Roundness rules hit traditional football stitchers

Fifa rules on the roundness of balls have hit the traditional football producing industry in Pakistan. Ten years ago the city of Sialkot produced 85 per cent of the world’s footballs employing 100,000 people as stitchers. Production has collapsed from over 40 million balls in 2007 to 22 million this year, while the workforce has shrunk to barely 10,000.

Fifa rules on the roundness of balls have hit the traditional football producing industry in Pakistan. Ten years ago the city of Sialkot produced 85 per cent of the world’s footballs employing 100,000 people as stitchers. Production has collapsed from over 40 million balls in 2007 to 22 million this year, while the workforce has shrunk to barely 10,000.

The difficulties began in 2006 when Fifa introduced new specifications which favoured uniform, machine-made products over traditional, hand-stitched balls. The latest rules introduced this year permit only a 1.3 per cent deviation from a perfect sphere, a tough target for traditional Pakistani stitchers to meet.

As Fifa has tightened its rules, China and Thailand have rushed in with cheaper machine-stitched balls that, although of lower quality, have in a few years taken over half the global market. However, all Premier League matches still use Sialkot footballs made by a local company, Silver Star.

With nearly 3,000 stitches per ball, a good Pakistani stitcher can make 3-4 footballs a day, for which they receive about 67p a ball. A machine stitcher can produce 50 at just 4p a ball.

The first football in Sialkot was supposedly stitched in 1889 after a British army officer asked a local saddler to repair his damaged ball. The saddler copied the pattern and was soon selling footballs to British regiments across India.