It would be nice if you could pinpoint exactly which person came up with soccer and indeed who invented the soccer ball. Just like the game itself though, the balls have simply been subject to a long process of development over hundreds of years. Rather than one person creating the soccer ball as we know it, therefore, the designs have changed over time and are not generally credited to an individual. Instead of naming a creator of the soccer ball then, we can take a brief look into its long journey.
At first, soccer balls were merely animal bladders wrapped in leather! In the 1600s for example, the bladder of a 'pallone'- an early Italian soccer ball- had to be inflated. These ancient balls were laced together manually, often lost shape with heavy use and became saturated with water when it rained. For a long time, even right up to the 1940s, you would have found soccer balls heavy and very difficult to play with.
More recently, with improved technology, soccer balls have developed into a light-weight, waterproof form. As you can imagine this now makes life much easier for strikers and harder for goalkeepers- this is just the game as we know it today!
Hopefully you can see that we can't determine who invented the soccer ball, because its development has just been a long process over time. Long ago people would just kick around animal bladders because these were all they had to play with. Nowadays we have better technology, so you can play with the plastic-coated, rapid balls that make the game much more exciting for all involved!
