In medieval times the parental rebuke "stop playing with your food" could be taken a little more literally: long before the creation of the Football League in 1888 footballers were partial to playing keepy-up with a hog's head.

Historians also reported that hundreds of years ago victorious English soldiers used the skulls of fallen enemy in their post-battle football games (cue morbid cries of "on me 'ead son").

The first properly made ball was simply a pig or sheep's bladder, inflated by good old fashioned lung power and knotted at the end. A leather casing would then be fitted around the bladder to provide durability. The resulting ball was rounder than a rugby ball, although still far from spherical. It was the invention of an india-rubber bladder in 1862, along with a pump to inflate it, which meant that a round ball which retained its shape could be easily produced.

The football changed relatively little in the first half of the 1900s. The basic structure of a rubber bladder cased within stitched leather panels remained. The main problem with the design was found out by the persistent wet weather in Britain. Even when treated with liberal amounts of dubbin, balls would quickly become waterlogged and more than double in weight. A player literally risked his neck going up for a header (indeed, Billy McPhail, who played for Celtic in the 1950s, claimed in court two years ago that his pre-senile dementia was caused by repeatedly heading sodden, old-style leather footballs).

The first completely non-leather ball appeared in the 1960s, but Fifa preferred leather, albeit with a fully waterproof coating, for World Cups until Mexico 1986, when the synthetic Adidas Azteca was used.

Now that football involves such huge levels of financial investment, even the balls themselves are big business . Manufacturers no longer permit them to be thought of as a plain old bladder in a bag. The latest generation of balls have sleek, go-faster names like Nike Geo Catalyst and Adidas Equipment Terrestra Silverstream.

High-tech tests are carried out to gauge their performance. Scientific jargon worthy of NASA is used to market them: Premium carbon latex 6-wing bladder (Nike); Micro fibre compuste layers with Pre Lamine, Toyo ink printing (Reebok); Gas filled micro-balloons of equal size and equal distance apart using Syntactic foam (Adidas): All a long, long way from 'Lillywhite's No.5', the first football ever used by the Football Association.