In the following essay, I intend to explore my thesis that technology may have changed football, molding it into the sport it has become today. I will be exploring all the ways in which technology may have helped football as well as how technology may have hindered it, boots and the way they’ve progressed, pitches, stadiums and the way they’re built, goal-line technology, balls and how they have been changed and finally the media and money through the media. For my research, I will be using both primary and secondary research to get views from a wide range of sources.
Beginning with the basics, boots. Boots have come an extremely long way since football first began, in my eyes football boots have changed because it is transferred from a past-time in the 1800’s to a professional sport with billions of pounds pumping in and out of the sport. In the early 1800’s football like mentioned above was a past-time and therefore the boots were exceedingly basic. Work boots would have had metal studs or tacks hammered into the bottom of the sole for grip and stability when playing, the boots themselves were made of a very thick, heavy leather with high ankles and a steel toe cap on the front. These boots as you could imagine were overly protective, however, once winter came and the ground became softer and wetter the boot which first weighed around 500g now, weighed 1kg. As you can imagine these were remarkably heavy and hugely unpractical.
During the first and second war, the football boot design stayed very basic yet football boot producer brands like Gola, Hummel, and Valsport were all working on designs. After the second world war, the football boot design changed dramatically with the introduction of South American boots. The South Americans focused on a lighter, more flexible boot which focused on ball control and kicking power supposed to protect. In the 1960’s football boots were introduced with a lower cut, this allowed players to move faster and change direction quicker. The 1970’s is where the changes began to happen with the football boots, lighter boots which now came in a variety of colors were available on the market. Sponsorships were now a thing and Adidas was leading the way with this. Adidas was also at the top of the market at this time with the best selling boot at the time, the Copa Mundial.
From the 1990’s to the present day football boots are constantly being changed and researched, every couple of months a new football boot seems to come out claiming that it can do X or Y better than the last boot. With the introduction of new technology, football boots have come a long way from their origin. Boots of the modern game a remarkably light and boast a high range of features to help the player with their game. The modern boot compared to a boot from the 1800’s has an unusually similar design but utterly different features. As you can see from the pictures, both boots have a high ankle, a similar shape, and studs. However, it's the materials and features of a modern boot which makes it stand out. The modern boot has a mind-blowing amount of features. With the evolution of materials over time football boots can now be made out of synthetic fibers. In the modern boot, above you may be able to spot ridges on the front of the boot, these ridges are in place to aid the swerve of the ball and the curvature of the boot is like that so the player has an easier time of hitting the sweet spot on a ball. You may also notice that the boot has no laces and the studs are made out of a rubbery substance. These are all changes being made to further enhance a players performance. Boots now also do the thinking for us, the Adizero F50 miCoach is now recognized as ‘Boots with a Brain’. The boots have a built-in sensor and capture 360 movements recording the following things for the player; speed, average speed, maximum speed, number of sprints, distance covered, the distance at high-intensity levels and step and stride rates.
However, has this taken away from the skill of football? Boots are now doing things for us, things that we used to have to practice and perfect ourselves. A great example of this is the miCoach. We used to have to monitor our game ourselves and figure out what we were doing wrong which we could improve on. On we have boots which calculate the speed, power, and placement of our boot when we strike a ball. This allows us to improve becoming better than we ever could alone.
The next point I’d like to talk about is football pitches. Everyone who has played football can tell you that they’ve played on a pitch where the grass was long, the pitch itself was waterlogged and muddy and the all-around conditions were horrible. Professionals in the olden days would have this problem, muddy pitches, flooded pitches, hard ground the list goes on. Football games would be called off due to conditions being too bad and unsafe for players to play. Modern-day pitches have been worked on a lot, especially in the higher leagues of football. Teams like Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United, Real Madrid, Barcelona all have advanced pitches. What I mean by advanced pitches are pitches which have the technology to adapt to certain conditions to make the surface playable and safe.
In the early days of football pitches would not have any markings, the pitch was a rectangle patch of grass with two goals and sometimes a fence running around the outside to inform players where they could run up to and keep spectators from invading the pitch. As far as the grass was concerned, it was no more than a good looking bit of grass usually in a park. Everton Football Club was leading the way with innovations to the football field. In 1958 the clubs stadium (Goodison Park) installed about 20 miles of undersoil heating in their stadium, this cost the club around £16,000 to install and more at later dates to repair and improve.This heating system helps the pitch not to freeze over when playing on particularly cold days, this means the pitch doesn't become too hard and is a high-quality surface to play on.
In 2001 both FIFA and UEFA decided to start work on a quality assurance programme for the development of artificial turf. In 2010 4G pitches which stands for ‘4th Generation’ turn was introduced to football. This turf is a hybrid of artificial turf and normal grass, this allowed for longer use with minimal signs of wear and tear.
Pitches nowadays have all sorts of modern technology built into them. For example, Manchester City is putting huge amounts of money into their stadium and pitches to make the experience of football a better one for spectators and players. The Man City pitch has 4G turf, undersoil heating, and drainage systems. All these added together to create a pitch which can be played on no matter the conditions.
The piece of footballing equipment I’m going to talk about it is the most important piece of equipment, the football. Footballs, like boots, have come such a long way since football first began with the earliest balls being dated back to 255 BC in China. According to legend balls could have been anything from human heads to stitched up balls. Going a couple hundred years down the line to the 1800’s balls were being made out leather and had a more consistent shape and size, beforehand the size and shape would have been dependant on the pig's bladder. Moving into the 1900’s when balls seemed to start to evolve almost into what they’re today. By the 1900’s the insides of balls otherwise known as the bladder was now made of a strong rubber which could withstand heavier pressure, this meant that the ball could now be kicked harder without significant damage being dealt. These balls were good for kicking but terrible for heading the ball as the sticking which held the ball together was thick and tough therefore hurting the head on impact.
As the years went by footballs were tampered with and changed constantly trying to find the best way to build one. As technology advanced new materials were used and suddenly footballs were of much higher quality. Synthetic leather was now being used in hexagon-shaped panels around the ball. This meant the ball was now more consistent in its flight and bounce. These hexagons created ridges around the ball which now meant the ball could grip the air and curl with ease.
Footballs are constantly being changed to become better for players and the game itself. With modern laser technology footballs can be changed, molded, shaped, colored and monitored. New materials are also being experimented with, currently, footballs are made out of several layers of cotton or polyester and will usually have a latex rubber or butyl bladder. You may think that these are just materials used to create a ball but they’re much more. The materials used have been researched and chosen specifically as they are best suited. For example, the built up layers of polyester or cotton are for a cushioned strike of the ball for the comfort of the players. The layers and shape of the ball also help with how the ball floats and swings in the air.
Technology is also going into balls, like with the MiCoach boots, there is a MiCoach ball. This ball has a small chip inside of it which when turned on and monitored will tell you how fast it's traveling, how hard it been hit and if chosen how far it has traveled during a certain amount of time. The MiCoach however like it explains in the name is a computerised coach and will not do much during a game as it is not built for games its built for training. In matches like the MiCoach balls are now having chips added to them to help with officiating the game with extras like goal-line technology for instance.
Moving on from boots and continuing with officiating, technology has brought football a distance in terms of making the game a fairer one. Not too long ago football relied on nothing but the judgment of three men, the referee, and the linemen. Like everything in football, this all changed with an event in the 2010 world cup. In an England Germany match, Lampard shot at goal and the ball passed the line but the linesman was not in a good position to see and disallowed the goal. Since then companies and universities have spent countless hours researching to find ways in which they could implement technology to help to officiate. By 2014 a new technological advancement called goal-line technology was introduced.
The goal-line technology involves a wire with sensors connected to it to run around the goal posts, inside the football, there is a small chip and when chip passed the sensors the referee will get a message to his wristwatch saying ‘goal/no goal’. This was first tested in the 2014 world cup game between France and Honduras and has been growing in popularity ever since. However some people disapprove of it, some players and spectators say that it ruins the speed of football and slows everything down but it is argued that the split second it takes to find out if it is a goal or not is worth it in the name of the game and fairness.