Sialkot - football production capital for the world
During this year's World Cup, FIFA used at least 300,000 Al Rihla and Al Hilm balls provided by Adidas. The production of this ball, Adidas assigned to a Chinese enterprise and Forward Sports with the main factory in Sialkot.
The Pakistani outsourcing unit says it accounts for 33% of Al Rihla production. This is the third World Cup in a row that Forward Sports has provided the ball, the previous two being Brazuca in Brazil 2014 and Telstar 18 in Russia 2018. With Al Rihla this year, Forward Sports uses heat press technology developed by them. since 2007.
But taken as a whole, the business is just the tip of the iceberg of Sialkot's reputation in the international sporting goods industry. As for football, this city has about 1,000 factories with 60,000 employees (accounting for 8% of the population).
With that infrastructure and human resources, Sialkot is likened to the world's largest hand-sewn football factory, accounting for 70% of the supply and 80% of the output is sewn by people. According to research from Bloomberg Businessweek, hand-sewn balls are more durable than machine-sewn types thanks to deeper stitches, tighter stitches.
At the Anwar Khawaja Industries factory, each worker is paid about 0.75 USD for each soccer ball they perfect. The finished product took three hours. If working for 30 days, an average of three fruits a day, monthly income per person is about 67.5 USD. Most of the workers who sew the balls are women, and their usual schedule is to sew two balls and then go home to cook and then go to another oven to sew more.
Meanwhile, men are in charge of many different stages of the production process, such as material preparation or quality control according to FIFA standards. Previously, factories in Sialkot employed 5-year-olds to help their parents. However, this is prohibited, under the Pakistani Labor Law enacted in 1997.
Most balls in Sialkot are made of synthetic leather - cotton, polyester and polyurethane. Ingredients are imported from many countries. The cheapest balls use Chinese materials, the higher quality ones use Korean ones. Particularly for the ball for the Bundesliga or the European arena, Japanese materials must be used.
Each fruit is traditionally composed of 20 hexagonal and 12 pentagonal pieces, joined together by 690 stitches. Currently, balls produced by heat press technology appear more. The quality of this type is still high, the production cost is cheaper, but the transportation is more expensive, mainly because of the disadvantage of taking up space in the shipment due to the characteristic that it cannot be deflated after being released from the oven.
At the 2022 World Cup, the Al Rihla ball was used from the beginning to the end of the quarter-finals. The matches from the semi-finals onwards all use Al Hilm balls. In Arabic, Al Rihla is the journey, and Al Hilm is the dream. Both types have integrated chip recording data such as flight speed, spin ... and assist the referee to arbitrate when there is a situation that is difficult to determine with the naked eye - offside, the ball crosses the border or not...
According to FIFA, Al Hilm is the first semi-final and final match ball to use only water-based ink and glue to minimize harm to the environment. The golden luster and triangular pattern on Al Hilm's surface is inspired by the iridescent desert surrounding the Qatari capital Doha, the cup color for the champion team and the motif on the host country's flag.
