Photo: Google Gemini · AI-generated
A small city with an outsized share of a global market
Sialkot is a mid-sized city in Punjab, Pakistan, that most people have never heard of and have almost certainly used something from. It’s estimated to produce around seventy percent of the footballs used anywhere in the world — not just replicas and training balls, but official match balls for the sport’s biggest stage. Forward Sports, a factory there, has built the official ball for four consecutive World Cups: Brazuca in 2014, Telstar 18 in 2018, Al Rihla in 2022, and this year’s Trionda.
That’s not luck, and it’s not cheap labour finding a niche. FIFA and adidas don’t hand the World Cup ball contract to whoever bids lowest — they hand it to whoever can guarantee that every single unit, across millions of units, behaves identically under conditions nobody can fully simulate in a lab. Sialkot has spent four decades earning that guarantee.
What a factory town teaches you before you ever write a line of code
A meaningful part of exbisoft’s team — including our founders — grew up in and around Sialkot. Not working in that industry directly, but close enough to absorb something from it: the expectation that “it mostly works” isn’t a finished product, and that consistency at scale is a discipline, not a talent. You don’t get four consecutive World Cup contracts by being inspired. You get them by being the same amount of careful on unit four million as you were on unit one.
We didn’t set out to build a software company around a football-manufacturing mindset. But when you grow up around an industry that treats “does this hold up, every time, under real conditions” as the only question worth asking, it’s hard to build software any other way.
Consistency is the whole job
The parallel isn’t that writing software is like stitching a ball — the actual work is nothing alike. It’s that the standard is the same: not “does the demo look good,” but “does this still work correctly the two-hundredth time, three years from now, when nobody who built it is in the room to explain the edge case.” That standard doesn’t come from a slide deck. It’s easier to hold when you’ve watched it modeled somewhere else first.
Still watching from here
We’ll be watching the rest of this World Cup the way most people do — for the football. But every time a commentator mentions how true the ball flies, we’ll think of the specific stitching floor a few hours from where a fair number of us grew up, and the very unglamorous decades of consistency that got it there.