World Cup Tales: The Making of a Design Classic, Mexico 1970

Forty years ago, the world tuned in to see the first World Cup broadcast live across Europe and the Americas. The images that summer from Mexico were pioneering, but for the majority of households watching on their black and white televisions, clarity was everything. One company, Adidas, had a solution that would outlast the tournament, outlast the players, and even outlast its own time in the spotlight: a football designed specifically for the screen.

It is one of football’s stranger truths that the mental image of a ball is so often one not widely used at the top level for more than thirty years. The 32-panel design, a spherical polyhedron known to some as a ‘bucky ball’, became an instant classic upon its introduction in 1970. It was the perfect fusion of applied science and commercial design, solving a problem most fans never knew existed.

Until the late 1960s, the standard football was an eighteen-panel construction of six blocks of three oblong strips. Creating a ball that was perfectly spherical, and neither too heavy nor too light, had always been a challenge. After securing a sponsorship deal with FIFA that continues to this day, Adidas set about reinventing the ball itself. They produced the Telstar, and in doing so, created an icon.

A Geodesic Sphere

The design’s origins lie not in sport, but in architecture. The American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, born in 1895, sought ways to construct buildings using the absolute minimum of materials. His most famous creation was the geodesic dome, a structure based on an earlier design by German engineer Walther Bauersfeld. By combining hexagonal and pentagonal panels, Buckminster Fuller could create a perfect sphere, a radical approach to construction seen in buildings like the Eden Project in Cornwall and the Tacoma Dome in the United States.

Adidas saw the utility in this design. A Danish company, Select, had manufactured a thirty-two panel ball back in the 1950s, but Adidas refined and perfected it for the world’s biggest stage. Using twenty hexagonal panels and twelve pentagonal panels, they produced a perfectly spherical football. The masterstroke was colouring the pentagonal panels black. This had two benefits. Firstly, it allowed players to judge the spin on the ball more easily, a significant factor in the thin air of Mexico. Secondly, and most importantly, it made the ball stand out on black and white television sets.

The Television Star

The 1970 World Cup was a milestone for broadcasting. While satellite technology had existed since 1962, the 1966 tournament was only shown live within Europe. Mexico 1970 was the first truly global television event for the sport. Although the memories of that summer are now preserved in vibrant colour, most homes watched in monochrome. The cost of a colour television set was prohibitive; in Britain in 1974, a new one cost £400 when the average weekly wage was just £38. The modern equivalent of that cost would be a staggering £5,150. The ball’s stark black-and-white pattern was essential.

The name itself, Telstar, was a nod to the communications satellite that made these global broadcasts possible, the trailblazer that turned football into a televised powerhouse.

The Telstar’s influence was massive, despite its relatively short lifespan in professional matches. It was used again four years later in West Germany, alongside an all-white version named the Chile Durlast. But by 1978, Adidas had moved on, ditching the design for the futuristic-looking Tango. The Tango design, in its various forms, would stick around for twenty-four years, three times as long as the Telstar was the official World Cup ball. Yet it is the Telstar that has lodged itself in the culture of the game.

It cemented itself as the generic, default football.

Type ‘soccer ball’ into Google’s Image Search and the results are telling. On the first page, thirteen of the twenty images are of Telstar-style balls. That achievement is remarkable for a design that has barely been seen in a major tournament for more than three decades. Bauersfeld's original geodesic dome was built into the roof of the Zeiss Corporation headquarters in Jena, Germany, as the world's first planetarium.

An Enduring Subconscious Image

The success of the Telstar as a collective idea is particularly perplexing in Britain, where a ball of its design was only ever seen during the 1970 and 1974 World Cups, or in grainy footage of European club matches. The design was never used in England for league or cup games. Somehow, it embedded itself into the public subconsciousness there as it did everywhere else. This is all the more ironic given how primitive marketing was in the early 1970s compared to the campaigns of today.

Adidas still designs the World Cup ball, of course, and now it changes considerably with every tournament. Perhaps that is the point: to create a disposable brand, renewed every four years. The idea of Adidas sticking with one ball design for more than one tournament now seems as alien as the simple, unadorned cotton shirts worn by Brazil and Italy in 1970.

Back then, Adidas seemed to be getting these design matters right. The key to an icon is often a mix of art and science. The Telstar found the perfect balance. The science of the spherical polyhedron and the geodesic dome was combined with a practical, almost minimalist aesthetic. It remains strangely futuristic, like a spinning alien globe, while also feeling completely traditional. It is more than just a ball; it is a design classic. More than Jairzinho’s goals, Pele’s audacious lob or Gordon Banks’ save, the Telstar is the 1970 World Cup’s enduring gift to football.