Thai soccer ball makers put stamp on World Cup
(iht.com)
Updated: 2006-07-03 11:49


"There are still improvements to be made," said Akkaphan Rammanee, an Adidas manager who looks after working conditions.

Adidas has outsourced production of the ball to Molten, and Akkaphan said she was in discussions to reduce the temperature in the factory.

Temperatures outside creep into the 32-degree Celsius, or 90 Fahrenheit, range regularly here. But this has not stopped employees of the factory from playing soccer on a basketball court at lunchtime. They organized a Molten Cup in which teams from different divisions of the factory play each other. Strikingly, however, they do not use the +Teamgeist ball for their matches.

"We make quality balls, so they should be used in important matches," said Wichet Boonma, who works in the packing and inspection part of the factory. But he paused after offering this self-effacing answer and glanced over at the ragged ball the workers use for their matches. "If given the chance, I'd like to play with the World Cup ball," he said.

CHONBURI, Thailand: On the field and on the sidelines, the World Cup is dominated by men. But in the sweltering factory here where the official World Cup soccer balls are cut, stitched and glued, it is a woman's world.

Only about a dozen of the 250 workers who assemble the Adidas-brand balls here are men. And Akiyoshi Kitano, the Japanese supervisor of the factory, said it is better that way. When it comes to production goals, women are much better at handling the ball, he said.

"The ladies are more skillful," Kitano said, adding that their fingers are more nimble and their work more precise.

Of all the logistics involved in the World Cup - the ticket sales, the advertising, the security - you could argue that the workers in this factory about two hours southeast of Bangkok have the most important job. The tournament could conceivably proceed without groundskeepers, ticket punchers or marketing executives. But with no ball to kick around, there would not be much of a game.

Perhaps in a small way, then, this makes the employees who churn out what Adidas calls +Teamgeist balls the heroes of the game, albeit meagerly paid ones. They earn about $200 a month including overtime, less than the price of some seats at World Cup matches.

A hero's welcome is what Wipa Dumklang, 30, who helps package the balls in the factory, recently received when she returned to her rice-growing village in northeastern Thailand and told her family about her job.

"Villagers came up to me and said, 'You made the ball for the World Cup,'" Wipa said.


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