No intimidating ‘Yellow Wall’ of fans, but viewers heard soccer crowd’s roar. A new normal?
Even sophisticated soccer fans might have done a double take when they tuned into Tuesday’s game between German giants Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich.
Dortmund’s 81,000-seat stadium was empty, devoid of its intimidating “Yellow Wall” of fans; but TV viewers still heard the roar of a crowd, whistles protesting referees’ calls, and familiar chants from fans of both teams.
Turns out all the noise was artificial. It was piped into the FOX broadcast by creative audio engineers tasked with producing an exciting soundtrack to enhance the at-home viewing experience for sports-craved fans during the coronavirus pandemic.
It is the sports equivalent of the sitcom laugh track, except games have no scripts, so sound experts are forced to predict the crowd’s reaction as action unfolds and provide fake noise accordingly.
This could become the new normal for the foreseeable future as Major League Soccer and other U.S. pro and college leagues finalize plans on rebooting interrupted seasons or kicking off new ones in empty venues.
MLS, which Thursday announced it would begin allowing small-group training, is expected to resume its season in Orlando, with teams playing fan-free games at the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex. The NBA has explored a similar plan. Players and league staff would be kept in a bubble, sequestered at nearby resorts. The National Women’s Soccer League announced Wednesday that all nine teams will play a monthlong tournament behind closed doors in Salt Lake City from June 27 to July 26.
On May 16, the Bundesliga became the first major soccer league in Europe, and the second in the world behind South Korea’s K-League, to restart amid the pandemic. German fans call the new games “Geisterspeile,” which translates to “ghost games.” Network and league executives from every continent have been watching closely.
One prerequisite was playing all matches in empty stadiums, with a maximum of 213 people including players, coaches, staff and broadcasting crews. Players are tested twice a week for the coronavirus. Substitute players must wear masks and sit six feet apart. Only socially distant goal celebrations are permitted. Game balls are disinfected at halftime. Postgame interviews are done virtually.
“Matches without stadium spectators are not an ideal solution for anyone. However, during this crisis, which threatens the existence of some clubs, it is the only option to preserve the leagues in their present form,” Bundesliga CEO Christian Seifert said in a statement earlier this month.
“There is no noise, it is very, very strange,” Dortmund coach Lucien Favre said after their first game back, a 4-0 win over Schalke. “You shoot at the goal, you make a great pass, you score and nothing happens.”
Nevertheless, the fan and media reviews have been positive.
All eyes on the Bundesliga
“The Bundesliga has set the standard,” said FOX analyst Alexi Lalas. “It was that initial canary-in-a-coal-mine-type situation and if you were to grade them, you’d give them an ‘A.’ What it does is sets up this competition because everyone is watching, not just other soccer leagues. All other sports are watching how it is done.
“It’s been interesting to see the tweaks and enhancements week to week. As other leagues start to come back, they’re going to be held to the standard the Bundesliga has, whether it’s the tarping of stadiums, enhanced crowd volume, the protocol — they put out a 50-page protocol with the way to do things. It’s going to force people to get creative and all leagues will want to one-up each other.”
To create the illusion of fans in the stands, Borussia Mönchengladbach invited supporters and opposing fans to purchase $20 life-size cardboard cutouts of themselves to be placed throughout Borussia-Park during matches. More than 20,000 have been ordered so far. The money generated through the “Stay at Home. Be in the Stands” initiative is being donated to local charities.
Korean baseball teams, some Hungarian soccer teams and Australian rugby teams are also using cardboard cutout fans.
Other teams and leagues are exploring virtual reality graphics to superimpose images of fans onto screens and try to replicate a stadium experience.
Stadium-wide Zoom fan gatherings
Danish team AGF Aarhus, which resumes its season against rival Randers FC on Thursday, is going a step further. It will convert its Ceres Park stadium into a “virtual stadium” by allowing up to 10,000 real fans to beam into the game for free through video conferencing platform Zoom.
Fans will join one of 22 virtual grandstands, their faces will be visible on large sideline video boards and their voices will also be heard by players on the field. They will be divided into Zoom breakout rooms, where they can chat with other fans during the match and choreograph chants.
Aarhus is not the first club to link fans to empty stadiums by allowing them to support their team while watching from home.
In 2013, due to lingering political turmoil following the Arab Spring, the Tunisian government decided for security reasons that all professional soccer games would be played without any live audience. One team, Hammam-Lif, with the help of its ad agency, came up with an ingenious plan to import fans’ energy into the stadium.
A mobile application called “The 12th Man” connected each fan watching on TV at home to 40 giant speakers inside the stadium. Users would tap on sound icons to produce cheering, clapping, drumming, singing. The more they tapped, the louder the sound in the stadium. During a critical playoff game, 93,000 fans used the app and filled the team’s 12,000-seat stadium with unprecedented crowd noise. Hammam-Lif won the game.
History of empty stadium sports
There have been many other examples of closed-door sporting events in recent years. Almost all were for security reasons or for disciplinary reasons.
On Apr. 29, 2015, the Baltimore Orioles hosted the Chicago White Sox in an empty Camden Yards because of unrest following the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who was arrested and died while being transported in a police van. It was the first closed-door game in MLB history.
In 2007, many Italian teams played without spectators after a policeman was killed during fan riots at a match between Palermo and Catalina. Two years later, Juventus had to play without fans after their fans yelled racial slurs at Inter Milan forward Mario Balotelli.
The 2009 Mexican league season included a round of games behind closed doors during the H1N1 swine flu outbreak. In 2018, FC Barcelona played Las Palmas without fans due to violence surrounding political unrest.
Even high school sports have been subjected to empty stadiums. On Oct. 29, 2007, Miramar High and Flanagan High resumed a football game without 54 suspended players (including Seattle Seahawks quarterback Geno Smith) at empty Lockhart Stadium in Fort Lauderdale after a bench-clearing brawl a month earlier.
In all those cases, the games were played in silence. Now, as sports resume during the COVID-19 crisis, the leagues and networks face two options: Televise the games with natural sound, with players’ and coaches’ shouting echoing through cavernous empty stadiums or use audio tracks with recorded stadium atmosphere. German T.V. networks are offering fans both options.
Although purists have scoffed at the idea of fake fan noise and artificial atmosphere, Lalas is fascinated by it.
“I said from the start that I wanted the enhanced crowd noise manufactured and piped in,” he said. “The ear wants what the ear wants. There is a soundtrack to sports and the stark, eerie, raw-type environment we saw initially, while there is an initial curiosity with it, I think it gets old real quick. This past weekend, hearing that familiar sound…sports often is comfort food and we want that playing and it was really nice to hear.”
It may even lead to game-day innovations for the future as sound and video engineers figure out how to augment the fan experience.
“Of course, it’s a better feeling and experience to have 80,000 people in a stadium, like at Dortmund, but right now that is not possible, so I am happy at least we can watch football,” said inter Miami’s German-American forward Jerome Kiesewetter. “I know how much people in Germany have missed it. People are getting very creative when there’s circumstances like this, whether it’s with cardboards or Zoom.”
As MLS and the NBA move toward resuming play at ESPN Wide World of Sports, a venue on Disney property used primarily for youth sports, the leagues and affiliated networks are working on ways to ensure the presentation of the games doesn’t have a Mickey Mouse feel.
“They’re talking about these stand-alone, World Cup-type tournaments in venues that aren’t stadiums and you risk looking – dare I say it – minor league or high school or preseason-esque relative to what the Bundesliga is doing,” Lalas said.
“The production and optics are really, really important right now. They will have to dress it up. It’s a problem for like a league for MLS, which is constantly striving for and craving relevancy. You don’t want to be perceived, even coming back in these unusual times, as less than major league in terms of that production. That’s not a good look from a business and brand perspective. There are no perfect solutions. You’re just looking for the least-bad solution to a difficult situation.”
This story was originally published May 28, 2020 at 2:06 PM.