In Ada, Ohio, the small town where Wilson has lived since 1955, a team of 140 unionized factory workers hand-makes the footballs.
Are you ready for some soccer?
The National Football League (NFL) kicks off on Thursday night with the defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs hosting the Baltimore Ravens, and for the 83rd consecutive year, the actual kickoff will be played with an official American-made Wilson Sporting Goods football.
The Chiefs have been to the Super Bowl four times in the past five years and are a model of consistency. But Wilson’s football and Wilson Football Factory The Ada, Ohio-based company holds the consistent record as the longest-running partnership between a professional sports organization and a sporting goods supplier.
And this all takes place in a small village in rural Ohio, 69 miles southwest of Toledo.
Wilson footballs have always been handcrafted at the Ohio Kentucky Leather Company in Chicago since the first year of production in 1941. In 1955, Wilson purchased the Ohio Kentucky Leather Company and moved manufacturing to Ada.
While not much changes in the manufacturing of footballs from year to year, the Wilson Football Factory moved to a new facility in May of this year, modernizing and expanding its space from 32,000 square feet to 80,000 square feet. The new building offers guided tours during the week and also houses a small museum documenting the history of Wilson footballs.
But while they have changed and grown, almost everything has remained the same when it comes to making the famous “Pigskin.”
“Everything is still definitely done by hand,” says Mike Springer, manufacturing engineer at Wilson Football. “We don’t have a lot of automation here. We’ve added some conveyor belts, but every ball is still hand-stitched, hand-turned, hand-strung and hand-cut by workers on-site.”
The production floor employs 140 people, an increase of 20 employees since the move to the new facility, conveniently located next door to the old one. The production floor workers are members of Local 1385 of the Chicago and Midwest Area Federation of Labor Unions.
And today, the Football Factory continues to recruit new football manufacturing talent.
“In our previous factory we were making about 2,500 footballs a day, but here we’re hoping to ramp that up to about 3,000 a day,” Springer said. “When we post a job, about 20 to 30 people apply.
“We’ve filtered the air and made it a much cleaner environment for our employees. Our employees are much happier. It’s allowed us to produce more soccer balls, increase productivity and increase production of not only leather soccer balls, but custom soccer balls and collaborative soccer balls.”
The manufacturing of footballs begins with cutting leather from Horween in Chicago, then stamping the ball with graphics, including Wilson’s nickname and “The Duke,” an NFL football nickname.
Once the graphics are complete, workers sew the ball from the inside out and turn it right side out. The ball is then filled with a bladder and laced, after which it is molded into its final shape.
After inspection, the balls are shipped to the teams and everything officially kicks off for the Made in USA football season.
“We supply the NFL with 27,000 footballs a year, and they’re already manufactured for the season,” Springer said. “Each team gets 780 footballs for the season, and each team’s equipment manager already has their balls for the season.”
Wilson Football Factory makes five different sizes of footballs for kids through professionals: a peewee size, a football for fourth through sixth graders, a middle school model, a high school and college model (the same size), and an NFL-sized ball that’s also used in the Canadian Football League.
But there will be a special production after the Super Bowl teams are selected.
“In fact, a small group of people will come in on Sunday night to watch the NFC and AFC championship games, and as soon as the winner of the game is decided that night, the team names will be engraved on the footballs,” Springer said. “Each team will be given 108 footballs — 54 on Monday and 54 on Tuesday. The equipment manager has almost two weeks to prepare the balls that the quarterbacks will use in the Super Bowl. There’s always something special going on here.”
Football has one special modernization that most fans don’t know about, or even see up close: NFL footballs have sensors sewn into the ball’s bladder that allow them to track vital statistics in real time.
So when the TV cameras are trained on the press box and you catch a glimpse of coaches intently poring over their laptops, it’s not just about the minutiae of play-calling.
“Every player has sensors under their shoulder pads,” Springer said, “there are sensors on the pylons, there are sensors on the chain gangs. They’re used to track the ball on the field and the performance of the players.”
“You can see every route the running back runs, every route the receivers run, every pass from the quarterback. Sensors send data from inside the football back to the stadium, and you can track the movement of the ball around the field.”
“If you NFL.com Next Generation Stats“You can see who the fastest players in the NFL are, who has thrown the furthest balls, and even track field goal kickers. The Dallas Cowboys kicker kicked a 66-yard field goal in a preseason game, but the sensor data showed that he could have made it from 72 yards based on the trajectory and speed of the ball.”
The sensors, supplied by Illinois-based Zebra Technologies, are a high-tech take on the old-fashioned hand-making process of making NFL footballs.
“They can actually use it to teach different route running and quarterbacks can use it to recognize the defense,” Springer added. “RPM is an important measurement for quarterbacks, so when you look at a Patrick Mahomes or a Tom Brady throwing, you see how fast the ball spins, how fast the ball is thrown, the trajectory of the ball and the consistency of the ball.”
“A lot of times in an NFL passing play, the quarterback is throwing the ball and the receiver doesn’t even turn his head to look for it. It’s all about timing patterns and how consistently you can throw the ball.”
Click here to schedule a tour of the Wilson Football Factory in Ada, Ohio.
