India @ FIFA World Cup 2010

Source - Paul Beckett

The Wall Street Journal

The England squad at the FIFA World Cup 2010 numbers 23 players. The BBC’s crew numbers at least 122, according to this report. India, though you probably didn’t know this, has sent a team of 130.

None of them will appear on the field, however, since India did not qualify. Nor will they commentate on the games. But neither the games, nor the commentary, nor much else in South Africa would be happening without them. They are all employees of Mahindra Satyam, the information technology company that used to be known as Satyam Computer Services Ltd.

Just as every international team in the competition has its unseen ranks of arrangers, trainers, physios, and organizers to get 11 players onto the field for each game, so the Mahindra Satyam workers are the unseen crew that make the World Cup run on time.

Mahindra Satyam

The technical team of Mahindra Satyam manages the FIFA World Cup 2010 at a command center in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The company is the official IT service provider for FIFA, the international soccer federation that runs the World Cup. Mahindra Satyam won the contract in 2007 and maintained its relationship with FIFA through the meltdown of Satyam Computer Services and the resurrection of the company in the past year and a half.

(In case you missed it, Satyam’s founder B. Ramalinga Raju fiddled the books to the tune of more than $1 billion, prompting a government-organized rescue in early 2009 and subsequent sale to Tech Mahindra.) The current FIFA contract runs until after the next World Cup in Brazil in 2014, according to Dilbagh Gill, who manages the FIFA relationship for the company.

That’s why you might have noticed the Mahindra Satyam billboards at the side of match games: as part of its contract, Mahindra Satyam gets nine minutes of advertising for all 64 of the 90-minute games of the tournament, Mr. Gill told India Real Time from Johannesburg.

Part of Mahindra Satyam’s work involves accrediting some 250,000 people (not including fans) making sure that the right people have the right badges for the access that they need. It helps organize 130,000 volunteers from 40 countries. It runs a transport management system that coordinates 10,000 trips a day from a fleet of 1,000 cars, buses, trucks and vans, Mr. Gill said.

And the company makes sure that the $1 billion of “assets” at the event – flat screen TVs, mobile phones, laptops etc. – are deployed properly and returned to their proper place after the final on July 11. So far, four laptops have been misplaced out of 4,300 distributed, Mr. Gill said. FIFA’s own intranet and extranet systems also are supported by Mahindra Satyam, so it handles requests for tickets from the world’s media (there are requests pending for 38,000) and the network on which referees write their match reports after the game.

Mahindra Satyam’s 130 employees in South Africa are predominantly Indian but comprise six nationalities. There are another 50 employees around India working on the event, Mr. Gill said.

Since India’s national soccer team is not there, which team is he supporting? “I hope the U.S. does a good job this time,” Mr. Gill said. “I just became a U.S. citizen.”

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