Fair Trade Footballs: It's Time To Play Fair!
People are often a bit surprised to see that we sell footballs! Perhaps because they don’t fit with the idea of a fair trade product. It’s probably because, like me, they never really thought about where footballs are made, or how.
In fact 70% of the worlds footballs are made in the town of Sialkot in Pakistan, in a process that still has a real handmade element. Rather than a shiny automated production line you’ll find people machine stitching, or painstakingly glueing pieces together before putting each football individually into a thermal bonding machine.
All the balls for the major tournaments are made in Sialkot but, as you might have guessed, no matter how expensive the ball, the pay and working conditions really don’t differ much. A big chunk of the price of a branded ball goes on sponsorship and advertising and very little gets back to the workers themselves. Many of them live at a subsistence level with little support when things go wrong.