Football (Soccer) In Space?

Astronauts don't have to much downtime on board the International Space Station. What do they do to have fun? Space Facts explores football in space!

Has anyone played football/soccer in space?

In celebration of the World Cup kickoff in 2014, a trio of astronauts aboard the International Space Station were spotted engaging in a game of football. Despite the limited number of participants, the game was notably more challenging due to the zero-gravity environment. The American astronauts Reid Wiseman and Steve Swanson, as well as German astronaut Alexander Gerst, were observed floating and spinning as they attempted to control the soccer ball.

Footage of the event was released by NASA, which also included a brief message from the astronauts themselves: "We want to wish all the teams and fans on the ground in Brazil a great World Cup. Have fun and have peaceful games. May the best win." It's possible that if astronauts continued to play football on the International Space Station, they might even draw more viewers than the World Cup in Brazil and their preferred teams. After all, nothing quite compares to space.

Some more American football space facts

The International Space Station is 357 feet long, almost the length of a football field including end zones.
4,625 footballs can fit inside NASA's spacecraft for deep space missions, the Orion crew module.
Orion will travel a distance of over 26,670,964 football fields during its next mission, which is thousands of miles beyond the moon.
NASA's Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever built, will stand at 364 feet tall - 4 feet taller than a football field.
The crew on the International Space Station, traveling at 17,500 mph, will see two sunrises and two sunsets during an NFL game that lasts over three hours.
It would take over 195 billion footballs, end-to-end, to reach from Earth to Mars at their closest distances, and 1.4 trillion footballs when Mars is farther away.
On Mars, a football would weigh only 0.38 pounds, while a 200-pound football player would weigh about 75 pounds.
If thrown to the moon at 60 mph, the average speed of an NFL pass, it would take 166 days to get there. The quickest trip was by the New Horizons probe, which took 8 hours and 35 minutes.
On Mars, ignoring air resistance, a field goal kick of 64 yards could be made from almost two football fields away (192 yards) due to ⅓ the gravity of Earth.
With a very thin atmosphere and low gravity on Mars, a quarterback could throw the football three times as far as on Earth, and a receiver would have to be much further down the field to catch the ball.