Hi Jonathon,
I love how quickly your method gets a nice looking soccerball!
However, the imperfect hexagons annoyed me as I can't un-see them :P!
So I did bit of research into it and figured out how to make perfect hexagons and pentagons with equal edge lengths (just a simple array modifier on an edge you know the length of) and through a series of manipulating pivot centers, transform orientations and snapping targets I was able to get each shape into the right place on the ball. You just need to know the angles to rotate them at.
This Wiki page helped put me in the right direction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truncated_icosahedron. Tip: create half the ball and duplicate for other half.
The image here is not a very good render, it's more to show the geometry of the ball. I'd love to see Jonathon use this method to create a geometrically perfect ball.
