A similarly provocative tactic with Dean Lokes, VP of Product, as he talked me through the history of Adidas footballs that have been at the centre of it all ever since the Telstar debuted at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. It soon became the 32-panelled black-and-white definitive symbol of what a football should look like, or at least, what it looks like in American high-school movie’s requisite soccer practice scene.
Look on your phone and you will see the Telstar, a relic of the past coming to grips with the future, the ball named after the world’s first communications satellite and designed to stand out on colourless television sets, a hieroglyphic now an emoji.
It lives on in the flesh too as the Telstar 18 embellishes the thirsty pitches in Russia, its pentagons pixelated blurs at the edges, shapes without a name, and its seams completely eradicated for something close to perfect seamlessness. No signs of its construction must be shown, as though the thing had just dropped from the sky, an orb from the future.
But without the casing it looked like mummified plaster-cast of a past version, not a Russian doll but a Russian doll's football. A re-replication of the past, a tinge of nostalgia Adidas attempt to turn into a wave.
The design of a football is essentially meaningless for the fans because your favourite is always the first one you remember seeing during a World Cup. I asked for his, which was the Telstar, and he asked for mine, 2002’s exquisite Fevernova.
For a moment I was left unsure if it was actually the colour of champagne or that was just the sepia-filter ache of longing overlaid onto my memory of it. It’s more telling than your actual age, I think, your favourite football.
For the generation between us it was almost unanimously the Tango, for the generation between myself and the South American dance enthusiasts it was almost unanimously the Questra.
There’s always something about the first one, the first time. Everything else is just a pale imitation, a spectre of its former self.
The more I saw of Adidas HQ the more it became clear just how perfectly enclosed it actually was, a pristine bubble with tennis and basketball and sand volleyball courts. There was even the less predictable sight of an outdoor rock climbing wall, perhaps used by employees who do their best thinking suspended 30 feet up in the air and clinging on to something.
At one point a man walked past me with a bow and several arrows loaded into the quiver on his back. It was left unclear whether there was an archery range, this was simply how the security staff operate or this really was a park in Westworld. The grounds themselves were perfectly sculpted, surrendering to giant angular structures looming over them like the point of a sundial. Robot lawnmowers patrolled the scenery as we walked through the place, attempting to process that this is where people actually come to work. Or to just mill about drinking coffee.
There is even a miniature athletics stadium and grandstand contained within the complex – the Adi-Dassler Sportplatz - complete with a full eleven-a-side pitch with grass meticulously cut to a specific height, although this was probably done by an actual human being.
I had witness Bayern Munich's 18/19 kit unveiling the night before in an industrial nightclub, they often trained here when visiting their famous kit sponsors.
Everyone of a certain disposition cannot resist playing with a football should it appear in front of them and so it proved when I found one sat lonely on the pitches during lunch.
A crowd, head to toe in the appropriate apparel, were shooting at one of the goals. Rudely, I was not deemed an ‘influencer’ and couldn’t take part in the various drills that the apparent Japanese YouTube stars were more qualified for, despite continuously blazing high and wide of the white frame.
I wanted to shout at them to keep their head over the ball, but I remembered that nobody watches the watchmen. Who could possibly influence the influencers?
Evidently not bitter about the fact, I remained alone in the centre circle, doing keepie-uppies as the sun beat down on my back and more sweat began to re-soak my brow. My elongated shadow cut the grass at an angle, as sharp as the greater-than symbol, now my own personal sundial.
Soon the dark point looped round and I had to head back inside, the tattered trousers at the knees schoolboy reluctantly returning to the classroom.
But then again, after lunch I got to meet the man in charge of the robot leg.
Unsurprisingly, he instantly became the coolest person I had ever met. He told me his name was Harry Koerger Director of Sports Science, as though the job title had simply become a part of him like a mechanical limb. He wore jeans and Sambas and his sleeves rolled up, a mad professor crossed with your favourite pint-buying uncle.
I trusted him, basically. I volunteered to have the robot foot fire knuckleball free-kicks at me at speeds of up to 160km/h (context: a lot harder than Roberto Carlos) whilst standing behind a safety panel. Squinting, this time I made sure the glass was actually there.
Fortunately the ball thudded against the screen pressed against my nose rather than my nose itself, proving that it was in fact there. The tell-tale scratches and marks became increasingly apparent as more blurry footballs were fired at me, tracked on a computer by the Hawkeye system on the roof following its path and arc, tracing
There was only ever the slightest deviation.
Harry went on to tell me about the unsuccessful versions of the machine: there was one in the 90s constructed with hip and ankle joints that would just break constantly, screws flying everywhere, and there was one more recent test run when the foot was calibrated wrong, trapping the football into the tee-off area and popping it into a million pieces like confetti.
The machine strikes the ball like a player and can recreate a true flight with no rotation, such as Cristiano Ronaldo’s free-kick against Spain, even though it winds up more like a catapult than a human leg.
Jokingly I asked him whether he had ever set the machine to purposely scuff shots at goal like bad football players often do.
He seemed genuinely confused and genuinely, actually, extremely German. “What is a bad player?", he replied.
After weighing up the likelihood of this man knowing about Lee Cattermole I told him I didn't know either. Maybe there are no bad players, only bad interpretations and context.
Who’s to say whether Lee Cattermole wouldn’t have been part of England’s victorious 1966 squad had he been born 50 years earlier, held aloft on the shoulders of Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters instead of Bobby Moore? And who’s to say that the thought only crossed my mind because I was having a football fired at some Perspex in front of my head at high velocity?
The final stop of the day was the kit design room with a man called Jürgen Rank, happily adorned in the glorious green Germany away kit with “Name 10” on the back. Great player that Name. Have always liked him.
It was the story of the throwback Germany home shirt that monopolised much of our conversation though, the jersey itself selfishly monopolising much of the love of football fans before the tournament, a reinvigorated update of the glorious 1990 number that West Germany wore throughout their third World Cup triumph.
Jürgen tells me that because of this, the shirt’s appeal has remained evergreen. "It could well be the most universally admired piece of German attire since Lederhosen," is what I thought would be a funny thing to say. I also thought it would be good to keep to myself.
Jürgen is arguably the man responsible for the current upward trend in football shirts, driving his Adidas team towards reimagining the fans wearing the shirts not inside the stadium but in the pub and in bars, to five-a-side, maybe out to a day rave in the murky depths of an east London car park.
There has been a conscious effort to create designs that endure long after the tournament has gone, from Japan’s Sashiko stitching wonder to Colombia’s canary yellow flash of a shirt worthy of Valderrama himself, who, let's face it, wouldn't be given a second thought if he popped up at the back of a Boiler Room set with two sets of gun fingers, a bumbag and a water bottle.
The discussion moved to its inevitable conclusion. England. England and Germany, Germany and England.
He revealed, to my shock and genuine disgust, that he wasn’t all that bothered about Germany’s chances in Russia, noting that a fifth star above the crest (denoting amount of titles won) would be, in his words, “a design problem.”
He needn't have worried as Germany crashed out of the group stages in spectacular fashion after losing to South Korea 2-0 in their final match. All is well back there in the Adidas design room, I hope.
Funnily enough Germany’s shirt, perhaps the bookies' favourite as the one that would endure long after Russia 2018, was immediately hit with heavy discounting after their abrupt exit from the tournament. It appears we won't see this one resurrected 30 years down the line, even with the generous Instagram filter of the gentle beautifying frame of time.
In a way, that’s why we love the World Cup. Even as things ostensibly get better, turning lighter, faster and increasingly seamless, it reminds us of where we were once.
Maybe it’s the first time you saw a ball on a television, the first time you kicked one, the first time you curled in a last-minute free-kick at the World Cup.
Maybe it's the time you won it all, maybe it's the time you didn't.
Maybe it’s just the fact you actually made it there.
There is one thing that still fascinates me about the shirt though - the lines through the chest. At first glance they gradually fade from black to grey like an old television turning on and heating up before succumbing to the static.
But they don’t fade and the colour doesn't change. The spaces between them just get slightly further apart and it’s our life, echoing itself, over and over again, three thick bold lines.
