Europe's big soccer tournament kicks off under LED lighting

The quadrennial month-long soccer tournament that pits Europe's top national teams against each other kicks off tonight, and with it, some new LED lighting will take the field in at least three of the eleven stadiums, including one in St. Petersburg where the high-intensity discharge (HID) lights lasted only two or three years.

Signify has over the last year replaced conventional field lighting not only in St. Petersburg — where it installed the short-lived HIDs in 2018 — but also in Budapest's Puskás Arena, and in Rome, where Italy and Turkey face off for the first game tonight at Stadio Olimpico. Switzerland and Wales will also play there in the upcoming days of the UEFA Euro 2020 tournament, postponed from last year because of the pandemic.

At all three venues Signify installed its Philips ArenaVision LED lights, as it also did at Steaua Stadium in Bucharest, which is not hosting matches but is serving as a training ground for national teams playing early-stage games at the nearby National Arena Bucharest. Those teams include Ukraine, North Macedonia, and Austria.

LED floodlights and their hefty upfront price tag compared to HID provide a number of advantages in addition to energy savings, including support for 4K ultrahigh-definition (UHD) broadcasting, slow motion replays, instant on/off, and longevity.

They can also deliver light show effects with sweeping beams. It was that capability that prompted St. Petersburg Stadium to rip out is new HID lights so soon after installing them in 2018, a Signify spokesperson told LEDs Magazine. Six teams are playing there in the first round — Russia, Finland, Sweden, Poland, Belgium, and Slovakia.

Signify did not reveal how much the stadium owners spent on the lighting.

The four venues with the new Signify floodlights did not deploy other Signify stadium lighting products, such as dynamic colors for outside and inside façades and panels, typically used to foster mood and fan excitement.

In some cases, the stadiums used a mix of vendors. For example, St. Petersburg stadium — also known as Gazprom Arena and Krestovsky Stadium — tapped another supplier for fan excitement lighting.

Such combinations are common. Back in 2018, about a year after Signify (then called Philips Lighting) installed LED field lighting and LED exterior façade lighting at Munich's Allianz Arena, lighting rival Zumtobel stepped in to add colors for  inside features. That stadium, also known as Football Arena Munich, is serving as another of the Euro 2020 hosts while Signify upgraded another location, hosting Germany, France, Portugal and Hungary in the first round.

In 2017, Signify upgraded Amsterdam's Johan Cruyff Arena to LED pitch lighting and to interior and exterior colors, using its Color Kinetics line. Amsterdam is hosting the Netherlands, North Macedonia, and Austria in the tournament's first week, sharing a group of teams with Bucharest.

Signify did not use robots to help align the field lighting in any of its new installations as it has done at Japan's Kobe Stadium and Toyota Stadium.  A Signify spokesperson told LEDs that the company has so far limited that practice to Japan.

The other cities hosting the 24-team tournament are: London, Copenhagen, Baku, Glasgow, and Seville. The other teams are: England, Croatia, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Scotland, and Spain.

London's Wembley Stadium is scheduled to host the final on July 11.

UEFA 2020 broke with the tradition of running the competition in just one country. UEFA (Union of European Football Associations — “football” is the word for “soccer” in many countries) made that decision several years ago, before the pandemic, to commemorate the tournament's 60^th year.

MARK HALPER is a contributing editor for LEDs Magazine, and an energy, technology, and business journalist ([email protected]).

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