Culture
Is Mikel Arteta right – do footballs really make a difference to performance?
This article was updated on January 9 to reflect the ball being used in Sunday’s FA Cup third round game between Arsenal and Manchester United.
Mikel Arteta was in no doubt.
Arsenal’s manager was dissecting a painful 2-0 home defeat against Newcastle United in Tuesday’s Carabao Cup semi-final first leg when — unprompted by any journalist in the room — he raised an unlikely issue that, he felt, helps explain his team’s inability to convert any of their 23 shots on the night into goals.
“We also kicked a lot of balls over the bar, and it’s tricky that these balls fly a lot, so there are details that we can do better,” Arteta said in the post-match press conference.
When asked to expand on his comments later, he added: “(The Carabao Cup ball) very different to a Premier League ball, and you have to adapt to that because it flies differently. When you touch it, the grip is also very different, so you adapt to that.”
Arsenal were certainly profligate, with Gabriel Martinelli, Kai Havertz and Jurrien Timber all spurning fine opportunities. But was the ball being used — the Orbita 1, made by German manufacturer Puma — really to blame?
Newcastle forwards Alexander Isak and Anthony Gordon seemed to have no issues with it as they converted their own side’s chances, and the ball hadn’t held Arsenal back in previous rounds in the competition, where they scored 11 goals in three games against Preston North End, Bolton Wanderers and Crystal Palace.
Arteta’s complaints were met with a sceptical response in many quarters, not least from the English Football League (EFL), which organises the Carabao Cup, English football’s No 2 cup competition after the FA Cup.
“In addition to the Carabao Cup, the same ball has been successfully used in other major European leagues, including both Serie A and La Liga and our three divisions in the EFL,” it said in a statement. “All clubs play with the same ball (in the competition), and we have received no further comments of this nature following any of the previous 88 fixtures which have taken place in this season’s Carabao Cup.”
Puma is yet to respond to The Athletic’s request for comment.
But was Arteta’s outburst so outlandish? There are, after all, two external factors (aside from the players) which materially affect the outcome of a football match — the pitch and the ball. It stands to reason, therefore, that any unexpected variation in either of those could potentially influence the outcome.
As Premier League clubs, Arsenal and Newcastle are used to training and playing with the Nike Flight ball. U.S. company Nike has supplied the footballs used in England’s top flight since the 2000-01 season, when it replaced British firm Mitre as ball manufacturer, and players have prepared for and played with its balls in league matches ever since. Occasionally, however, they are obliged to change.
Arsenal also feature in the Carabao Cup, FA Cup and Champions League this season, with a different ball (made by other manufacturers) used in each instance. In addition to Puma’s Orbita 1, Adidas supplies the balls for the Champions League and Mitre for the FA Cup.
On Thursday, it was confirmed that the ball being used in Sunday’s third-round tie with Manchester United at the Emirates Stadium would be a special gold edition of the Ultimax Pro model — a nod to United having won the competition last season.
Something for the winners… 🏆
As current holders of @EmiratesFACup 23/24 season, @ManUtd will play with this gold limited edition Ultimax Pro match ball in the 3rd round tie against Arsenal on Sunday.
Let’s see if they can take it all the way to the final… pic.twitter.com/LlekjNQAZh
— Mitre Sports (@MitreSports) January 9, 2025
Though they all have similar dimensions and are made from similar materials, slight alterations in design can make a marked difference.“The more ‘perfect’ a ball is, the more likely it is to be erratic,” says Justin Lea, founder of ball manufacturer Hayworth Athletic. “They all have their own personalities. If you look at the FIFA ball rules, there are ranges for everything. A ball can only retain a certain amount of water if a field is wet. There’s a range to the sphericity of the ball and the bounce of the ball.”
The game’s laws state a regulation size-5 ball must be 68-70cm (26.8-27.6in) in circumference and weigh between 410 and 450 grams (14-16 oz) at the start of the match. It must also be inflated to a pressure of 0.6-1.1 bars at sea level.
The Premier League is using the Nike Flight 2024 ball (Matt McNulty/Getty Images)
“There’s a certain amount of intuition with a ball,” says Lea. “The Brilliant Super from Select, for example, kind of goes where you want it to go. But the more ‘perfect’ a ball is, the more likely it is to be erratic. Some with thermal bonding technology and higher-end materials can get so spherical that the dynamics and the trajectory change. They can go in a lot of different directions.”
At the 2010 men’s World Cup in South Africa, it wasn’t just the honking sound of fans blowing vuvuzelas, a trumpet-like musical instrument, in the crowd that dominated discussion. Adidas’ now infamous Jabulani was also a hot topic, becoming arguably the most recognised and disputed ball in the sport’s modern history.
The Jabulani consisted of eight thermally bonded panels with a textured surface (named Grip ‘n’ Groove by Adidas), which were said to improve aerodynamics. For the players in that World Cup, however, it proved to be a nightmare, with goalkeepers and outfield players alike complaining about the balls swerving uncontrollably after being kicked.
“It’s sad that such an important competition has such an important element like this ball of appalling condition,” said Iker Casillas, whose Spain side would go on to win the final, in comments reported by the BBC. According to Brazilian news outlet O Globo, meanwhile, Brazil player Julio Cesar described it as “horrible” and like “the ones sold in supermarkets”.
Casillas did not like the 2010 World Cup’s Jabulani ball (Lluis Gene/AFP via Getty Images)
One of the most vehement opposers was former Liverpool midfielder Craig Johnston, who became an expert in the appliance of science to football equipment after his playing career ended and helped design the original Adidas Predator boot. In a 12-page letter of complaint to world football governing body FIFA’s then president Sepp Blatter that was acquired by UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph, Johnston wrote, “Whoever is responsible for this should be taken out and shot for crimes against football.”
The general contemporary opinion surrounding the Jabulani was that it was not fit for purpose, but it was not universally disliked.
Clint Dempsey, who sneaked a shot under goalkeeper Rob Green’s body to equalise in the USMNT’s 1-1 group-stage draw with England, said in a pre-tournament press conference reported by FOX Sports: “If you just hit it solid, you can get a good knuckle on the ball… you’ve just got to pay a little bit more attention when you pass the ball sometimes.”
It also provided former Uruguay and Manchester United striker Diego Forlan with his defining tournament.
His former national-team colleague Diego Abreu told Uruguayan outlet El Futbolero in 2020 that Forlan got Adidas to send him a Jabulani three months before the World Cup started, and that he would practise shooting and taking free kicks with it. As it transpired, Forlan finished as the tournament’s joint-top scorer, with his five goals helping Uruguay reach the semi-finals. Such was his mastery of the Jabulani, he also left South Africa with the Goal of the Tournament award and the Golden Ball, presented to whoever gets voted the competition’s best player.
Forlan practised extensively with a Jabulani before the 2010 World Cup (Rodrigo Arangua/AFP via Getty Images)
The Jabulani remains possibly the most extreme modern example of a football’s effect on the quality and trajectory of a shot, and it’s unlikely we will see an outlier like that again. Still, many players feel noticeable differences when switching between different makes of balls even 15 years later.
“When I went to the Premier League, and I started playing with the Nike ones compared to the Mitre balls in the Championship, I found they felt so much lighter,” says former Reading and Cardiff City striker Adam Le Fondre. “I felt like I was going to get a bit more movement with it.
“Mitre balls were more like cannonballs. They wouldn’t move or deviate off plan — they’d act in a straight manner. As a striker, you might want to get a bit more of a wobble on it, or even if you don’t connect with it well, the Nike ball in the Premier League might still have gone in. They gave me a little bit more help.”
It’s not just in football this happens, either.
In October, Los Angeles Lakers head coach JJ Redick complained about using new basketballs instead of already broken-in ones in the NBA.
“I’m gonna send in a request for the league tomorrow that we play with worn-in basketballs,” Redick, who previously spent 15 seasons in the NBA as a player, told various outlets in a post-match press conference. “I’m not sure why we can play in real games with brand-new basketballs. Anybody who has ever touched an NBA ball brand new — it has a different feel and touch than a worn-in basketball.”
Lakers head coach Redick was unhappy at using new basketballs rather than worn-in ones (Sam Hodde/Getty Images)
At the beginning of the 2021-22 season, the NBA switched its ball manufacturer from Spalding to Wilson, which was cited as one of the reasons for a slump in shooting percentages across the league. “It’s just a different basketball. It doesn’t have the same touch and softness the Spalding ball had,” said Philadelphia 76ers forward Paul George in a post-match press conference. “You’ll see a lot of bad misses this year. You’ve seen a lot of airballs (shots that miss the hoop, net and even backboard entirely). Again, not to make an excuse or put any blame on the basketball, but it is different.”
It wasn’t long before players became accustomed to the different feel of the Wilson balls, and shooting percentages rose again. Still, it highlights how minor differences can affect elite athletes who are familiar with a particular piece of equipment.
Arsenal used the Puma Orbita 1 in training on Monday during the short turnaround between their 1-1 Premier League draw with Brighton on Saturday and the meeting with Newcastle (who have had extra time to get used to the Puma ball, as they entered this season’s Carabao Cup one round earlier than Arsenal, due to the latter getting a bye having qualified for Europe). But, judging by his comments, Arteta must surely be wondering if he should roll them out sooner in preparation for the decisive second leg at St James’ Park on February 5.
Besides, any extra time his players get with those balls could serve as Forlan-like preparation for next season — Puma has a deal to be the official football supplier to the Premier League from 2025-26 onwards.
(Top photos: Arteta and the controversial Orbita 1; Getty Images)
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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