Inside the Sherrin Football Factory and the lifecyle of the Australian icon
Iconic Sherrin footballs are used every day all across Australia. But where do they come from? And what happens to them after AFL games? We take you behind the scenes to find out.
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They come out of a quiet street in Melbourne’s east, get kicked about 200 times and retire from the big leagues to be bumped down a ladder of footy clubs to a local level.
There is no more iconic sporting ball in Australia than a new Sherrin and its life cycle comes together with care that serves players at all levels.
STITCHING TOGETHER
On average, 200 leather Sherrins come out of a factory in Keysborough, about 27km southeast of Melbourne’s CBD, every day.
And the warehouse pumps out 2.5m footies – leather and synthetic – and Spalding basketballs a year.
The top quality leather Sherrins are put together by hand in a 22 degree, temperature controlled workshop in footy heartland.
But it really starts in Queensland, when leather from the belly of Australian cows is tanned red or yellow.
Any offcuts not used to make balls are repurposed, sent to fill odd jobs like filling in furniture.
Given the rise in games later in the day – any AFL game starting after 3pm uses a yellow footy – experienced Sherrin workers believe six out of 10 balls stitched together these days are yellow.
The tanned leather is cut into four panels and sent to the printing room out the back.
While the factory doesn’t smell of deep leather, the back room does smell of ink, and every individual colour on the ball needs to be printed carefully with a stencil, before the next colour is added.
That means specialty footies used for Sir Doug Nicholls Round or Gather Round take meticulous care.
When this masthead visited the factory, a special colour of ink was in use for a new addition to AFLW ball this coming season.
The panels are stitched together on machines that would look at home in a arts and craft classroom from the 1970s, with Sherrin happy to stick to tried and true methods.
Balls are stitched and stapled to keep them in shape, then hammered to wear down the sharp stitching.
Then the demanding work begins, with workers grinding the stitching to ease it down on poles and worked inside out to round off the ball.
A physio comes out to the factory every Wednesday to help ease the surprisingly physical burden on the workers.
A special, secret stitch is applied to one section of the Sherrin, a task that is kept in house so much so that it was not allowed to be captured by our cameras.
Once worked into shape, a bladder is inserted and the laces stitched like a shoe, the ball pumped up to 69 kPa and put into the brand’s iconic paper bags to go out.
The 200 balls made in Keysborough each day include match balls and some others done for promotions or sponsors.
KICKING ON
Once in their bags, footies are off to clubs.
AFL clubs can put in an order to the Sherrin factory at any point of the year.
Hawthorn is known as the most active, calling on new balls about once a month, with Richmond a close second.
The Tigers caused a minor stir on the factory floor a couple of years back when they asked for their footies to come rounder, with the point of the ball bashed, so it felt kicked in.
The workers did similar with other balls until Fremantle complained that their Sherrins were shorter than usual, so now clubs all get the same regulation size.
Game day balls are sent to the home team each week and need to be kicked in at training – usually the club’s captain’s run the day before a match – to AFL specifics before they are used on match day.
Every game has six balls in action, stored in bags behind the goals when not being used.
Before round 14 this year, on average 209.2 kicks and 148.6 handballs are completed in every AFL match, so an individual Sherrin’s time on the big stage is limited to 34.9 kicks and 24.8 handballs per ball before their one game is up.
Some footies are kept for milestones or promotional acts, but otherwise staff from the home club scoop them up and take them to training.
Like most things in AFL land, the sponsors on the Sherrin are vital, with many clubs having ‘ball sponsors’, who are not only used on balls at home matches, but need to be represented when posting training photos on social media.
Clubs use match balls at training and filter them down.
Essendon’s game balls are used by the AFL team, then the VFL Bombers, the club’s academy and once kicked enough, get sent off to local clubs in Melbourne’s north west.
Geelong also hands out its Sherrins at random to local clubs.
St Kilda measures out its balls, introducing about half-a-dozen newer footies into the training rotation every 10 days or so.
The old ones slowly migrate to Moorabbin's indoor facilities, where they are booted up against the walls until they are used up.
Even if a Sherrin is loved enough that it breaks down, the cycle may not end.
Up to 60 balls are sent back in to the factory for tender love and care and refurbished, to be kicked again.
Each ball is stamped with a date on the inside of the leather – a practice that has always been done – and when one ball was opened up, the stamp was from the mid-1950s.
For some of us, a good Sherrin feels like it lasts forever.
FOOTY MYTHS
There are a few myths about the Sherrin that always circulate around the outer at any footy ground.
When a commentator claims there is ‘something wrong with the ball’ after players blast a few out on the full, Sherrin makers scoff.
Sure, a bladder can be slightly out of shape after a lot of kicking in, but during an AFL game, when the ball is reasonably fresh, that is extremely rare.
One other myth came from one of the greats, when Leigh Matthews suggested in 2009 that a yellow ball is more slippery than a red one.
“Because we are playing night games with yellow footballs and there are quite often dewy conditions, the yellow balls are a bit more slipper than the red ones,” he said then.
“I have no idea how it could be done, but you have to ask the question: is there something feasible that can be done to make the ball easier to handle that doesn’t affect the kicking?”
Sherrin staff are adamant, the yellow ball is no more slippery than the red and dew at night is to blame.
But the grip and finish on the footy’s leather has been discussed between Sherrin and the AFL on and off over the years, to understand if there is a way to add grip without changing how the ball behaves.
Nothing has changed on that front, but different finishes on the leather have been looked at over the years.
Even if the leather treatment hasn’t changed, one major change has come to the football, with a microchip added to the AFLW ball for ball tracking purposes.
The chip sits on the inside of the bladder in the ball, as far away from the boot as it can get, so it doesn’t impact kicking the thing.
Originally published as Inside the Sherrin Football Factory and the lifecyle of the Australian icon
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