Pakistan's last hand-stitched football makers keep a fading craft alive as machines reshape the world's game.
Sialkot, Pakistan - “Look at these hands.”
Ansar Majeed holds them out for inspection. The fingers are thickened, the tips hardened by decades of pulling waxed thread through football panels. The skin around her knuckles is worn smooth in places, cracked in others. Her nails are cut short so they don’t catch on the thread. Her hands settle back around the ball resting in the wooden clamp before her, the needle already threaded and waiting.
Around her, the low-build stitching centre hums with conversation. Whitewashed walls are brightened with murals painted by her daughter. About 25 women, aged between 16 and 55, sit on low seats with their kits spread around them, drawing waxed polyester through pre-punched panels.
One woman rises from the red-and-yellow chatai (floor mat) to fetch a cup of iced water from the cooler in the centre of the room. Above, ceiling fans work hard to push warm air around the space. Beyond the curtains, drawn across the room's open edge to the south-facing courtyard, another Punjab summer presses down on Sambrial, a suburb of Sialkot in northeastern Pakistan.
For generations, this corner of Pakistan has helped make the world's footballs. The city's relationship with football's biggest tournament stretches back decades. In 1982, Sialkot manufacturer Sublime Sports produced Adidas's Tango Espana, the first official World Cup ball to be made in Pakistan. More recently, every official World Cup ball since the 2014 tournament has also been manufactured in Sialkot.
Although the official match balls are factory-made, each tournament triggers a wider boom in demand for footballs, increasing orders for the hand-stitched training and souvenir balls that provide extra work for many of the city's stitchers.
But the rhythm of hand stitching is fading.
Machine work and thermal bonding now dominate production, leaving hand stitching confined largely to premium training, retail and promotional balls. The women gathered here know every order could be followed by weeks of silence, even as local manufacturing partners for global brands continue to place those specialist orders.
At 55, Ansar is one of the oldest women in the room. She has been stitching footballs for 35 years.
Around her, younger women work steadily, chatting as they stitch. Some have been here 5 years, some 10. Ansar has taught many of them herself.
“They all learn quickly. Some take a couple of weeks, others get the hang of it in a month. We start them with two panels at a time instead of overwhelming them with the entire ball from the beginning,” she says, as a woman half her age watches her stitch before adjusting her own accordingly.
Rolling her shoulders back, Ansar stretches from her place on the floor, lamenting the pain that settles in her neck, back and shoulders after decades of stitching footballs. She now explains what her hands have already revealed. “When the weather is cold and dry, the constant pulling of thread causes cuts through the skin. The needle can make it worse. Our hands show that we do this work.”
In summer, the heat softens the rexine - the synthetic leather used to make the footballs - and the needle moves more easily.
Like many women here, Ansar learned the craft after marriage. She joined her husband, Qari Abdul Majeed Chishti, in Sambrial after leaving her hometown of Mandi Bahauddin, about 120km (75 miles) away in central Punjab.
As a young bride, far from her family, she filled her days with household chores. When those were done, she would crochet or embroider to pass the time.
"I started when my daughter was just a month old," recalls Ansar, dressed in a white and green printed kameez with a plain white shalwar and an orange dupatta covering her head. "Now she has her own children, and I am a grandmother. This is how long I have been stitching the ball.”
She says her husband taught her the trade, and together they taught many of the people who now work alongside her when the centre opened in 2008.
The football factories cut the panels, assemble the kits and collect the finished balls. Much of the hand stitching is subcontracted to more than 1,400 registered centres across Sialkot district, each inspected every four to eight weeks as part of a monitoring system introduced after child labour was removed from the industry's supply chain in the late 1990s.
Any workplace with at least five stitchers is registered as a centre with the Independent Monitoring Association for Child Labor (IMAC). This centre is one of the largest, with separate sections for men and women.
Ansar moves between the women, checking their progress and correcting mistakes before they become habits.
She recalls how different the work was when she first started.
“There used to be very frequent loadshedding (power outages), but we needed to stitch more to fulfil the orders, and also so we could earn more and pay off our debts.”
By the light of an oil lantern, she would search for the holes in each panel, working late into the night after the household had gone to sleep. It was painstaking, but the wages accumulated over time.
Those earnings, together with a loan from the Dutch company that employs the centre to stitch footballs, helped Ansar and her husband build the three-room house they loved 12 years ago.
The couple began their married life in a room adjoining the neighbourhood mosque, where her husband worked as an imam. Before moving into their current home, they hosted the stitching centre from a room built above their modest accommodation.
Her face shows the hardships of those years. Deep lines crease the corners of Ansar’s eyes and forehead, etched by years of concentration, but they quickly soften into a smile.
She remembers a very different Sambrial, where many families, including her own, lived in mud houses vulnerable to floods and heavy rain. Slowly, brick by brick, families worked to improve their circumstances, building homes that offered greater safety and stability.
“Nobody knew where the next meal would come from.”
For many families, football stitching offered a way out of poverty. But it was not always a source of pride.
“These communities, these people have had to face a lot of stigma. They were looked down on by their neighbours and others for being so poor that they had to stitch balls,” says Nasir Dogar, chief executive of IMAC.
“Sometimes people would hide that this is how they were earning their living because it could hinder their children’s employment or even marital prospects.”
That scrutiny intensified in 1996, when a magazine photograph of a 12-year-old boy stitching a football for Nike prompted international outrage and shone a spotlight on child labour in Sialkot’s football industry.
Dogar and his team have spent almost three decades working in these communities to remove children from the football manufacturing supply chain. In 1997, FIFA, the International Labour Organization, UNICEF, Save the Children, the government of Pakistan and the Sialkot Chamber of Commerce signed the Atlanta Agreement, committing to eliminate child labour from football production.
"We spent hours understanding what was driving them to engage young children in stitching footballs. We knew we had to start with encouraging the community to contribute and participate in putting an end to child labour," explains Dogar.
As villages embraced the programme, local people helped build registered stitching centres. One member of a village committee donated bricks at half price, others paid for fixtures and fittings, while residents supplied the labour.
“When a village reached full school enrollment, a white flag was raised above it,” says Dogar. “We’d hold a meeting, in which small shields were given out in recognition of this achievement. This was done in all 1,609 villages.”
A subsequent independent UNICEF audit found that between 96 and 97 percent of children were attending school.
The world's game begins far from the stadiums, in homes and workshops where footballs are still stitched by hand.
Twenty minutes across town, the smell of rubber and diesel gives way, every so often, to crushed sugarcane and the sweetness of ripe mangoes and lychees piled high on roadside carts. Here, in a modest three-room house, Abida Hussain stitches footballs much as Ansar once did.
Her workshop is the drawing room at the front of her three-room family home. During the summer months, she works here alongside her husband and four daughters, transforming the space from a room to entertain guests into one for stitching footballs.
With the door left ajar, a breeze moves through the house, making it more comfortable to bear the warm summer days. In winter, the family moves further inside and works from the living room, which also serves as a bedroom at night. A charpai (lightweight bed) remains in the middle of the room during the day so they can sit together and watch the latest Pakistani drama serial on the small television.
“We sleep on the chhat (the rooftop) in the summer because it is much cooler there than the suffocating heat that gets trapped inside the house,” says Abida, 50, as her grandson comes to ask if he can have an ice lolly.
The drawing room itself is painted in bright shades of green and pink. A chatai woven from straw covers the concrete floor beneath them.
“I just took a short break to tend to the plants in the courtyard,” she says, setting down a watering can by the door. “We all take regular breaks for 10-15 minutes every hour or so. Sometimes, we all drink lassi together, and other times I enjoy a stiff cup of chaa.
“I love taking care of my plants. I can only grow a few in this space, but I have some pots on the chhat too.”
Home-based family workshops now make up only a small share of Sialkot’s registered stitching network, but, like larger centres, they are formally monitored by IMAC. Across the district, more than 700 registered centres are staffed exclusively by women, while about 500 employ only men.
One of Abida’s daughters, Sadaf Hussain, smiles before getting up to look for her father.
Before she reaches the doorway, Muhammad Hussain appears, carrying two stainless-steel glasses of lassi, asking his daughters to fetch the remaining glasses for everyone gathered in the room.
Quiet at first, he soon joins the conversation.
Muhammad has been stitching footballs since 1988. He learned the craft from his older brother, who sat him down with a needle and a panel and showed him what to do. Decades later, he has passed those skills on to his wife and daughters.
When each of the girls turned 16, he taught them how to stitch a football. One daughter now teaches at a primary school but knows she can fall back on the craft if she ever needs to. The others continue to work alongside their parents.
Abida stitches between three and five footballs a day, earning the equivalent of just more than $6 when she completes five match-quality balls. Like thousands of other artisans across Sialkot, the family is paid by a local manufacturing partner that supplies kits to registered stitching centres and home workshops before collecting the finished footballs for export.
She has never considered factory work and says she would not want it for her daughters either.
“To begin with, mostly men did this job. But gradually women joined alongside managing their household,” she explains.
For Sadaf, the appeal is the freedom to earn without leaving home. “This work is the best. It is such a good way to earn money and keep ourselves busy while staying in the safety of our home,” she says. “There should be ways to expand it. Because, to tell you the truth, it is a completely different struggle once you set foot outside.”
Outside the home, she explains later, women must contend with concerns over safety, long journeys, workplace expectations and social pressures that make home-based work far more attractive.
The contradiction is not lost on the women. They know hand stitching is becoming less common, yet they still hope for more orders because the work allows them to earn without leaving home. When football orders dry up, many turn to embroidery or stitching badges for blazers worn by members of the UK armed forces, taking whatever piecework is available to bridge the gaps.
“I wake for Fajr before the Azaan,” she says, pointing in the direction of the mosque across the road. "And after reading the Quran, I make breakfast - paratha and omelette or the leftover salan from the previous night - for my sons and my daughter as they get ready for work.
“That hour after the prayer belongs to me, and I look forward to having a cup of chaa with my boys,” she says of her morning ritual. “My husband and my daughters are not keen on it; they are lassi drinkers. What is chaa if not enjoyed with someone else?”
The footballs arrive as kits from Anwar Khawaja Industries, Select's local manufacturing partner. Each contains 32 pre-cut panels and a printed guide showing how they fit together.
Depending on the design, one person can finish about 15 toy balls a day, eight to 10 training balls, or no more than five match-quality footballs destined for pitches around the world.
"Football, without any doubt, has been the central character in our lives," Sadaf says. “After all, this work has paid for our education, for my sisters’ weddings. It is such a blessing that we know this craft. It helps us keep this roof over our heads, and we don’t have to worry about where our next meal will come from.”
Can hand stitching survive the machine age?
About 70 percent of the world's hand-stitched footballs still begin as kits in someone's hands in Sialkot. Yet within the city itself, the craft has become an increasingly small part of the industry that made it famous.
Khurram Khawaja of Anwar Khawaja Industries has watched that change accelerate.
"Five or six years ago, hand-stitched footballs accounted for 80 to 90 percent of production in Sialkot," he says. "Today, they make up about 20 percent."
The reasons are largely economic. One worker in a factory can produce between 50 and 60 machine-stitched footballs in a day. A skilled hand stitcher completes about five.
Khawaja believes hand stitching could disappear from mainstream football production within the next eight to 10 years.
For families like the Hussains, however, the craft remains worth holding on to.
“The number of orders goes up and down, but we keep the faith and find ease and peace through it all,” says Sadaf as she makes tea with her mother and sisters.
Like her sisters, Sadaf completed her studies before choosing to stitch footballs.
"We prioritised educating our daughters," says Muhammad, "but also taught them this skill so they could earn from the comfort of their own home."
The work demands far more skill than it first appears.
Each football is stitched inside out, with every panel pulled together under immense tension before the ball is turned the right way around.
The wooden clamp serves as a sewing frame, holding the ball steady as it grows.
"The final stitch requires real skill and expertise, and a neat stitch," says Muhammad. "It requires more focus and time compared to the rest of the pieces that are stitched together."
In the Hussain household, the work has been divided naturally over the years. Abida and her daughters stitch the first 26 panels before passing each ball to Muhammad to close. Working largely by feel, he turns the ball through itself before pulling the final stitches so tightly that the knot disappears beneath the surface.
Back at the stitching centre across town, the final stage of the process is usually left to the men working upstairs.
With decades of experience behind her, she is the only woman at the centre who regularly closes the final six panels herself. Two others have learned, she says, but they take longer and usually leave the final stage to the men.
Years of experience have earned Ansar a certain authority among the women gathered here.
“They like a bit of banter, they like fooling around, and I let them be. But sometimes, they cause a right raucous so I have to tell them off,” she says.
The afternoon light has softened. Conversations drift between Punjabi and Urdu, punctuated by laughter, by somebody's story about somebody else. The steady rhythm of needle through rexine continues.
Once a week, usually on a Friday or a Saturday, the women pool their money and order food together: Samosas, naan tikki, biryani, shawarma or, on hotter days, just kulfi.
“Some of these women have very young children who they have left at home to come and work here. And some return during their chilla (40-day postpartum period for rest) so they bring their babies with them,” says Ansar, glancing towards a young mother soothing her infant nearby.
Between stitches, the women talk about rising bills, school fees, family illnesses and the everyday calculations required to keep a household running. The work is repetitive, but what it supports is not.
“We get worried when we don’t receive orders,” says Ansar. “Sometimes, because of incessant rains. It can become difficult to make ends meet or make payments for bills, or the monthly committee, and we wonder what we will do, where we will get the money from. But God has been most merciful.”
Tomorrow, the women will return to their places on the chatai. Ansar will settle another football into the wooden clamp before her, and across town, Abida and her daughters will do the same.
Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2026/6/26/the-hands-behind-the-beautiful-game?traffic_source=rss