How Can Soccer Players Bend Their Shots in Midair?

We need one more thing – how about Newton Second Law? It says that acceleration depends on the net force (F_Net) and mass (m) of an object. It is usually written like this F_Net = m × aBut we can rearrange it like this: a=f_Net/m. Combining this with our own gravitational force, we get something interesting:

Courtesy of Rat Allen

Since gravity and acceleration both depend on the mass of the ball, mass cancels out. We find that the downward acceleration of any object on Earth is 9.8 meters per second per second (m/s)²). This means that if you drop a bowling ball and a marble at the same time, they will fall to the ground at the same time – even though the force of gravity on the bowling ball is thousands of times greater. Strange isn’t it?

Anyway, now, in the presence of gravity, if you kick a ball at an upward angle, its vertical velocity will slow down, stop and reverse, and speed up as it falls. In other words, as soon as you kick, it begins to accelerate in a downward direction, even while moving upward.

What about horizontal motion? Ah, since there is no horizontal force after the initial kick, the ball continues to move at the same speed through space. People think that the ball falls because its forward motion slows down, but it is actually the opposite. Without the drag of the air it doesn’t slow down at all. It stops only because the ground gets in the way.

So what we get for the trajectory is the familiar inverted parabola, often called a ballistic trajectory because it is the path of any unpowered projectile, such as a cannonball, bullet, or basketball. Any flying object for which gravity is the only (significant) force acting on it will move in this manner.

football with the wind

It is a matter of happiness that there is air on earth. But this changes the game to a great extent. now there Is A constant force acting horizontally is what we call air resistance or drag, and it pushes in the direction opposite to the ball’s motion.

Think of air molecules as a collection of tiny ping-pong balls. As a soccer ball moves through the air, it collides with a multitude of these smaller air balls, and each collision exerts a backward force; Taken together, this makes up the total air-resistance force. The larger the object, the more collisions it has to contend with.