Beckham in for a surprise on Mars

Putting spin on a ball would send it swerving the wrong way on the red planet.

21 February 2003

If a future interplanetary soccer competition is held on Mars, even David Beckham will struggle to bend the ball into the net, a new study suggests. Swedish physicists have found that a spinning ball would swerve in the opposite direction to the way it goes on Earth in the low-pressure atmosphere of the red planet.

Beckham confirmed his position as a master of football physics when he curled a free kick into the Greek goal to propel England into the 2002 World Cup finals. Baseball fans know the same phenomenon as the curveball. Cricket, table tennis and golf players put spin on their balls to make them swerve. And Isaac Newton realized that spin is the crucial ingredient, by watching the tennis balls served by some seventeenth-century Andre Agassi.

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