The hands behind the beautiful game

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 more to fulfil the orders, and also so we could earn more and pay off our debts.” By the light of an oil lantern, she would search for the holes in each panel, working late into the night after the household had gone to sleep. It was painstaking, but the wages accumulated over time. Those earnings, together with a loan from the Dutch company that employs the centre to stitch footballs, helped Ansar and her husband build the three-room house they loved 12 years ago. The couple began their married life in a room adjoining the neighbourhood mosque, where her husband worked as an imam. …