Oooops! – German Football Team’s Perimeter LED Displays Trashed As Fans Invade Pitch After Historic Win
April 18, 2024 by Dave Haynes
Hat Tip Craig Denholm for posting about this on Linkedin …
LED ribbon displays – more formally known, I think, as perimeter screens – are common along the sidelines of professional football (soccer) playing surfaces around the globe. They are, by necessity, ruggedized to deal with balls being kicked at them, and players taking out frustrations by kicking the screens.
But they’re not so ruggedized that they can handle a pitch invasion involving 1,000s of wildly happy fans.
This past weekend, Bayer Leverkusen officially won the Bundesliga, Germany’s top pro league. It was the club’s first league championship in its 120-year history, so the fans were more than a bit excited. At the end of the title-clinching match, many of them left their seats and headed for the pitch – clambering over the perimeter screens and inadvertently (one hopes) beating the hell out of them.
These screens were added in 2019, so they are arguably approaching the end of operating life – though maybe they last a lot longer because the number of operating hours would be relatively low (maybe 50 matches per season?) when compared to screens running 24/7 for ads and other purposes.
I don’t know how this sort of thing is avoided, though Denholm – whose Scottish company sells this stuff – says he advocates mounting units on the front walls of the stands, so they’re not just resting on the ground and looking like things that can be hurdled.
This is what the field looked like once the stands emptied …
Wow! Who do they think they are? English? Bwahahahaha!