SCIENCE BEHIND “IMPOSSIBLE” FREEKICK BY ROBERTO CARLOS

In 1997, in a game between France and Brazil, a young Brazilian player named Roberto Carlos set
up for a 35 meter free kick. With no direct line to the goal, Carlos decided to attempt the seemingly
impossible. His kick sent the ball flying wide of the players, but just before going out of bounds, it
hooked to the left and soared into the goal.

According to Newton's first law of motion, an object will move in the same direction and velocity until a force is applied
on it. When Carlos kicked the ball, he gave it direction and velocity, but what force made the ball swerve and score one of the
most magnificent goals in the history of the sport?

The trick was in the spin. Carlos placed his kick at the lower right corner of the ball, sending it
high and to the right, but also rotating around its axis. The ball started its flight in an apparently direct
route, with air flowing on both sides and slowing it down. On one side, the air moved in the opposite
direction to the ball's spin, causing increased pressure, while on the other side, the air moved in the
same direction as the spin, creating an area of lower pressure. That difference made the ball curve towards the lower pressure
zone. This phenomenon is called the Magnus effect. This type of kick, often referred to as a banana kick, is attempted
regularly, and it is one of the elements that make the beautiful game beautiful. But curving the ball with the precision needed to
both bend around the wall and back into the goal is difficult. The same physics make it possible to score another apparently
impossible goal, an unassisted corner kick.

The Magnus effect was first documented by Sir Isaac Newton after he noticed it while playing
a game of tennis back in 1670. It also applies to golf balls and baseballs. In every case, the same thing
happens. The ball's spin creates a pressure differential in the surrounding air flow that curves it in the
direction of the spin.

And here's a question. Could you theoretically kick a ball hard enough to make it boomerang all the way around back
to you?

Sadly, no. Even if the ball didn't disintegrate on impact, or hit any obstacles, as the air
slowed it, the angle of its deflection would increase, causing it to spiral into smaller and smaller
circles until finally stopping. And just to get that spiral, you'd have to make the ball spin over

15 times faster than Carlos's immortal kick. So good luck with that .
The knuckleball is a phenomenon that has been utilized in many sports including baseball, football, cricket and
volleyball .It's random flights through the air seems to defy our common understanding of projectiles and if you want to
find out more about how these shots can even exist in the first place keep reading.

The term itself comes from the way in which the baseball is thrown off the knuckles. The slow yet deceptive way
of throwing the ball is designed to put batters off due to the random course which the ball can take through the air and this
technique was taken up in football for exactly the same reason. Its erratic path through the air means it is hard shot to
safe in. As I mentioned at the start, it's not just baseball and football that have adopted this technique but also cricket,
volleyball and even tennis so what's going on with the knuckleball and why is it used in so many sports

To shoot a knuckleball you need to impart very little or no spin at all onto the ball when you kick it. First consider
the case where it keeps the ball with spin we see that to get the ball spinning we need to apply a torque to the ball which
is equal to the force produced multiplied by the perpendicular distance from the ball center of mass. If we hit the ball even
further to the right we would apply an even greater torque to the ball as the distance has increased. However we want to
keep the ball in such a way that we apply zero torque to it meaning that the foot has to travel in a line of motion that goes
through the center of mass of the ball. This is why you're often told to hit the ball slightly below the center as this is the
point at which the ball will not spin once kicked. It is tricky to pull off due to the accuracy you need to hit the ball with and
also dues the irregular shape of your foot.

This still doesn't explain the stochastic nature of the balls flights when it has no spin. Though we are very used to
shots with backspin or topspin being very stable in their side-to-side motion, but can curl down or hang in the air longer.
So surely a non rotating ball will be stable in both of these axes, however we know that this is not true and to explain it we
need to delve into the wonderful world of fluid dynamics.

Fluid dynamics is the study of how fluids interact with moving objects. Fluids can be liquids or gases However it
can also be applied to the flight of a sphere through air and this is what we will be studying to reveal any answers the air
itself may hide. For a random flight through the air, we would expect to a random change in turbulence and pressure
behind the ball as it moves, which would induce a change in the direction of the ball. The reason as to why these random
forces arise is at the heart of the knuckleball problem and it could be down to the composition of the ball itself. If you
consider a baseball you will see that this is not a truly round sphere but has loads of seams all over it. These seams will
interact with the air in a different way to the smoother panels covering it and so will give a different flow of air this could
lead to a random change in turbulence behind the ball especially if it is rotating slowly which would cause up a change in
the airflow around the ball. In fact if you add the effects of the seams and the different orientation of the ball this could be
enough to give the required random air flow and hence random flights of the ball.

This is an argument has been used to explain the knuckleball effects for some time but it does have one major
issue with it. You see the same theory is all well and good when describing baseballs but if you now turn your attention to
a football you'll see that it's much smoother than a baseball, in fact the 2010 World Cup ball the Jabulani was much
smoother than anything else previously made and was observed to have a very large knuckle effect.
 So what's going on here how smoother spheres can create more turbulence than seams on a baseball? To start
with I'd like to state that the baseball and football can't be directly compared to due to their differences in size. But the
point still remains the same, smooth footballs can randomly move from side to side during their flight. If you're still
skeptical the knuckle effects can be observed using a table tennis ball and even with perfectly smooth marbles being
dropped into water

This effect was studied in depth in a paper from 2016 and the results are truly remarkable. First these two key
terms need to introduce in fluid dynamics streamline flow and turbulent flow. Streamline flow can be thought of as the
smooth flow of fluid around an object where the flow can be divided up into many parallel layers. On the other hand
turbulent flow can be thought of as a chaotic process in which the fluid flow around an object results in erratic changes of
pressure and velocity. Now what the researchers verified was that something special happens at a point known as the
drag crisis and this is the point at which the drag force for a sphere dramatically decreases with an increase in speed. As
we normally think of drag force being proportional to an object's velocity squared, what's happening is that the flow of air
around sphere is going from streamline flow to turbulent which gives a decrease in drag force. The drag crisis for a rough
surface occurs at a lower speed than for a smooth sphere. Further the underlying mechanics of why the drag force
decreases is to do with the boundary layer of air which increases the surface of an object.

To explain the knuckle effects that we can glean from the boundary layer theory. The boundary layer is a thin film
of air which encases any objects moving through air and is the reason why your car can remain dusty even after a drive.
The boundary layer of air where the dust sits is stationary, so it doesn't move the dust at all. At the drag crisis of sphere,
the boundary layer is subject to intermittent reattachment to the ball giving aside with streamline flow and aside with
turbulent flow. This process is random and so either side can be turbulent at any one given point is this constant
detachment and reattachment of the boundary layer which generates random turbulence either side of the pool and since
turbulent air has a low of pressure than the streamline flow of air. On the other side the ball is pushed in this direction. An
instant later the boundary layer may separate on the other side and the ball will be pushed the other way this
phenomenon was the main subjects of the paper and to investigate it they used a motorized rotating metal plates to
launch a ball with no rotation.

Interesting fact from this paper was that as the drag crisis occurs at a given speed for a certain ball this will affects
the velocity at which the ball is projected in different sports giving optimum values of speed for that given ball.

Ball Velocity req foe drag crisis

Baseball 28 - 36 m/s

Football 20 - 25 m/s

So to conclude, it seems that there are two ways in which the knuckleball effects can be achieved by using a ball
with seams on it but also due to the drag crisis phenomena. Both of these methods combined gives an overall effect
which has been deployed by sports people with huge success and will remain a completely unpredictable shots in its