Universities need help to study leather football performance
The Institute for Creative Leather Technologies (ICLT) at the University of Northampton are working with a research team at Loughborough University Sports Technology Institute and the Football Association (FA) to accurately reproduce leather footballs from the past.
The research team at Loughborough aim to reproduce balls from across the last century as accurately as possible, to assess the performance of the leather balls against their modern synthetic counterparts.
However, as PhD student Ieuan Phillips explains, there is a stumbling block… “no one in the project team has any of the original recipes that were used to manufacture the leather. Technical specifications for the balls exist (size, weight etc), but no specification or recipe for the leather itself.”
Prof. Will Wise continues “ICLT is ideally positioned to make the small batches of leather for Loughborough, but understandably we need to be as close to history as we can be, and this is very difficult without a recipe to follow or specification to meet.”
The project team are interested in anyone from the industry who might have a leather recipe and/or specification that they would be willing to share with the team. Ideally it would be useful to know what decade that recipe/specification was from so that the research team can correlate the results.
Anyone that can help please contact Professor Will Wise at the ICLT.
Photo by Call Me Fred on Unsplash
