A goalkeeper, a leather trade and a ball.

Select is the ball brand of Select Sport A/S, a Danish company headquartered in Glostrup, on the western side of Copenhagen. The company dates itself to 1947 and names as its founder Eigil Nielsen, who kept goal for the Denmark national football team. Danish Wikipedia names a second founder, Poul Ferdinand Schlie, alongside Nielsen. Olympedia, the Olympic results database, records Nielsen as a player of the Copenhagen club KB and as a member of the Denmark football team that took bronze at the 1948 London Olympics.

The company’s account of its origins, published on its Danish website in 2012 and repeated on its American website in 2015, says that footballers of Nielsen’s generation could not live from the game alone. It says he trained as a sports psychologist and worked in the shoe and leather trade, and that it was in that trade that he made the earliest Select football. In 1951, the company says, Nielsen reached an agreement with the Danish football association, Dansk Boldspil Union (DBU), to supply the balls for national-team matches. It describes that ball as having a built-in valve and no external lacing, and says the change helped the ball keep its round shape and removed the lace that players met when kicking and heading.

Select’s own timeline then follows a series of construction changes. It says footballs of the period were made from sections of cow leather, that designs built from long strips of leather came next, and that in 1962 Select presented a ball built from 32 panels. English Wikipedia describes that pattern as 12 black pentagons and 20 white hexagons. The company says it brought the same panel construction to handball at the start of the 1970s and that in 1974 it moved from cow leather to a hand-sewn ball in synthetic leather. Its milestone list adds that the Danish Handball Federation (DHF) chose Select as its official ball supplier in 1957, and that its laceless football was used at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.

Those milestones are the company’s own, and the brand’s heritage is told largely through them: a goalkeeper’s ball, a federation agreement, and a sequence of changes to how a ball is cut, stitched and inflated. The match ball that carries the line today is called the Brillant Super, and the company’s Danish history ties that name to Nielsen’s original design.

Pakistan, handball and a German sister brand.

Select’s balls are made outside Denmark. The company’s 2012 Danish history and its 2015 American history both say they are produced in Pakistan by Anwar Khawaja Industries (AKI), and Danish Wikipedia also records that the balls are made in Pakistan while the head office stays in Glostrup. The company says the stitchers and their families receive free medical care, and their children schooling, through a programme it calls SAHEP.

Handball has been a second home for the brand. The company’s timeline says the Spanish top division, Liga ASOBAL, chose Select as its official handball supplier in 2005, and that in the same year the International Handball Federation (IHF) appointed it to supply balls for World Championship and Olympic tournaments. English Wikipedia says Select balls are used in Olympic handball, at the World Championship and in the Danish, Swedish and Spanish men’s leagues, and lists club and national-team handball sponsorships in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany and Portugal.

In the United States the brand is sold through a subsidiary, Select Sport America, which its 2015 website located in Alpharetta, Georgia. On 9 April 2015 the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) announced a five-year agreement naming Select the “Official Soccer Ball of the NJCAA”. Under it, the association said, soccer-playing member colleges would use the Super or Brillant Super match ball in the regular season and the Super in the postseason, with the deal running through the fall of 2019. On 16 April 2018 the National Premier Soccer League (NPSL) named Select the official match ball supplier for its 2018 season, and its announcement noted that Select supplied match balls to the Danish Superliga. The company’s American site lists an agreement with the NAIA from 2012 and an extension in 2015.

A second ball brand sits inside the group. On 25 May 2018 the Bundesliga’s website published a release announcing that Derbystar, a ball maker from Goch in Germany’s Lower Rhine region, would supply the official match ball of the Bundesliga and 2. Bundesliga from the 2018–19 season. The release, quoting both the league body DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga and Derbystar, describes Derbystar as part of the Danish sports equipment manufacturer Select Sport A/S. The ball in that agreement carries the Derbystar name rather than Select’s, so the Danish parent reached the top German leagues under its German brand.

The company’s own pages also show how wide the range has become. Its 2012 Danish catalogue menu grouped footballs, futsal balls and handballs alongside basketballs, volleyballs, goalkeeper gloves, playing kit and a sports-care line, and English Wikipedia lists shin guards, compression garments, ball pumps and tactic boards among its accessories.

Design and documentation.

A ball or stick brand is read at very close range and in motion, so its identity has to work at small sizes and on curved or narrow surfaces. On a ball, the name is usually printed or stamped onto the cover, often with a model name and a number that lets players tell one ball from another; on felt, leather or synthetic panels the mark has to survive wear, mud and repeated impact.

Packaging carries much of the rest. Balls sold in sets often come in pressurised cans or in tubes and boxes, and the label on that container — its colour, the name and the lettering — is often what a buyer sees first in a shop, long before the ball itself is handled.

Stick and racket equipment adds another surface. Heads, shafts and handles carry logos, model names and sometimes moulded lettering, and those marks are shaped to fit narrow frames and plastic parts.

Each guide that follows sets out what can be checked about a brand — who founded it, who owns it now and how its marks have appeared — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A capitalised word and a panelled sphere.

The Select identity works with two materials: a word and a ball. The word is written in capitals across the company’s own pages — SELECT, SELECT Sport, SELECT Sport America — and the company’s histories in Danish and English refer to the brand that way throughout. It is an ordinary English adjective, and the company has kept it while adding Sport to the corporate name and America to the name of its U.S. subsidiary.

The ball is the other half. The company’s history pages present the brand through construction — leather sections, then strips, then a panelled sphere, a valve in place of lacing, and hand stitching in synthetic leather — and English Wikipedia’s article on Nielsen credits him with the pentagon-and-hexagon pattern in 1962. Danish Wikipedia names the laceless ball and the panelled ball as the things the company is known for.

The clearest written description of ball graphics inside the group comes from the 2018 Bundesliga release. It says the Derbystar match ball for the German leagues combined the classic Derbystar lettering with the Bundesliga’s red-field logo, kept a black-and-white base, and added red elements and a stripe design intended to suggest speed, with grey shading in the background. A Derbystar manager quoted in the release described the combination as joining two established brand logos on one ball.

The names of the balls are the third constant. The company’s Danish history uses Brillant Super for Nielsen’s original design, the 2015 American site listed the Brillant Super as a product line of its own, and the NJCAA’s 2015 announcement named the Super and the Brillant Super as the balls its colleges would play with. Across those documents the match ball keeps the same two-word name.

For a design guide, Select shows how a ball maker can build its brand story on construction — panels, valve, stitching and material — while keeping one short capitalised word on decades of federation and league balls. Compare it with Adidas, the German sportswear brand, and Dunlop, the rubber name that became a racket and ball brand. For this guide we use panel black, match white and signal red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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