What makes a football swerve

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Lay the points has the What is a game based on the principle of spot play? What are the strategy of the game at spot play? According to the article , variations in the different soccer balls can determine how predictable the ball will be in flight.

What makes this interesting is how the phenomenon could take different forms around the world. Soccer is a global sport played by people who are very wealthy and people in poverty. Most are able to play the game in North America on well-manicured turf or natural grass fields with authentic soccer balls. On the contrary, in less fortunate parts of the world, one can often find children using balls that are taped together on fields that might have a sand or clay surface that differs significantly from wealthier areas.

For a such a familiar phenomenon to many soccer players around the world, the explanation for it can seem pretty complex. Known as the Magnus Effect, the article claims that renowned scientist Isaac Newton was the first to describe it. He first noticed in tennis that topspin to the ball causes it to dip, while backspin will flatten out the trajectory. This application is brought to soccer, most commonly with free kicks, corners, and crossing passes.

The wrinkle to the Magnus Effect is how the direction of the curve can reverse. In the article, Professor Bush discusses how a completely smooth ball may change the curve direction. A curveball in baseball is another example from sports: A pitcher throws the ball with especially tight topspin, or sidespin rotation, and the ball curves in the direction of the spin.

In soccer, the same thing usually occurs with free kicks, corner kicks, crosses from the wings, and other kinds of passes or shots: The player kicking the ball applies spin during contact, creating rotation that makes the ball curve. In the above animation, a player strikes two balls: one smooth, and one with an elastic band wrapped around its equator. Both balls are struck with his instep so as to impart a counterclockwise spin. However, the smooth ball bends in the opposite direction as the banded ball.

Courtesy of the researchers. Why is this? Where that transition arises is influenced by the surface roughness, the stitching of the ball. If you change the patterning of the panels, the transition points move, and the pressure distribution changes. If the reversing of the Magnus Effect has largely eluded detection, of course, that is because soccer balls are not absolutely smooth — but they have been moving in that direction over the decades. While other sports, such as baseball and cricket, have strict rules about the stitching on the ball, soccer does not, and advances in technology have largely given balls sleeker, smoother designs — until the introduction of the Brazuca, at least.

There is actually a bit more to the story, however, since sometimes players will strike balls so as to give them very little spin — the equivalent of a knuckleball in baseball.

In this case, the ball flutters unpredictably from side to side. Even in the most commonplace things, there is subtle and interesting physics. Previous item Next item. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.