This substantially increased the drag on the ball, which made it slow down even more. This enabled the sideways Magnus force, which was bending the ball towards the goal, to come even more into effect. Assuming that the amount of spin had not decayed too much, then the drag coefficient increased. This introduced an even larger sideways force and caused the ball to bend further. Current research into football motion There is more to football research than simply studying the motion of the ball in flight.
Researchers are also interested in finding out how a footballer actually kicks a ball.
For example, Stanley Plagenhof of the University of Massachusetts in the US has studied the kinematics of kicking - in other words, ignoring the forces involved. Other researchers, such as Elizabeth Roberts and co-workers at the University of Wisconsin, have done dynamic analyses of kicking, taking the forces involved into account. These experimental approaches have produced some excellent results, although many challenges still remain. One of the most critical problems is the difficulty of measuring the physical motion of humans, partly because their movements are so unpredictable. However, recent advances in analysing motion with computers have attracted much attention in sports science, and, with the help of new scientific methods, it is now possible to make reasonably accurate measurements of human motion.