Khawaja Masood Akhtar founded Forward Sports in Sialkot in 1991 with 20 employees and one room. Thirty-five years later, his factory has made the official match ball for four consecutive FIFA World Cups: the Brazuca in 2014, the Telstar 18 in 2018, the Al Rihla in 2022, and now the Trionda, stamped with Adidas's logo and sold as the ball of the 2026 tournament co-hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada. Pakistan's national team has not qualified for a World Cup since the country was formed. Its footballs have made every one since 2014.
The label on the box says Adidas. The labour is Pakistani, and increasingly, so is the underlying technology — the Trionda carries a 500Hz motion sensor built into a four-panel shell to feed data into semi-automated offside and video-review systems, developed with Sialkot's engineers as much as Adidas's design studio in Germany. Consumers see three logos on football pitches: Adidas, Nike, Puma. Almost none of them see Sialkot, where a cluster of factories has quietly supplied the sport's most visible object for over a decade.
Since the 2006 World Cup, official match balls have been thermally bonded, not hand-stitched. The hands are still in Sialkot — they've just moved further down the production line.
The "hand-stitched" reputation that put Sialkot on the map is now only half true, and that half-truth is the real story. Since 2006, FIFA's official match balls have used thermal bonding rather than traditional stitching — a manufacturing shift that produces a rounder, more water-resistant ball. What survives in Sialkot's factories is everything thermal bonding hasn't automated: panel cutting, colour application, quality inspection, and the hand-stitching that still goes into training balls, replica balls and lower-tier match balls sold at a fraction of the official price. Robots haven't replaced Sialkot's workforce so much as narrowed what that workforce does.
Has Pakistan lost market share, then? Not in the category that matters commercially. Forward Sports has kept the single most prestigious contract in ball manufacturing across four World Cup cycles, a run that predates most of the players on this year's rosters. What has shifted is where the growth sits: mass-market and mid-tier balls, along with the cheaper end of licensed replica production, have migrated to China, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia, chasing the same lower labour costs and faster automated lines that have reshaped garment and footwear manufacturing across the region.
What happens after the final whistle in July matters more to Sialkot than the tournament itself. World Cups generate a spike in replica-ball demand that fades within months, and Forward Sports' real revenue comes from the unglamorous, unbranded contracts that run in between — training equipment, school and league balls, and licensing work for federations that never make a World Cup broadcast. The official ball buys Sialkot four years of credibility. It's the four years of ordinary orders that keep the factory running.