Fancy Designer Footballs For Sale: Forget Pigskin, Go Exotic
The market for elite footballs is booming, with Americans increasingly craving something exotic and expensive to toss around. While most families make do over Thanksgiving with something they picked up from Sports Authority, it turns out that when it comes to stitching together pigskin quality really does matter.
As Paul Cunningham, maker of handmade footballs, explains, it’s all about the look, touch and even smell of a beautiful piece of leather.
How expensive can a collectible football get? Try up to $800 or even more.
“It’s positioned as a luxury item,” Cunningham said, “and because of that, I think my customer is a person with a sense of style, a sense of appreciation for nice aesthetics, and I think it’s someone who also may have a fairly high net worth.”
The thing is, he said, football has a sense of nostalgia to it. The snap of leather, the smell of autumn, the memory of watching a game with family or hanging out on campus waiting for the game to start. It’s a sport about much more than who manages to win or lose on any given day; it’s about all those times in our lives when the game was just window dressing around the things and people that really mattered.
This is a game that’s about where you came from and who was there. For some people, investing several hundred dollars into that part of their lives seems trivial by comparison.
So where can a shopper go when they’re ready to spend a month’s rent on blown snaps?
List Price: $195.00
Ghurka prides itself on starting with French calfskin.
Regardless of whether or even why Ghurka’s Francophile approach is the best, this is a straight-down-the-line-brown football produced by a high-quality leather maker. There’s no guarantee that dropping nearly $200 on a football will make you a better player, but at least it’ll give everyone something better than Obama to talk about over dinner.
List Price: $150.00
Shinola Detroit prides itself on selling all-American products, often with all-American themes. (For those who can find their way to one of the Midwestern chain’s stores, they also make an amazing cup of coffee at their in-location cafes, giving them a Plan B in case this whole retail thing doesn’t work out.)
It’s tough to pick out a unifying theme around Shinola’s products other than “vaguely hipsyer,” but their individually cut footballs do have some traditional cachet, particularly the merlot/navy version. Although billed as “made to be used,” it still may be difficult to convince your family to chuck a several hundred dollar keepsake around for fun.
Leather Head
List Price: $130.00 and up
Leather Head was the brainchild of a man who started stitching individual baseballs and just kept right on going. These days a lot of people are impressed by Paul Cunningham’s work, including the President of the United States. The White House Mess sells Leather Head footballs, specially stamped and all, at its gift shop.
Unfortunately, you generally need to work at the White House to buy those, but you can get one of Cunningham’s many other hand-stitched balls featuring logos other than the Presidential seal. He emphasized the traditional feel of the sport that he tries to capture with his products.
“Really what I’m looking for at the end of the day is a ball that feels substantial,” he said. “I’ve used certain leathers that are gorgeous, but they’re thinnish and when you put the ball together it really feels like a very cheap toy… I want a leather that when you put that ball together it has a certain heft to it. It has a certain masculine strength to it.”
“If you want to put an $800 price tag on something like that, it better feel like it’s worth it,” he added.
Killspencer
List Price: $350.00
If Darth Vader had a football, it would look like this.
Killspencer has decided to corner the market in creepiness. This black missile belongs on a mantelpiece surrounded by stuffed deer heads, gazed upon by someone in a monogrammed robe who talks about how someday he hopes to hunt “truly dangerous game.” Even the name “Killspencer” doesn’t exactly soften that image.
But let’s not kid ourselves, this is an extraordinary looking piece of sporting equipment. Just be prepared to answer the occasional question about whether you keep any bodies stuffed in the basement.
Chanel
List Price: $195.00
For a quite modest list price, in context, the Chanel football comes branded with the infamous logo and is on sale at several of the company’s boutiques around the country. Just think how proud your World War II veteran grandfather will be when he sees you out in the yard playing catch with a football made by Chanel.
List Price: $90.00
Nike actually gets in the game among the bespoke footballs and ostrich leather works of art. Made with, according to the company’s website, “premium tacky leather” and “designed with insights from quarterbacks at every level,” this is the company’s top flight football.
Admittedly, it feels a little bit like hitting Five Guys for steak night, but let’s give credit where credit is due: Nike managed to find many different levels of quarterback to interview just for the forging of this one ball.
Plus it’s a third of the price of some of its competition.
List Price: $100.00 and up
What Big Game brings to the table isn’t just a handcrafted football, but one branded with the team of your choice. As long as that team is one of the 12 available for selection on the company's website.
It adds a little something extra in terms of color and style, although at the cost of the traditional roughneck feel that an old Handsome Dan conveys.
For the true connoisseur, Big Game offers something a little bit special. Their $400 elephant hide football is something you can almost guarantee that none of your friends will have. Still, it’s their loss, as you grab ahold of “one of the toughest leathers in the world” made by a species that’s quickly vanishing from it. After all, if you can find one to make a football out of how endangered can they really be?