Some of the balls used in Premiership matches may have been stitched by children in their homes, the league's official supplier, Nike, admitted yesterday.

Nike is sacking its main manufacturer of hand-stitched balls, a Pakistani company called Saga Sports, because of concerns about "significant labour compliance violations".

The US multinational said that a six-month investigation had concluded that Saga was outsourcing many of the balls to casual workers who sew them together in their homes around the city of Sialkot, near the Indian border.