Relegation Woes for Mexico's Hand-Crafted Footballs Agence France-Presse
go to original June 9, 2016

Hand-crafted footballs struggle to stay in the game in Mexico (AFP)

A shirtless man sits under a tree in a town in southern Mexico, stitching together a soccer ball. At the central square, several women congregate to make balls for the national pastime.

Others toil in workshops or inside their ramshackle homes: A grandmother sewing on a chair in her dirt-floor home, or a pregnant woman pulling threads in her kitchen while her six-year-old niece hands her panels of synthetic leather.

Hundreds work like this in Chichihualco, a town famous for hand-stitching colorful soccer balls for more than 50 years in the mountains of the impoverished state of Guerrero.

In its heyday, Chichihualco made the balls that were kicked around on the pitches of Mexico’s first-division clubs, and those used by the national team.

However, competition from Asia, emigration to the US and drug trafficking have relegated Chichihualco’s soccer balls to amateur recreational sales.

Read the rest and see photos at Daily Mail

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