Within the city, 70 percent of the world’s football is played – where the World Cup has been played for the past 44 years.
The official balls for every tournament since 1982 have been made in Sialkot, Pakistan, and most are hand stitched.
More than 100 years ago, the locals in Sialkot started preparing balls as a hobby, and now about 40 million balls are exported from the country each year.
Colors and logos are applied by hand, and workers carefully inspect the finished product.
The craft takes months to perfect and skilled seamstresses can finish about four balls a day.
According to Forward Sports, who produced this year’s World Cup ball for Adidas called Trionda, 2026 is the biggest number they have produced in their history.
The World Cup will start on June 11, and football will be kicked in Canada, Mexico and the United States.
Stefan Bohrer, who filmed the football show, told Talk to the Press: “The level of football production in Sialkot is amazing.
“However, football is truly a universal language. These balls will be kicked, shared, and celebrated by millions of people around the world, with the love of the game and the creativity of the people who make it.”
“Standing there, looking at this huge production process, I realized that each ball is destined for a different story somewhere in the world – from the dirt field to the next World Cup Champions.”
Sialkot makes hundreds of thousands of balls every day.
Forward Sports started making balls for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil and now has a separate side of the company for match ball research.
Making a World Cup ball is highly regulated, and a new match ball takes three to four years to make.
Thermo-technology is often used to ensure that no water can penetrate and that its weight remains constant regardless of the weather.
The roundness of the soccer ball, the colors and the accuracy of its seams must be perfect, especially to match FIFA standards.
Factories also contain cages where balls can be tested by repeatedly shooting them against the wall.
Usually, official match balls account for only a small part of the production in Sialkot, and most of the balls produced are used as training balls.
During the World Cup, Sialkot gets a lot of demand from both sports brands for soccer balls and other businesses like McDonald’s who print balls with their logo on them.
However, the city is afraid of Chinese manufacturers who can quickly produce cheap copies of their balls and use high security in their factories.
