BURNLEY FC
HISTORIC TURF MOOR BECOMES ONE OF THE MOST DIGITALLY ADVANCED STADIUMS IN EUROPEAN FOOTBALL
Aim:
ADI were invited to provide a complete consultation for Burnley FC’s Turf Moor stadium that focused on improving the experience for fans, whilst also creating a more attractive commercial platform for the club partners, both local and national.
The overhaul has seen over 1,100 m2 of displays installed within and outside of the stadium, providing a huge digital canvas for the club to engage with fans and activate commercial partnerships.
Services:
Consultancy
Design Engineering
Digital Signage
LED Screen Manufacture
LED Screen Installation
Live Venue
Service and Maintenance
Production
Matchday Services
Project Management
Visualisation
Burnley, UK
Platform for the Future
The hugely ambitious project has transformed every part of the matchday experience for fans, from their approach to the stadium, entering the turnstiles and through to the experience from their seat in the stands. It’s also revolutionised the club’s promotional platform, providing a massively enhanced platform for their national and local commercial partners.
Turf Moor is now one of the most digitally advanced stadiums in Europe. There are over 30 installations throughout the stadium and over 1,100m2 of ADI’s proprietary LED screen panels both within the stadium bowl and on the outside of the stadium.
The solution can be broadly split into three main areas:
Within the Bowl
We’ve added new UEFA compliant digiBOARD digital perimeter, supported by a second tier of camera facing LED in many areas to maximise broadcast commercial value. There are multiple layers of LED ribbon around the stands, digital signage above vomitory stairwells and a small screen on the halfway line. Two new superwide 32:9 screens provide live match coverage and additional engaging content. What was once a busy mish-mash of signage is now a clean digital platform that the club can control and activate as they see fit.
32:9 LED Screen
32:9 LED Screen
UEFA Spec DigiBOARD
Multiple layers of LED Ribbon around 3 stands
Halfway Line Screen
LED Ribbon
On the Outside of the Stadium
We’ve added a number of different digital elements in the form of screens, ribbons and wraps around the main entrances, turnstiles and club shop. There are also new screens in the matchday fanzone as well as an advertising screen on the busy crossroads outside the stadium that the club sell commercially on outside of matchdays.
Within the Stands
We’ve added a powerful full new IPTV system to the redeveloped hospitality areas and we’ve also completely refitted corporate boxes with full video conferencing facilities, adding value to the non-matchday corporate services that the club are able to offer.
Creative Consultancy
Home to the club since 1883, Turf Moor is an enduring and iconic part of Burnley FC’s character. Following the acquisition of the club by ALK Capital in late 2020, the development and modernisation of this classic stadium was high on the priority list.
The process has very much been a collaborative one. Burnley have a long-term vision to introduce flexibility into the usage of the venue, but more important was to add value to the fan experience and to encourage more interactions through technology.
ADI were invited to provide a complete consultation on the stadium, both inside and outside, with a pretty broad brief that focused on improving the experience for fans whilst also creating a more attractive commercial platform for the club partners, both local and national.
From there, we created visualisation videos which helped give Burnley’s team an idea of the impact each of the options would have as well as seeing how they’d look all together.
Working with ADI, it became much more of a collaborative process. Originally, we wanted something that changed the look and feel of Turf Moor, giving us that starting point of the journey, but, after discussions with ADI, the great thing was how they enlightened us in terms of the potential of what we could really achieve.
ADI’s visualisation videos for the digital transformation of Burnley Football Club, produced during the consultation process.
ADI Product
The scale of the Turf Moor project is vast – all in all we’re installed around 1,100m2 of LED product – and all of it designed and manufactured by ADI. Aside from the digital perimeter – which is ADI’s UEFA-compliant digiBOARD solution – every screen comes from our new MT series.
MT is a revolutionary new lightweight tile that is slimmer, more efficient, greener and easier to install and maintain than anything else on the market. It’s made the installation far simpler and is particularly suited for these types of non-standard installations.
Creative and Live Venue Delivery
ADI’s Studios Division provide a full remote production service, encompassing both creation and management of content across the whole platform.
Burnley is the latest club to join ADI’s Live Venue broadcast network, so matchday content is delivered as a full live event production from ADI’s galleries in Preston over dedicated fibre lines.
On a matchday our team create and manage everything. This includes a full pre-match programme that makes use of all of the displays within the stadium bowl to particular effect – particularly in the pre-match build up as the teams take to the field to a huge audio-visual show.
"We’ll typically operate everything on a match day, but then the club also have the ability to manage all different types of content on the screen themselves. I think this is where the value lies for the club – we’ve delivered one platform on which we can deliver anything they want throughout the screens in the stadium."
Single Platform control
One of the keys to ADI’s longterm success is that we don’t just provide hardware. The 1,100m2 of LED at Turf Moor is just the (very) visible part of a full stack solution encompassing technology, content and services from ADI’s Displays, Studios and Services Divisions.
Driving the screens is a powerful, fully integrated control solution designed specifically for the club. It encompasses both traditional signage technologies as well as the type of high powered media servers that you’d find driving massive live concert and event productions.
It was really important for us to provide Turf Moor with a fully integrated control solution that allows for control both granular management of content whilst also being able to co-ordinate content across every screen. We see so many stadia with multiple digital platforms all delivered by different companies that don’t work with one another.
Our solution allows the club to view all of the digital screens and signage around the stadium as a single platform, creating simple continuity of message to fans, whether that’s club communication or the ability to sell moments of exclusivity across the whole stadium to their commercial partners.
High Value Advertising Platform
The new platform has revolutionised the value of Burnley’s advertising platform. Within the bowl, the camera-facing digiBOARD perimeter are in world leading 6mm pixel pitch, and the secondary row of signage around most of the pitch adds increased value to key partner brands wishing to target the global Premier League TV audience.
Elsewhere, the multiple levels of ribbon and also space on the superwide stadium LED screens has allowed Burnley to massively upscale the value of packages they can offer to local brands who wish to target the audience within the stadium. The whole platform adds huge value to the venue on non-matchdays, providing a flexible canvas with multiple touchpoints that can be configured any way the club wish.
Outcome:
The introduction of new screens and integrated LED technology has helped Burnley supporters feel more connected to the match than ever before, whilst helping the club to unlock its commercial potential to national and international brands, and also provide local businesses with uplifted branding.
Whilst most clubs have fragmented digital platforms with multiple operators and disparate control systems, Turf Moor will be able to easily manage content across every screen within the stadium, enabling far more effective management of stadium-wide communication and promotion; achieving it’s ambitions to be an effective multi-use venue, in addition to a leader in fan-engagement.
It’s been amazing to work with ADI – they guided us through the whole process. They didn’t sell us a particular idea, but listened and took on board what it was that we were aiming to do at Turf Moor...the fact that they could describe and help us see those ideas in action, including the how you get there and what steps you take, was vital in making this a success.
