Wimbledon 2018: the UK has no idea what colour tennis balls are

Google Trends can reveal the brilliance and stupidity of human beings on the internet, and as Wimbledon fever sweeps across the UK, some are smashing their search bars to ask one particularly important question.

If you’ve ever seen a tennis match, you’ll know that a major part of the game is the ball. Those fuzzy little wads of rubber and fluff has a very particular colour, but the UK just can’t quite figure out what it is.

“‘What colour is a tennis ball?’ is one of the all time top questions on the rules of tennis in the UK,” Google Trends’ Twitter account revealed in a shocker on Monday.

“What colour is a tennis ball?” is one of the all time top questions on the rules of tennis in the UK.

Find more top questions and other insights on our #Wimbledon page: https://t.co/SWG8hH1mF7 pic.twitter.com/ns0jijGZRb

— GoogleTrends (@GoogleTrends) July 3, 2018

In fact, it’s the second-most popular query on Google regarding the rules of tennis since the company’s Trend monitoring began in 2004.

We Googled the phrase and Wikipedia had the honour of explaining this to us:

Yellow and white are the only colors approved by the ITF, and most balls produced are a fluorescent yellow known as “optic yellow”, first introduced in 1972 following research demonstrating they were more visible on television.

Heh. Who would’ve guessed?

Other popular tennis questions noted by Google from within the UK includes:

• What does seeding mean in tennis?
• How wide is a tennis court?
• Where was tennis invented?
• Who invented tennis?

In terms of global interest, Australia, the United States, and the Netherlands lead global search interest in tennis balls since 2004. Interestingly, France, Romania, and Italy have shown the most interest in Wimbledon since 2004 too. The UK’s only fifth.

Feature image: Tadeusz Lakota via Unsplash