UEFA European Championships – what can be learned about their Hybrid Model?

So ends, the first weekend of UEFA European Championships, and what a weekend! Our thoughts are with Denmark’s Christian Eriksen & his family, and it was great to see the fans at the games bringing song, support and energy to the players.

Sport, and in this instance Football (or Soccer as my dual citizen requires me to say), has long focused on a hybrid delivery. Fans at the physical location, fans gathering in venues to watch as a group, or fans choosing to watch at home on television. The model works well. It expands the capacity for the event, and while engagement can be rich with a fast-paced end-to-end game watching at home, there’s magic in having a crowd around in a hybrid venue like a pub, where it’s more interactive and experiential than watching at home alone.

Balancing spectators and safety

Welcoming live spectators to the stadiums, has been a measured approach. Each venue for EURO 2020 has a different capacity depending upon the infection percentage & percentage of vaccinated people for each host city, for games in Saint Petersburg and Baku (Russia) have confirmed capacities of 50%. Budapest (Poland) aims to host 100% of the stadium capacity, but with strict stadium entry requirements for spectators. Amsterdam (Holland), Bucharest (Romania), Copenhagen (Denmark), Glasgow (Scotland), Rome (Italy) and Seville (Spain) will be hosting 25%–45% of the stadium capacity. London has confirmed a minimum capacity of 25% for the first three group matches, and round of 16 matches and Munich (Germany) aims to host a minimum of 14,500 spectators, corresponding to approximately, 22% of the stadium capacity. As a result of the distribution of the games between countries and the reduced capacities, venues that show the game to bring larger groups of fans together are more important than ever.

What we can learn for our own hybrid events

We are all craving the opportunity to BE IN PERSON to meet with new people, make new connections, this can still happen when we leverage a similar model being used for EURO 2020 and we can improve upon the model by helping the hospitality industry following a challenging year.. Here is how:

Setup either a single, or multiple LIVE venues delivering content.
Hire smaller venues as hybrid pods, for watching specific live content, and expand it to offera unique experience with seperate workshops and social experiences
Create a social experience specifically for the online audience who can’t travel or join a pod. Allow them to meet for face-to-face virtual networking, with experiences like table topics for a connected virtual experience.
Bring ALL audiences together for a set time to share their observations, and exchange thoughts about the content each day giving those who.

Looking at the current COVID-19 Vaccination Statistics fro North America, Europe, Asia, World and Australia, we will be facing travel restrictions for many years to come, so we need to rethink the way we are doing hybrid, so that we can:

Help venues regain revenue by hiring smaller venues as lower capacity hybrid venues
Enable those who need to remain remote to do so, without pressure to attend
Enable connection in new ways, as globally we recover

beedance focuses on helping our clients understand their goals, and determine a strategy before any technologies are discussed. It is key to our mutual success that we both understanding your goals and match technologies that can help deliver the experience, engagement and results you seek.