--- title: "Stitched by Hand: The Pakistani City That Makes the World's Footballs" description: "Few fans watching the World Cup think of Sialkot. But the Pakistani city has long hand-stitched many of the world's footballs — a painstaking craft now being squeezed by machines and a changing industry." category: "Sports" category_url: https://newsparlor.com/category/sports author: "Thomas Berger" published: 2026-06-26T14:13:01.000Z updated: 2026-06-26T14:13:01.000Z canonical: https://newsparlor.com/article/stitched-by-hand-the-pakistani-city-that-makes-the-world-s-footballs tags: ["Pakistan", "Sialkot", "football", "manufacturing", "human interest"] --- # Stitched by Hand: The Pakistani City That Makes the World's Footballs Few fans watching the World Cup think of Sialkot. But the Pakistani city has long hand-stitched many of the world's footballs — a painstaking craft now being squeezed by machines and a changing industry. When a World Cup ball rolls across the pitch, few spectators think of Sialkot. Yet the Pakistani city of some three million people, in Punjab province, has for decades been the world's foremost producer of hand-stitched footballs. ## The city behind the ball Sialkot and its surrounding villages account for roughly 70% of the world's hand-stitched footballs, according to [industry accounts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_manufacturing_in_Pakistan) — though Pakistan's share of the wider global ball market, which is dominated by machine- and thermo-bonded production in China, is closer to 16%. The distinction matters: Sialkot does not make the most balls by volume, but it has long made many of the ones that take the most skill. The city's flagship manufacturer, Forward Sports, founded in 1991, has produced or supplied versions of recent World Cup balls and counts Adidas among its biggest customers, [Wikipedia records](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_Sports). ## A craft under pressure The traditional method is elemental: 32 pre-cut panels are stitched together by hand under tension, then turned right-side out. A skilled stitcher completes only about five match-quality balls a day, while a machine operator can do ten times as many — and newer thermo-bonding fuses panels with heat rather than thread, the technique now used for top tournaments' official match balls. As a result, hand-stitching has shrunk from the large majority of Sialkot's output a few years ago to a small fraction today, [Al Jazeera reported](https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2026/6/26/the-hands-behind-the-beautiful-game), and some in the trade fear it could fade from mainstream production within a decade. ## The people who do it For the workers, much of it home-based, the trade is both livelihood and strain. Al Jazeera spoke to a home stitcher who earns only a few dollars for a day's work of five balls, and to a veteran of 35 years who described how the constant pulling of thread cuts the skin in cold, dry weather, along with the back and neck pain common among long-time stitchers. The work nonetheless offers income, particularly to women, without leaving the household. ## A reckoning, and reforms Sialkot's industry also carries a difficult history. In 1996, images of a child stitching a ball drew global outrage and prompted a landmark 1997 agreement — involving FIFA, the UN's labour and children's agencies, and local manufacturers — to remove child labour from the supply chain, monitored since by an independent body overseeing more than a thousand registered stitching centres. Audits found school enrolment rising sharply in participating villages, though critics note home-based work is harder to monitor and wages remain low. ## Racing the clock World Cup years bring a surge in orders, and Sialkot's exports run into the tens of millions of balls and hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But the hand-stitchers who built the city's name now occupy a shrinking niche — training balls, replicas and specialty orders where the texture of hand-stitching is the point. Whether the craft survives another World Cup cycle is a question the city would rather not have to answer. ## Sources - [The hands behind the beautiful game](https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2026/6/26/the-hands-behind-the-beautiful-game) - [Football manufacturing in Pakistan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_manufacturing_in_Pakistan) - [Forward Sports](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_Sports)