Metin Tolan

"That's soccer. Sometimes the better team wins." The physicist Metin Tolan proves what Lukas Podolski contritely confessed after the 2006 World Cup defeat: soccer is the most unfair sport in the world! If eleven physicists met on the pitch, there would be no more wrong offside decisions, banana crosses out of bounds and poorly positioned defenses. Because physics can do what Bastian Schweinsteiger and co. only try to do: Explain soccer. Who would have thought that in a penalty shoot-out, the order of the kickers is decisive? And who would dare to say of the 1966 Wembley goal that it could have been in? Metin Tolan dares! And uncovers all the secrets of the round leather with absolute incorruptibility.

Metin Tolan, born in 1965, is a physics professor and was President of the University of Göttingen until 2024. For years, he has been making a name for himself as Germany's most original physics explainer. His first book Geschüttelt, nicht gerührt (2008) about physics in James Bond films became a surprise bestseller. For his success as a science communicator, he received the Communicator Prize in 2013 and the Robert Wichard Pohl Prize from the German Physical Society in 2017.

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