The hands behind the beautiful game

Pakistan's last hand-stitched football makers keep a fading craft alive as machines reshape the world's game. xwhatsapp-strokecopylinkgoogleAdd Al Jazeera on GoogleinfoSialkot, 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

The hands behind the beautiful game

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