How cricket-crazy Pakistan became a major football factory

When World Cup games kick off in Qatar, the best players on the planet are passing, heading and shooting with the new “Al Rihla” football, whose glossy design offers state of the art speed and accuracy, according to its maker Adidas.

Millions of the Al Rihla balls — the name means “the journey” in Arabic — have been shipped from a factory on the secluded outskirts of Sialkot, a small industrial hub in northern Pakistan, where the German company’s contract manufacturer Forward Sports runs one of the world’s largest football-making operations.

Sialkot’s residents mostly share their compatriots’ devotion to cricket, in which Pakistan’s national team earlier this month were Twenty20 World Cup runners-up. The sport’s popularity also proved a vote-winner for former cricketer Imran Khan, helping him to become prime minister in 2018.

While Pakistan’s football team has never qualified for a Fifa World Cup, Sialkot has been a winner off the pitch. It has withstood the rise of China, automation and Pakistan’s political and economic instability to build a world-class football and sports manufacturing hub, attracting leading brands in a country otherwise starved of international exporters.

For global manufacturers, clusters like these provide a valuable alternative as geopolitical tensions and Beijing’s heavy-handed pandemic restrictions prompt them to diversify supply chains away from China. With Adidas also manufacturing Al Rihla balls in China, Forward is hoping to capitalise on this.

The company makes about 15mn footballs a year and Adidas has been a customer since the 1990s. “China is the factory of the world,” says chief executive Khawaja Masood Akhtar. “Whatever you have to do, you have to compete with China.”

Vision Technologies, another Sialkot football maker, this year started making footballs for France’s Ligue 1. “The quality which we are producing, they cannot get that from other countries,” Ahsan Naeem, Vision Sports’ chief executive, said. “They know it is the best choice to stay with us.”

In Vision’s factory, thousands of workers operate machines that print, cut and bind the balls together. In one wing, they subject the balls to a series of gruelling pressure and climatic tests to ensure quality standards are met.

Sialkot’s success is a rarity in Pakistan, which has long struggled with weak exports and repeated balance-of-payments crises. Exports fell from 17 per cent of GDP in 1992 to 10 per cent last year, according to the World Bank, with other traditional manufacturing industries struggling in the face of growing competition from China and other manufacturers.

Pakistan’s IT sector has fared better, growing to around $2bn in annual exports, as high costs in neighbouring outsourcing giant India force global companies to look elsewhere.

Nonetheless, Pakistan’s overall sporting goods exports are tiny compared to China’s, according to data platform the Observatory of Economic Complexity, accounting for around 1 per cent of the global market, versus around half of it for China.

Sialkot’s sports industry has long faced scrutiny over alleged exploitative labour practices, including employing children, but international buyers and authorities have tried to crack down in recent years. The fact that leading global brands continue to come to Sialkot points to some entrenched advantages.

The city “is an exception to the norm”, said Asad Sayeed, a senior researcher at the Collective for Social Science Research in Karachi. “They have adapted to and improved on what the global needs are . . . in spite of the environment around them.”

After Sialkot’s manufacturers had earlier begun haemorrhaging sales to China, factories such as those of Forward and Vision expanded from hand-stitching balls with cheap labour to techniques such as “thermo bonding”, in which the balls’ synthetic leather panels are fused together with heat by machines.

And where Pakistan’s infrastructure has fallen short, Sialkot’s powerful business lobby has taken matters into its own hands — even building a private airport to fly in international executives.

Not everything is high-tech, however. At MB Malik, a cricket-goods manufacturer whose bats are used by some members of the Pakistani national team, craftsmen cut and shave hunks of imported English willow to make bats by hand in a labour-intensive process that has been passed through generations.

“The skilled labour in our region, that’s the main reason we’re here,” said Malik Umer, one of the company’s directors. “It’s very difficult for buyers to go elsewhere . . . If someone is a bat maker, you’ll see their brothers and sons working in the same factory.”

These habits die hard. Even Vision’s Naeem, whose family has made its fortune thanks to football, admits that none of them actually play the sport. Their sport of choice? “Cricket”, of course.