Keeping her eye on the ballPHOTOGRAPHY is fiercely restricted inside Khawaja Masood Akhtar’s factory in Sialkot, a small city in northern Pakistan. His products—top-of-the-range footballs—must be zealously guarded until the time comes for his customers, big international sports brands, to unveil their offerings for the new season. Until then the latest ball designs are subjected to a battery of tests in windowless laboratories. They must endure everything from hard poundings from mechanised boot studs to repeated dusting with fungus spores. The quality of the factory’s output is so high that Adidas chose it as one of only two in the world to manufacture the balls used in the World Cup in 2014.
Pakistan has precious few globally competitive exporters, but a good number of them are clustered in Sialkot, an out-of-the-way city of fewer than 1m people in north-eastern Punjab. It supplies the world with all sorts of sporting gear, from hockey sticks to judo suits, as well as leather goods and surgical instruments. Sialkoti Lederhosen are all the rage in Bavaria. The city’s 8,000-member chamber of...Continue reading
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