It has been the practice, ever since 1970, for a new ball, with a new name, to be introduced for each World Cup. Adidas has been the manufacturer throughout, and they evidently do a terrific job with their research and development.

We have now arrived at their 10th World Cup ball, the one that will be used next year in Germany. It is called the Teamgeist, the Teamspirit.

I have seen the ball, and I have read the blurb … and I have a problem. Not with the Teamgeist, which I am confident will perform as reliably as Adidas says it will. My problem is with the blurb, with the scientific – though I’m convinced that most of it is pseudo-scientific – overkill that always accompanies the birth of a new ball.

That a new ball is going to be “better” than its predecessors seems quite likely, given the rapid rate of technological advances. But how does one prove that?

In 2000, Nike came up with the GeoMerlin ball for use in the English Premier League, a 32-panel ball that, it was claimed, retained its “roundness” under all conditions. Very likely it did, but in that same year another manufacturer, Penalty, produced a ball called the World Stability for use in the Argentine league. Forget about roundness and 32 panels. This one had only 12 panels and “with fewer panels and seams it offers less aerodynamic resistance and when kicked travels up to 12% faster than regular balls.”

Possibly it did, but by then one’s suspicions about these claims had been sharpened. For the 1990 World Cup, Adidas gave us the Etrusco, which was said to be “more lively and faster than ever,” a claim that didn’t look too good after the World Cup, which turned out to be anything but lively and culminated in the worst final – Germany beat Argentina 1-0 on a penalty kick – in recent memory. The 1990 World Cup also recorded the lowest goal-scoring – a 2.21 goals-per-game average – in the tournament’s 60-year history.

As I recall, no one blamed the ball for the poor play in 1990, but it is a matter of record that manufacturers repeatedly make claims that their products – balls, shoes, shirts – will improve a player’s performance. Shirts? Oh yes: when Nike provided the American team with its uniforms in 2004, it did not simply supply a shirt, it “engineered” one that “enhances performance, while players do not even notice they are wearing it.” All done scientifically by having “key sections of shirt bonded together using an innovative Zero Distraction seam technology.”

This use of elaborate scientific-sounding terminology runs much further amok with the soccer balls. It started with the 1990 Etrusco. Four years later came the Questra, for which Adidas switched from black polyurethane to white polyethylene foam, employed in an “ultra-high-energy-return layer.”

By 1998, for the World Cup in France, the new Tricolore ball featured “an advanced syntactic foam layer – a tight regular matrix composed of gas-filled, individually closed and highly durable micro-balloons.”

Nike upped the scientific stakes in 2000 when it boasted of “five layers of casing material [and] a six-winged carbon latex bladder” in its GeoMerlin ball.

Back came Adidas in 2002 with the Fevernova, featuring a “three-layer knitted chassis,” and claims that it was the “most accurate ball ever made.” Maybe, replied Manchester United’s French international defender Mikael Silvestre, but “no one likes this new ball, especially not the goalkeepers.” Belgium’s goalkeeper coach said the ball was too light and “took goalkeepers by surprise.”

The idea that goalkeepers will suffer the most – with the implied corollary that scoring will increase – crops up repeatedly, but is never borne out. The 2002 World Cup, complete with Fevernova, averaged 2.52 goals per game – actually down from 2.67 in 1998.

I recall watching a documentary in 2003 in which an Adidas scientist (wearing the obligatory white lab coat) talked of the Roteiro ball, to be used in the Euro-2004 championship. When he’d finished explaining the ball’s “innovative carcass technology”, he launched into an amazing series of predictions – that the ball would create more goal-scoring chances, that we’d see more goals, that players would want to practice their skills more, and so on.

Players were duly paraded praising the new ball. David Beckham said he’d noticed that, with the Roteiro, “my free kicks have improved … it’s going to be a great ball to play with. Goalkeepers are going to have a very tough time.”

Note that Beckham is under contract to Adidas, and that other players found the Roteiro decidedly short of perfection: “It’s hard to believe they can call this a ball,” scoffed Spanish winger Joaquin, while Real Madrid’s Ivan Helguera said “it was like a beach ball.”

In the end, the players’ opinions counted for little. Euro 2004 produced an average of 2.48 goals per game, and again the figure was down, from the 2.74 average of Euro 2000. So the technically superior ball produced fewer goals. But who noticed? No one ever blames such faults on the ball.

And so to the Teamgeist, which features “a revolutionary 14-panel ball configuration.” It has been exhaustively tested at the Adidas soccer laboratory in Scheinfeld – tests that included being repeatedly kicked by a high-tech robotic leg which “can repeat an identical kick” time and again.

Again, I cannot help but be impressed by all the lab work and the testing, but I remain steadfastly skeptical about the extravagant claims. Beckham has embarrassing cause to regret his praise of Roteiro ’04: “I can rely on the ball to go exactly where I want it to go.” It was in Euro 2004 that Beckham missed a crucial penalty kick, sending the ball soaring way over the bar.

Possibly Beckham has learned the hard way – so far, all he has had to say about the Teamgeist is that “it’s been good in training.” Adidas is also adopting a low-key approach – claims of higher scoring and tales of terrified goalkeepers have yet to be heard.

Which is just as well. Teamgeist got its first live test on December 10 in a French first division game between St. Etienne and Lyon. The final score was 0-0.

pgardner@nysun.com