The World Cup ball, edition by edition: from Telstar to Trionda
The 1970 Telstar, with its black-and-white panels designed for television, began a saga that reaches the four-panel Trionda of 2026.
The ball is the silent protagonist of every World Cup, and its design tells the tournament's story too. The first that adidas made for a World Cup was the Telstar, at Mexico 1970: 32 panels, 12 black pentagons and 20 white hexagons, a pattern designed to show up better on the black-and-white televisions of the era. Its name honoured the Telstar satellite.
From there a saga was born. The Tango family dominated from 1978 to 1998 with its elegant «triad» design, while the 1986 Azteca was the first fully synthetic World Cup ball.
Innovation accelerated in the 21st century: the 2006 +Teamgeist introduced heat-bonded, seamless panels. But no ball caused as much fuss as the Jabulani at South Africa 2010: its unpredictable flight drew a storm of criticism from goalkeepers and strikers — Iker Casillas called it «a horrible ball» and Gianluigi Buffon «shameful» — to the point that NASA analysed its behaviour.
Then came the Brazuca (2014), the Telstar 18 (2018, already with a chip inside) and Qatar 2022's Al Rihla, fitted with technology to assist VAR with real-time data.
The 2026 ball is the Trionda, whose name blends «tri» and «onda» (wave) in a nod to the three host nations. With just four panels — the fewest ever at a World Cup — and iconography for each venue, it represents the technological and symbolic leap of the first three-country World Cup.
Source: Wikipedia (Adidas Telstar; Adidas Jabulani; Adidas Al Rihla; Adidas Trionda).