KARACHI: Pakistan’s national football team is 200th out of 211 teams in the FIFA world rankings, but the country’s more than 200 million people will still be feeling part of the 2022 FIFA World Cup finals to be played in Doha this winter. Declining to give the exact number of footballs the company will supply for the World Cup due to restrictions from Adidas, Akhtar said it would be “not in thousands but millions.”Environmentally friendly match ballsNamed “Al-Rihla,” Arabic for “The Journey,” the official match ball for the 2022 World Cup was unveiled in March by Adidas in Doha. The soccer ball to be used in the forthcoming tournament is technically termed “thermo bonded,” which was first introduced in the 2014 World Cup. Before that, Pakistan had supplied hand-stitched soccer balls for most of the World Cups from the 1990s to 2010. Yet the national team is ranked 200th in the FIFA World Rankings.

Source: Pakistan Today July 09, 2022 06:06 UTC