Hayworth Athletic

08/19/2026

New batch in the works.

08/18/2026

08/17/2026

Hayworth Athletic. Handmade Soccer Balls.

07/23/2026

Always prototyping. Always pursuing our mission to make the best balls in the world.

07/21/2026

Jack and the 152. Milwaukee.

07/13/2026

Manaus, in the Brazilian Amazon, 1932. A leatherworker from the Colombian mountains, conscripted for a war over a river port, watches men cut and sew cattle hide into footballs. He carried the stitch home.
Up ten thousand feet, to Monguí, a cold stone town that had already spent three centuries making things slowly by hand and keeping them. With his brother he built a tannery and taught the method to twelve farmers the town still calls the twelve apostles.
In 1938 they registered the ball with the government and called it Libertad. It was the first football Colombia ever entered on a register, the first with a birth certificate, and it said Monguí.
Ninety years on, the hands that still sew are mostly women’s hands. A few balls a day, against the machine’s hundreds. Monguí still sews.
The full story is the second of the Hayworth Letters. Link in bio.

07/08/2026

The American Soccer League, 1928. The New York Giants against Bethlehem Steel. On Monday the United States went out of its own World Cup, beaten 4-1 by Belgium in the round of 16. It was the fourth time in five tournaments the Americans have gone out this round. The temptation is to read a verdict into one night in Seattle. There isn’t one. Only 14 nations have reached a World Cup quarterfinal more than once without ever winning the tournament. Three of them no longer exist as countries: the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia. Four have not been back in over twenty-five years: Mexico, Hungary, Austria, Poland. That leaves seven still standing. The United States is one of them. (The others are the Netherlands, Croatia, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland – all European teams).
A soccer country is not made or broken in ninety minutes every four years. It is made on fields like the one in this photograph almost a century ago, and the ones still being played on this weekend in leagues most of the country will never hear about.
The game was here then, and it will be here long after this summer.

07/07/2026

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit, 1922.

07/04/2026

We are a land of immigrants, bound not by blood but by defiance and the will to begin again. To be American is to build an identity, not to inherit one. This year we build our American soccer identity.

07/03/2026

Hand-cut panels. Italian waxed thread. Three hours of stitching per ball.