November 29th, 2022
Via Bloomberg, an article on how Sialkot, a city in northeast Pakistan, produces about 70% of the world’s supply—including Adidas’s Al Rihla, the official ball of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar:
If you have a soccer ball in your house, there’s a pretty good chance it came from Sialkot, a city in northeast Pakistan near the Kashmiri border. More than two-thirds of the world’s soccer balls are made in one of the town’s 1,000 factories. That includes the Adidas Al Rihla, the official ball of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, which kicks off this month.
In Sialkot, about 60,000 people work in the soccer ball manufacturing business—or about 8% of the city’s population. Often they work long hours and sew the balls’ panels together by hand.
More than 80% of the soccer balls made in Sialkot use hand stitching, a laborious process that makes the ball more durable and gives it more aerodynamic stability. The seams are deeper, and the stitches have greater tension than those sewn with machines.
At manufacturer Anwar Khawaja Industries, stitchers get paid roughly 160 rupees—about $0.75—per ball. Each one takes three hours to complete. At three balls a day, a stitcher can earn about 9,600 rupees per month. Even for a poor region, the wages are low. A living wage for Sialkot is around 20,000 rupees a month, according to researcher estimates.
Most of the people who stitch the balls are women. In a typical day at Anwar Khawaja Industries, they might stitch two balls, return home to cook for their children, then continue their work in a nearby village in the afternoon.
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