Why do spherical sports balls have different stitch patterns for each sport? Why don’t they mix it up?

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Soccer balls ⚽️ are made with a bunch of hexagons

Baseballs ⚾️ and Tennis Balls 🎾 have two a rounded hourglass shapes

Basketballs 🏀 have their own weird thing going on

Volleyballs 🏐 have the rectangles

Why aren’t there soccer balls with the volleyball pattern? Why not make a baseball out of hexagons?

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11 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Soccer literally has no requirements about the ball stitching at all. You can buy stitch patterns of a huge assortment right now.

the classic 32-panel combination of hexagons and pentagons was made famous by the Telestar from adidas in 1970. Prior to that most soccer balls did look something like the 18 panel volleyballs. Even there the stitched varied heavily from a 12-panel version, to versions with decorative edging. There even t-shaped panels in there as well .

Here’s the picture list of World Cup balls

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FIFA_World_Cup_official_match_balls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FIFA_World_Cup_official_match_balls)

it’s helpful to remember that official soccer rules are very broad and simple. The rules are designed to work everywhere.
here is the officials rules from FIFA (technically IFAB but I am not going there)

All balls must be:

* spherical
* made of suitable material
* of a circumference of between 68 cm (27 ins) and 70 cm (28 ins)
* between 410 g (14 oz) and 450 g (16 oz) in weight at the start of the matchof a pressure equal to 0.6–1.1 atmosphere (600 –1,100 g/cm²) at sea level (8.5lbs/sq in–15.6 lbs/sq in)

that said specific competitions have more stringent requirements. So now every competition has its own branded ball. Premier league…one branded ball, FA Cup a different ball.

tldr: soccer has no rules about stitching. Bring anything ya want really.