While early soccer balls were constructed in a number of ways, a fairly stadard 32-panel ball was designed by Danish national team goalkeeer Eigil Nielsen in 1962. This was followed by the introduction of the Adidas Telstar ball in 1970 based on a truncated icosahedron with white hexagons surrounding black pentagons. This style was soon widely adopted and has become the iconic ball shape and style for the game.
In more recent years, various designs are now used, including many that are custom-designed for a particular national league or international tournament. For example, the Adidas Jabulani ball (whose underlying structure is the Jabulani polyhedron) was used at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, and the Adidas Conext 21 ball (whose underlying structure is the Conext 21 polyhedron) were used at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games (held in 2021).
