronaldinho, the Brazil forward, played in boots decorated with 24-carat gold.

It is not as if the World Cup final needs to be hyped up using such artificial stimulation, especially given the criticism that Fifa, world football’s governing body, attracts for sullying the tournament with excessive commercialism. World Cup winners hardly need to play using their own special ball to evoke the glory of their achievement, either.

Teamgeist — “team spirit” — is said to produce greater precision than other balls, making ball control and distribution 30 per cent more accurate. Cunningly, the ball achieves this by virtue of being round. Rounder than traditional balls, anyway, because the number of panels is reduced from 32 to 14, which removes seams that create an uneven surface.

As if taking home advantage to extremes, adidas launched Teamgeist saying that it is “designed in white and black, the traditional colours of the German national football team, and accentuated with the golden colour of the Fifa World Cup trophy”. The 2002 ball was decorated with an image of a martial arts weapon to symbolise the energy of the hosts, Japan and South Korea.

David Beckham, the England captain with the appropriate nickname of “Golden Balls”, is said to like Teamgeist, as might be expected since he is a spokesman for adidas. The company aims to sell more than ten million of the balls, which cost about £75. Six million of the 2002 tournament’s Fevernova designs were sold.

The 1966 World Cup was the last to feature a ball untainted with logos. For 1970, adidas introduced the Telstar, with black-and-white pentagons designed to be more visible on black-and-white televisions.

In the first World Cup, in 1930, Argentina and Uruguay could not agree on which ball to use in the final so they played with an Argentine ball in the first half and a Uruguayan one in the second.

Last year, England introduced a gold star above the Three Lions crest on their white home kit to commemorate the 1966 win. It already featured on the red secondchoice kit. That is something other World Cup-winning nations have done for decades.