With eight months until the 2026 World Cup, the tournament’s official match ball is here.
Adidas on Thursday unveiled its latest creation, named “Trionda,” which will take center stage across 104 World Cup fixtures in North America next year. Intentionally designed to pay homage to the World Cup’s three host nations, the ball is also the brand’s most technically advanced ball ever.
A hologram of the ball was draped against the New York City skyline in Brooklyn on Thursday night during an elaborate launch event hosted by Adidas. The international sports brand, like others in the space, is slowly beginning to build momentum as the largest World Cup ever rapidly approaches.
Adidas invited The Athletic to Brooklyn to give us a first look at the Trionda, which took more than 3.5 years to design. It levels up the brand’s Connected Ball Technology first used for its “Al Rihla” ball at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
“Moving from what we did in Qatar, from a performance perspective, was very progressive, and moving that on was also really important,” Sam Handy, general manager at Adidas Football told The Athletic. “Making it work better and making it really express the cultural opportunity for football in the market also made it a very complex and interesting project.”
Here’s everything you need to know about the official World Cup match ball.
Ball design pays homage to three host-nations
“Trionda” stands for three (tri) waves (onda). The ball’s design features a red, green and blue design to represent the World Cup’s trio of host nations, Canada, Mexico and the U.S. There is also iconography significant to each country featured throughout the ball – a star for the U.S., a maple leaf for Canada and an eagle for Mexico.
These icons are displayed loudly in graphics splashed across the ball’s panel designs and are also more subtly embossed onto its matte base. The ball also features a subtle nod to the World Cup trophy, with gold embellishments detailed throughout.
The Trionda will be in action when the tournament kicks off next summer. (Photo courtesy of Adidas)
This is considered one of the brightest balls Adidas has ever created, Handy said. That’s a far cry from Adidas’ first World Cup ball in 1970, which featured the classic black-and-white color pattern with iconic hexagon shapes throughout.
The “trionda” also features a brand new four-panel ball construction with “intentionally deep seams and strategically placed debossed lines.” This, Adidas says, creates optimal in-flight stability by allowing sufficient and evenly distributed drag as it travels through the air.
This is the most advanced ball ever made by Adidas
This official match ball also carries the newest version of Adidas’ Connected Ball Technology with a new mounted chip system. It features a 500Hz inertial measurement unit (IMU) motion sensor chip that sits inside a specifically created layer in one of the ball’s four panels, as opposed to the center-mounted system in previous designs.
“A couple of years ago, you would have been called mad if you wanted to place a chip inside a ball and still make it playable,” Hannes Schaefke, football Innovation lead at Adidas, told The Athletic. “We introduced the technology in ‘22, so there is some experience that we could build upon.”
The ball technology is designed to send precise ball data to the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) system in real time, which can help quicken the pace of a match by providing referees with more information to help make faster decisions for calls like offsides. The technology can also help match officials identify each individual touch of the ball.
“One of our key focuses was helping referees make the right decisions and make them as fast as possible,” Schaefke said, “because any sort of VAR moment in the modern game is a bit of a disrupt, right, because, as a ref, you need to step outside and need to look at the situation. Offsite decision is one example.”
There’s also the issue of handballs detection. Schaefke said, “That is another thing, where you basically enable a black or white decision-making – yes or no – through this tech, which is unthinkable if you look at past tournaments. (It) might have been quite helpful, depending on how you look at it in the past.”
This advanced technology is, as Schaefke described, “the heartbeat of the ball now.”
How does Adidas test the ball? It’s a years-long process
The 3.5-year process to design this ball included various rounds of trial and error, with Handy saying hundreds to thousands of footballers tested the technology throughout its development process.
Solène Störmann, global category director of football hardware, described to The Athletic the various conditions the ball was tested in, with precision and in-flight stability two of biggest factors they considered. They tested the ball in different altitudes, and even across several host cities. It was tested in different temperatures to make sure the technology worked no matter the conditions. This was important, considering the various climates where World Cup matches will be played next year.
“We can simulate some things also in us in the lab, but you also have to validate through the real world and going to the location,” Störmann said. “So, we went to seven out of the 16 host locations to test it, and this is actually how we wanted to get our proof points.”
Lionel Messi led a collection of World Cup legends as part of the ball’s official release. (Photo courtesy of Adidas)
Adidas also has robots in their labs designed to kick balls at various speeds and strengths, including shots at an unrealistic 200 kilometers per hour, Schaefke said. This helps designers track the ball’s precision and accuracy. There was also extensive testing by real-life human players, including blind tests to determine whether players noticed any difference from balls with or without their advanced chip technology.
The testing is “to make sure from a durability standpoint, this new construction, of that connected technology, really withstands any given situation,” Schaefke said. “But the fun stuff was, actually, the player validation piece, because. we wanted to make sure no players ever are able to notice any or any of those differences, and this is where we basically applied also psychologically scientific approach and blind test studies.”
The ball’s real test will come during the next round of World Cup qualifiers, when the ball will be officially launched for use during matches next week.
“The rest of the international qualifiers will be playing with that match ball,” Handy said, “It is the thing that binds everything together, right? You can’t play the game without that match ball. It’s in the center of every goal, every pass, every save. It will be the center of the camera at every moment. It’s the most visible thing in the tournament.”
And, very soon, it will be the center of every conversation heading into 2026.
-Melanie Anzidei
What do we think of the ball, personally?
When you’re a young child in the UK, often the first type of footballs you will play with are called ‘flyaways’: they’re cheap, made of a rubbery plastic, bouncy, very light and usually come in a range of bright, primary colours.
The Trionda looks like three flyaways mushed together, a ball that has presumably cost stacks of money to research, design and manufacture, but that ultimately resembles something you’d find in a giant netted basket in a discount sports store. Dolly Parton once said, “it costs a lot to look this cheap”: she could have been talking about the Trionda.
Part of the problem is the attempt to represent Canada, Mexico and the United States equally, leading to the bold red, green and blue, which brings to mind that old saying about a camel being a horse designed by committee. This is a ball designed to incorporate three countries because it’s no longer viable for a single association to host the World Cup unless they’re a petro state with unlimited funds, so all three need to have some sort of prominent representation, which has contributed to it looking like something you’d give to a four-year-old. Admittedly, as idioms go, it probably needs to be snappier.
Kylian Mbappe found the 2022 World Cup ball to his liking. (Jack Guez / AFP via Getty Images)
But aside from the snark, there is a potential problem with this design.
The one thing that every World Cup ball since 1970 – and most footballs generally, for that matter – have in common is that they’re predominantly white. Or if not white, predominantly a single bright color that makes it easy to see as it moves at speed, something that will make it stand out against the background: the pitch, the night sky and probably most importantly a crowd. This isn’t that: it’s mainly three different and individually bold colours that, as it is spinning through the air, will probably look like a non-specific, blurred dark color.
There’s usually some sort of controversy about World Cup balls, often originating with goalkeepers: it’s too light, it behaves unpredictably, unsporting forwards keep kicking it past them, that sort of thing. An early prediction this time is that players will complain that the Trionda is more difficult to pick up against multi-colored backgrounds.
In some respects, it looks quite nice… as something to be put on a shelf and just looked at. As something that will have to be used to play football with… maybe not so much.
-Nick Miller
(Top photo: Melanie Anzidei)
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