My first encounter with the Adidas Tango soccer ball came in the late 1980s, when I was just a stupid tiny person who thought the coolest part about soccer was that you got to wear “shields” on your shins and eat free oranges. Due to a scheduling conflict, I’d arrived extremely early for my game and found a soccer ball sitting to the side of the field. It was soft and made of real leather and looked and felt infinitely cooler than the black-and-white spotted balls made of saran wrap and sheet metal that I was used to playing with. On it was the name of a partner dance that rose in popularity during the end of the 19th century along the Argentina/Uruguay border, although I didn’t know that at the time, because my parents didn’t yet trust me with maps.

But just as I was about to show everyone how skilled I was at toeing this amazing Latin dance ball in indiscriminate directions, a coach came over and took it from me. “That isn’t for you,” I remember him saying. “That’s for the older, good players.” And though he probably could’ve just said “older kids” and gotten his point across without destroying my nascent fragile self-confidence, the fact remained with me: First you achieved greatness. Then you got to Tango.

The Adidas Tango soccer ball, created for the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, is inarguably the greatest, most iconic soccer ball ever made. Its elegant, handsome style—that interlocking triad design creating seven circles within the overall sphere—was a revelation at a time when most of the soccer balls had opted for the black-and-white “Buckminster” archetype, named after an American architect who discovered the design while trying to construct buildings using as few materials as possible. The Tango was not only made of real leather but coated in that shiny Durlast waterproofing, and it was so expensive (50 pounds at the time, or 250 pounds nowadays) that purchasing it actually meant something. Namely, that you were to be taken seriously. Or just really rich.

But now that we know the apex of the World Cup soccer ball pyramid, what, as they say in that 2000 Robert Zemeckis film starring Harrison Ford, lies beneath? In order to find out, I polled soccer friends, pro players, and a Dutch guy who claims he knew Arjen Robben as a teenager. Then I ignored their opinions and ranked every other Adidas World Cup ball ever used according to my own whims. So here they are, from worst to second best:

12. Fevernova (Korea/Japan 2002)

For one, this was the first WC ball in 24 years that didn’t feature the Tango style and instead opted for some sort of “Asian-culture inspired” design that looked like what a triangle looks like if you’re on hallucinogens, so that was strike one. Two, Adidas added to it “a refined syntactic foam layer for a more precise flight path”, which ended up making the ball extremely light and behave—as Italy’s Gianluigi Buffon famously put it—like “a ridiculous kiddie’s bouncing ball.” Strike three was that ridiculous name, Fevernova, which sounds like a Marvel comic superhero whose special powers involve elevating his body temperature and getting tested at the hospital for Kawasaki disease. Not a great ball.