B12049-A is a size 4 and it weighs 370–390 g. B11006-A is a size 5 and it weighs 310–330 g, which means the smaller ball in the carton is the heavier one, and if that reads like a typo to you then you are holding the exact assumption that turns a youth order into a return.
Size is a circumference. That is all it is.
Every useful map of soccer ball sizes by age begins with a tape measure, because the number on the label describes how far the ball goes around — 580–600 mm at size 3, 640–660 mm at size 4, 680–700 mm at size 5 — while the things a coach actually feels on a Tuesday night, the grams, the cover thickness, the way the bladder recovers after a hard strike, are decided somewhere else entirely.
Four weight classes hiding inside three sizes
Stay on 580–600 mm for a minute. Two products live there and they are not cousins.
B11064 is a size 3 at 280–310 g on a 2.7 mm PVC cover, machine stitched, built like a scaled-down match ball. B11061 sits on the same circumference at 220–240 g in 3.5 mm metallic TPU. Sixty grams apart, same label, same shelf.
A seven-year-old notices sixty grams.
She notices it in the last ten minutes of a session, when the ball stops reaching her and starts dying at her feet, and the coach notices it later in the way her plant foot never quite gets set before contact.
Now slide up to 640–660 mm, where most school programmes actually live. B11055-A: 310–330 g, 2.7 mm PVC. B11122-B: 180–200 g, EVA shell, same nominal size. That is a 130 gram gap at the midpoint of each range, and one of those is a match ball while the other is a training tool that happens to share a size number.
A spread that wide under one size label — that is not a rounding error! That is two different products wearing the same name badge.
B12049-A goes further. Thermal bonded, 4.0 mm PU leather, 370–390 g, still a size 4, and it is heavier than plenty of the size 5 balls we ship out of the same building. Then B14001, a futsal ball at 390–410 g, tops the whole table on circumference that is legally a size 4.
I have never liked the way tender documents collapse “size 4” into one line item. It flattens four products into one word, and then everybody stands around the samples in October pretending to be surprised that they behave differently.
One SKU, three age groups, and a quiet email in October
Buyers love a single-SKU order. Clean paperwork, one carton spec, one price.
A school sports office sent us exactly that last spring: 1,200 balls, size 4, logo on two panels, delivered before the September term. Tidy brief. We quoted B11055-A and asked, almost as an afterthought, what the under-nine group was using. Same ball. Splitting the order felt like admin nobody had time for.
Six weeks into term the email arrived. The little ones were toe-poking everything. The ball was running away from them, two coaches had raided the storage room for the size 2 mini balls at 170–190 g, and one PE teacher wanted to know whether we had sent the wrong product.
We had not. Nobody had specified the right one.
Who benefits from a nine-year-old learning to strike a ball that outweighs her leg?
We shipped 400 pieces of B11122-B at 180–200 g to sit beside the 800 they kept, and the complaints stopped. That is how most of these end, by the way. Not with a defect report or a claim. Just a quiet change of habit and a coach who trusts the catalogue a little less.
520 mm wearing a size 3 label
B12093 is a thermal bonded size 3 in 3.55 mm PU, 250–280 g, and its circumference is 520–550 mm. Put that next to the 580–600 mm of B11064 and the gap is not subtle. It is a small-format ball that our own catalogue files under size 3, and it will not pass a tender that wrote “580 mm minimum” into the spec.
Which is the whole point of this exercise. The millimetre column is the specification. The size number is shorthand that survives right up until money changes hands.
Where the age table earns its keep
Convention, in the order book we actually see: size 3 for the five-to-eight group, size 4 for nine-to-twelve, size 5 from thirteen up, with size 2 minis at 440–460 mm and 170–190 g doing reception-year and holiday-club work. Soccer ball sizes by age is the shortcut everyone quotes, and it holds up better than most shortcuts do.
Fine. It is the second half of the sentence that gets dropped — the part about surface, session length, bladder type and how hard the thing gets hit. A size 4 in PU leather on a sports hall floor and a size 4 in PVC on wet November grass are not interchangeable, and a futsal ball is a third animal again, which is why B14001 carries the weight it does instead of following its neighbours.
Latex bladders feel livelier and lose air faster. Butyl bladders hold pressure for months and feel wooden to a small foot. Neither fact appears in an age column, and both facts decide whether a coach re-orders in the same season.
Two ladders in one carton
Freight people think in volume, not in age groups.
The 20 mm of circumference between a size 4 and a size 5 changes how balls nest inside a master carton, and a buyer mixing three sizes usually ends up shipping less air than the buyer who insists on one SKU flat. Same line, same purchase order, three labels.
Chibe builds most of that ladder in the same plant, so a mixed order does not fracture into three shipments with three sets of documents and three arrival dates. The full range, with circumference and gram columns for every model, is on the product catalogue — including the sizes we rarely quote and the buyers who ask for them anyway.
What to send instead of an age range
An age range is a starting point, not a brief.
What survives production reads more like this: ball shape (round, mini, futsal), age group and the surface it will be used on, quantity per size, print method and panel layout, target landed price, delivery window. Six lines. It takes four minutes to write and it saves a season.
Send those through the inquiry form and put the shape, age group, quantity and target price in the message box — that is the combination that lets a factory quote something you can genuinely compare instead of something you have to re-quote in August. Private label cartons and custom panel layouts are handled on the OEM page if the artwork matters as much as the ball.
Two seperate ladders exist here: the one printed on the carton, and the one your coaches will build for themselves if you get it wrong.
Measure first. Then choose.