The club is undergoing the unusual head-shaving to promote UK online betting site Betfair. The team is an underdog in their upcoming match, so every little bit of attention helps, I suppose.

I’m a bit at a loss how people will be able to scan these photos though, unless they have telephoto lenses on their smartphones. No matter what the original purpose was, it’s certainly an unusual place to find QR codes. At least these ones are temporary, unlike those QR code tattoos.

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[Dailymail via Ubergizmo]

These vehicles pit one shoe versus another in a game of tabletop or floor soccer. Each shoe comes with a mini goal as well as an accompanying soccer ball (er, football for most of the world).

You can grab a pair over at UK gadget shop Pro-Idee for £49.50 (appx. $77 USD), or single shoes for £24.95 (appx. $39 USD). Although if you buy a single shoe, you’ll probably look pretty silly driving it around all by itself. Actually, you’ll look silly either way.

[via OhGizmo! via Fashionably Geek]

This 65-foot sculpture was on display in a shopping mall in Johannesburg, South Africa and was made by Ratcliffe Fowler Design for Nike. They modeled it after Carlos Tevez from Argentina (can’t you see the resemblance?). The sculpture is made out of 5,500 so-called pixels, which are actual soccer balls that were donated to football programs around South Africa after the display was taken down.

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The time-lapse video of how they put it together is pretty awesome. That sure is a whole lot of balls!

[via Make:]

I laughed out loud when I saw what Darth Vader does with his penalty kick in this video. I guess you don’t need a lucky bounce off the goal post, when you can just flick the ball around using the Force.

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And naturally, when you’re the Dark Lord of the Sith, you can easily deal with the opposing team when they start having hissy fits with a simple telekinetic kill. Works wonders on referees as well.

[via Leetlady]

This amazing automated LEGO foosball table was created by Sariel using the LEGO WeDo kit. The score keeping, as well as the return of the balls is completely automated. The actual playing of the game is still done by us mere humans. No robots allowed, at least for now.

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Each time a goal is scored, the table will show it on the top of the goal and play a sound. It’s kind of neat to see the ball slowly rolling down the paths to the plastic bin at the bottom. The only problem that I can think off is that most foosball players are rough with foosball tables. In all honesty, a foosball table like this wouldn’t last 5 minutes, with drunken players pushing and hitting it all of the time.

[via HobbyMedia via Make:]

Like its console counterparts, there are Champions League and Europa League modes. I think the national teams that are licensed in the console versions are here as well, like Spain, Argentina, Japan and Italy. Here’s Konami’s trailer for the game:

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I looked at a couple other gameplay videos and I saw that the game’s graphics are decent, and the gameplay is smooth. However, people who bought the game have some complaints. The most important warning I read about is that the game is incredibly sluggish on a iPhone 3G (but should be fine on newer models). Others say that the game’s AI is dumb, and the lack of versatility in terms of types of shots and passes that you can pull off is disappointing. I’m a die-hard PES fan though, so if I had an iOS device I’d still buy this and see for myself. You can buy Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 at the App Store (link opens iTunes) for $7 (USD).

[via Akihabara News]

I don’t know what’s more amazing, this little stop-motion reenactment or the fact that the USA is actually doing pretty well in the World Cup this year. If you don’t know it by now, the USA actually tied England in this match. And I guess that tying in soccer is impressive. I guess it’s better than losing.

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The only thing missing from the clip is a bunch of tiny LEGO vuvuzelas. Somebody better get on that.

[via Presurfer]

I even beat a certain Stephen Totilo.  Then again he may not care – for all I know he just wanted to check the game out. Unfortunately for him, his team came across my Inter Milan, and despite being just at Level 1 we beat his Level 2 Guessers 2 to 1.

I just started playing today – hence the level – so I won’t be able to show you all of the game’s features. I started off with a bunch of players, which of course are relatively weak. Then I played training matches, after which I earned experience and a bit of gold coins. As in Football Manager, the game itself plays out behind the scenes, meaning you don’t control your players – it’s their stats vs. the opposing players’ stats. When you enter a match, there’s a bit of commentary and maybe 4 or 5 animations, but that’s it. You’d best skip to the end and see what the outcome is to save time.

There are three kinds of currencies in the game – match credits, which you need to play games,  gold coins, which you need to buy players and better facilities for your stadium and training ground, and of course Playfish coins, which is exactly like gold coins except you buy Playfish coins with real money. You get gold coins (and XP) whenever you play a match, whether you win, draw or lose. Match credits – the number next to the football icon in the picture below – are replenished after a set number of hours. You can also buy more match credits with real money.

The game is a bit like web MMORPG Skyrates, in that the training actions take a substantial amount of real time, allowing – forcing – you to . Unlike Skyrates however, the game warned me that if I let my players be Idle – meaning if I don’t issue another training routine after they finish what they’re doing – their ‘Training’ stat will decrease, which I guess is realistic. What’s not realistic is that even while your team is training, they can still play matches.

You move to higher leagues after beating a set amount of opponents. You can also give mystery gifts to your Facebook friends who have signed up for the game. And when you win against your friend, you can brag about it on his Wall. Which I just did. It felt awesome. So that’s about all I have for now. So far I’m actually having fun with EA Sports Superstars. I hope they don’t give players who spend real money too much of an advantage.

The competition was started in 1997, and has a goal of creating a bunch of robots that will ultimately defeat a bunch of humans playing soccer, likely sometime in 2050 – after Skynet has won. Lofty goal, but for now, it’s just a fun competition to check out.

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This robot in the video above was developed by Professor Asada’s lab at Osaka University and the Osaka Institute of Technology. Its body has 22 joints and uses a servo motor with 327kg/cm of torque. Despite all of that, a lowly snail could probably still block it from kicking a goal.

[via Crunchgear]

The miSoccer ($119 USD) works just like any other iPod speaker dock, except it looks like a soccer ball (or for the majority of the globe – a football). The miSoccer dock is a self-contained 2.1 sound system, and has two full-range drivers for stereo sound, plus a 15-watt subwoofer inside the soccer ball. It plays and charges all iPod models with the dock connector. It doesn’t say that it’s compatible iPhones though, so I’m betting you’ll get that annoying GSM interference if you try one that’s not in airplane mode.

If you’re a big fan of the game, you can pre-order over at Speakal. While you’re over there, pick up an iPig or an iPanda too. I assume Speakal got a really good deal on that orb-shaped speaker mold.

Just don’t try kicking a goal with one.

[via Coolest Gadgets]

The cool thing about the virtual foosball players and ball is that they’re still controlled by the same sort of spinny axle controllers that traditional foosball machines use.

In this case, however, software transforms all of the players movements into digital information which is used to control the virtual soccer players on screen. Each control lever is tied to a set of infrared sensors (similar to the way spinner controls work in arcade games) which tells the software which way to spin the players.

Check out the video clips below for a look behind-the-scenes of Space Foosball, along with some gameplay footage:

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The Space Foosball system was developed using the Virtual Physics CGI engine developed by Young J. Kim and the team at the Ewha Women’s University Computer Graphics Lab in Seoul, Korea.

No word on if or when you’ll be able to play Space Foosball at your neighborhood pub.

There are two types available: lingerie torso and cropped World Cup t-shirt torso. All of the torsos are wearing lacy painted underwear which only serves to highlight their unfortunate limblessness.

To add to the perviness factor, the mice are given names like Francesca and Michaela, depending on nationality. Oddly enough both the French and Spanish torsos are named Luisa. Then again, I’m guessing if you are the type to buy a mouse of this nature then such trivialities will not bother you.

As far as a novelty mouse goes, I will grudgingly admit that a woman’s curves do seem like they would make for a pretty ergonomic mousing experience, and it’s clever to make boobs clickable, but that doesn’t make this any less creepy. And if you’re willing to shell out €30 ($45) for one of these, then you’re not only kinda pervy, you’re also pretty spendy. Get them here.

The set comes with a pair of mini infrared remote-controlled robots which can shuffle the ball along the ground and push it into the goal. A press of the “sprint” button gives your robot a momentary boost of extra energy to power through.

The set includes both ‘bots and remotes, a pair of goals and balls and some green “turf” to play your game on. You can grab the complete set over on UK gadget shop I Want One of Those for just £19.95 (about $38 USD).

Sure, the Shiro won’t win any prizes for storage capacity, maxing out at 1GB of memory, but it certainly gets my endorsement for its cool design. The player measures in at just under 2-inches in diameter and a slick OLED display. It supports WMA, WAV, MP3 formats and also has an FM tuner and voice recorder built in.

[via Thoughts from the Sidelines]