It wasn't until 1855, when Charles Goodyear patented vulcanized rubber, that soccer balls started taking shape. Literally.

Most people know that a traditional soccer ball is black and white and that the black and white panels are in a pattern. You might even know that there are 32 total panels on a traditional soccer ...

Mark Wright, editor-in-chief, Soccer jr. magazine: You mean the black-and-white hexagons and pentagons? That's them. Maybe they ran out of triangles. Uh-huh. Get Answer Guy: The Book, with a ...

Mathematics suggests a variety of alternative designs for soccer balls. ... are colored black and the hexagons white. ... can be sewn together to produce a ball with 96 pentagons and 160 hexagons.

Picture a soccer ball and the image that comes to mind is probably a sphere made up of 32 smooth panels – 12 black pentagons and 20 white hexagons. But this conventional ball is oh so passe. In ...

Following is a transcript of the video. The typical soccer ball looks like this. Black and white with a bunch of these panels. But that's not what the World Cup balls look like.

Legendary Bayern Munich coach Jupp Heynckes once described the soccer ball as, "along with boots, ... the Telstar ball was formed of 12 black pentagons and 20 white hexagons, ...