ADIB Cup 2025–26 Final

We designed the lighting for the ADIB Cup 2025–26 final in Abu Dhabi. The brief called for a rig that read cleanly on broadcast while holding atmosphere for the live audience — two requirements that pull in opposite directions.

The solution was a selective colour palette drawn from the tournament’s identity and a plot structured around camera angles rather than venue sight-lines. We produced the full technical drawing set — plans, sections and rigging plots to scale — and pre-visualised the rig so the approach was confirmed before a single fixture went up.

The match. The ADIB Cup is the UAE League Cup — a fourteen-club knockout run by the UAE Pro League and title-sponsored by Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank. The 2025–26 edition opened on 30 August 2025 and finished at Mohammed bin Zayed Stadium on Friday 1 May 2026, kick-off 20:45, with Al Ain in purple against Al Wahda in white. Ninety minutes and extra time produced nothing; Al Wahda took the shootout 4–2 for their fourth title in the competition’s history.

The show. The ceremony was built around Emirati heritage rendered at stadium scale: a sixty-metre fort structure with fabric tents, a dhow crossing a projection-mapped pitch, and a seating bowl turned into a display surface. Around 400 lighting fixtures worked alongside lasers, pyrotechnics, twenty projectors driving the floor map, and 12,000 chair pixels. Over 500 crew delivered it, and the full set of structures cleared the pitch in eight minutes so the football could start on time.