Sports Equipment Manufacturing: Where ABB Fits

Most sports gear started as craft work: a ball stitched by hand, a ski carved from birch, a racket frame bent from strips of wood. Sports equipment manufacturing has since moved to metal and composite layups, bonded panels and, more recently, robot arms. This post traces that path from hand-stitched footballs and wooden skis, through Howard Head's metal skis and the bonded World Cup ball, to the robot-sprayed uppers that On plans to use for football boots. It also looks at where ABB robots for grinding, sanding, welding and painting could fit, which in most of these factories is still a possibility.

Men making wooden tennis racquets by hand in a workshop; place and date unknown. Photo: State Government Photographer via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

How balls, skis and rackets were made by hand

Footballs show how long hand work lasted. The Adidas Telstar used at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico was made of leather, with 32 hand-stitched panels: 12 black pentagons and 20 white hexagons. The centre of ball stitching is Sialkot in Pakistan, where sports goods makers set up in the colonial era to supply British troops, helped by timber nearby. Sialkot is still called the world's largest producer of hand-sewn footballs, and its factories make 40 to 60 million footballs a year, roughly 60 percent of world production.

The Adidas Telstar of the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, a leather ball of 32 hand-stitched panels. Photo: Shine 2010 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Skis and rackets were woodwork. In 1894 the painter Louis Sparre photographed Samppa Moilanen, a craftsman of wooden skis, outside his cottage in Paltamo, Finland, and small Finnish ski factories were still making skis from birch in the 1960s. Tennis racquet frames were bent from wood and finished at the bench by hand, as in the workshop photo above. The quality of every ski and frame depended on the person shaping it, and a workshop could only make as many as its craftsmen had hours for.

Samppa Moilanen, a craftsman of wooden skis, outside his cottage in Paltamo, Finland, in 1894. Photo: Louis Sparre / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Engineers changed the materials first. Howard Head, an aircraft engineer at the Glenn L. Martin Company, was frustrated by wooden skis after his first try at skiing in 1947. He founded Head Ski Company in 1948 and launched the Head Standard in 1950, a sandwich of aluminium and plywood that was lighter and stronger than wood; by 1955 Head was the leading ski brand in Europe and North America. As chairman of Prince Manufacturing from 1971 he designed an oversized aluminium racquet. Footballs changed much later. The 2006 Adidas Teamgeist had 14 curved panels that were thermally bonded instead of stitched.

The Teamgeist ball made for the 2006 World Cup final in Berlin, with thermally bonded panels instead of stitching. Photo: Jürgen Siebert / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Robots on sports equipment lines in 2026

The clearest robot story this year comes from footwear. Swiss brand On makes shoe uppers with LightSpray, in which a robot arm sprays a continuous filament around a last to build a one-piece upper with no seams, replacing a traditional upper process of about 200 steps. In February 2026 On opened a LightSpray site near Busan, South Korea, with 32 robots, against 4 in Zurich, able to make about 1,000 pairs a day. On 18 September 2026 On said it is entering football with Kylian Mbappé, with a first boot due in 2027, and LightSpray prototype boots have been shown. Nikkei reported on 25 September that On is working toward a fully automated system that makes a whole shoe in 15 minutes.

A robot arm built for spraying: ABB's IRB 5500 paint robot. On's LightSpray uses its own spraying robots, not ABB ones. Photo: ABB

Other gear is moving more slowly. Carbon fibre is used in bike frames, rackets, golf shafts and hockey sticks, and its layup is often still done by hand, as our post on carbon fibre composites explains. CompositesWorld lists golf clubs and shafts as the largest sports market for composites, ahead of skis and snowboards, bicycle parts, rackets and hockey sticks. In Sialkot, Forward Sports made the match balls for the 2014, 2018 and 2022 World Cups. The finishing steps, such as grinding, sanding, painting and checking parts, are the easier ones to hand to a machine.

A 2010 Cervélo RS road bike, whose frame uses carbon fibre. Photo: Ukexpat / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

I found no published ABB installation in a ski, racket, ball or golf club factory, so ABB's place here is a possibility based on what its robots already do elsewhere. An IRB 6700 grinds steel parts in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer, similar work to finishing golf club heads or ski edges. A GoFa cobot sands curved wooden panels with a Mirka sander in ABB's OmniVance finishing cell, close to the job of shaping a ski core or a wooden bat. ABB's IRB 5500 paint robots coat car bodies and could put graphics on skis, boards and helmets. Paths for jobs like these are usually planned in RobotStudio before a real part is touched.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Photo: ABB

Where sports equipment manufacturing goes next

More gear may be made on demand and closer to customers. On plans further robot factories in the United States and Europe to reduce tariffs and supply chain risk and to speed up delivery. If robots do most of the work, labour costs matter less and a factory can sit near its buyers. The same reasoning could apply to skis, rackets and bike frames, where robots that lay up composites, trim and finish parts would let makers build short runs and custom sizes. Trade is already pushing the question: in September 2026 US tariffs on Canadian imports raised fears of even higher hockey gear prices.

A GoFa cobot sands a curved wooden panel with a Mirka sander inside ABB's OmniVance finishing cell. Photo: ABB

For households the gains are fit, consistency and price. Adidas designed the bonded Teamgeist to be rounder and more uniform than a stitched ball, and a sprayed upper is built to the shape of its last every time. Home users will not run these robots, but they may one day order a ski or a racket built to their own measurements. Smaller makers still matter too. Firms such as Ogasaka in Japan make skis in their own factories, and a compact cobot cell suits a company that size better than a full robot line. Robots that play the sport are another story, told in our post on table tennis robots.

The Ogasaka ski factory in Japan, November 2024. Photo: 快速踊り子 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The open problems are variety and skills, and both drive cost. Sports gear comes in many sizes, colours and seasonal models, so robot cells must change over quickly, which favours cobots and easy programming over fixed lines. Composite layup and stitching are delicate, and soft, sticky or floppy material is still hard for robots to handle. In places like Sialkot, where hand stitching employs many people, automation also raises questions about jobs. Welding and finishing are easier first steps. ABB's GoFa Cobot Arc Welding Package, for example, lets a welder teach a seam by guiding the torch by hand, which suits small runs of metal bike frames.

Teaching a weld by hand with ABB's Easy Teach Device on the GoFa welding torch. Photo: ABB

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