Adidas and Bayer MaterialScience have teamed up to develop the FIFA World Cup ball. The "+Teamgeist" ball is said to be the roundest ball ever.

The "+Teamgeist" is just one per cent away from being a perfect sphere. This makes it particularly accurate as it travels through the air. It is all down to the materials used to make it and the innovative construction. For the first time, the adidas specialists have thrown out the familiar five and six-sided sections which have been used over the last few decades and replaced them with propeller-shaped panels.

They have also reduced the total number of sections from 32 to 14. Fewer edges and more roundness also means fewer seams and corners in the outer skin so that when the players kick the ball, there is a greater chance that they will make contact with a smooth surface. This increases their chances of hitting the target.

To keep the ball in shape, Bayer’s coating specialists developed a new structure for the outer skin. To begin with they increased the wall thickness of the ball to 1.1 millimetres to make it rounder and smoother.

The decisive component in ensuring an accurate trajectory of the "+Teamgeist" is the polyurethane-based syntactic foam, which is applied to an adhesive layer that bonds the outer skin to the textile substrate. The foam consists of millions of gas-filled microspheres. Above the foam layer, the ball has an aliphatic intermediate coat to protect it from external influences such as moisture, and give it exceptional elasticity.

The ball's outer finish protects the printed surface from abrasion. It makes for greater durability and gives it a perfect appearance over a longer period.