Spot the ball competition

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A spot the ball competition is a traditional newspaper promotion where the player has to guess the position of a ball which has been removed from a photograph of a ball sport, especially association football. The position of the ball must be deduced from the relative positions of the sportsmen shown in the photograph, the directions in which they are looking, etc.

The game was extremely popular in the UK in the 1980s as part of newspaper promotions. Players would pay for a certain number of crosses on the picture, which was sent in by post to the promoter. Sometimes players could cover the picture with hundreds of crosses, and special rubber stamps were manufactured which helped people fill in the picture with regular arrangements of crosses. Where several entrants had identified the correct area, a special high-powered magnifying device would be used to determine which of the crosses was the closest to the centre of the ball.

Sometimes the "correct answer" is the position of the ball as judged by a panel of experts, rather than the position of the actual ball before it was removed. This may be to prevent collusion with anyone who has seen the actual photograph used.