soccer balls spinning in the air

The World Cup this round is now near its climax. I'm not a soccer fan, though it is my interest to know how the soccer balls traverse the air. One finds here a good and terse essay on this. It talks of how the trajectory of a soccer through the air is affected by the drag force and Magnus force, both of which are of course exterted by the air. An exact solution of such problem is only numerically or experimentally possible. Even today, after nearly three centuries since Euler equation, some very fundamental issues as regards the transition from laminar and turbulent flow are not concluded.