Enhancing the experience for athletes and spectators
Enhancing the experience for athletes and spectators
From international athletics events to football tournaments, Signify has a proven track record of providing the biggest sporting events with world-class lighting solutions to give fans and athletes the ultimate experience.
Top sports teams and venues all over the world rely on Signify to provide innovative, high-quality, and sustainable lighting solutions. Every solution is tailored to unlock the full potential of light for each sport, from optimizing grass growth and creating an immersive experience at football stadiums to helping athletes maintain peak performance in Formula 1.
So as the preparations are underway for the Formula 1 Dutch Grand Prix at the iconic Circuit Zandvoort, let’s take a closer look at some of the ways that athletes and venues use light to stay in the lead by continuously investing in the future of sports.
Using light to enhance performance
Since entering into partnership with the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team in 2024, Signify has learned a great deal about the intensity of the Formula 1 racing schedule and the unique challenges that drivers face to achieve and maintain peak performance.
Getting a good night’s sleep is essential for your brain and body to function healthily, and since sleep patterns are intrinsically linked to light exposure, they can be influenced using artificial light—and that’s where Signify comes in.
Creating the ultimate experience
Given its proximity to Signify’s High Tech Campus headquarters and lengthy association with the company, Philips Stadion—home to the local football team, PSV Eindhoven—has wowed fans with several important innovations in sports lighting over the decades. The team is known for its commitment to investing in the future of the sport.
Back in 2015, PSV became the first Eredivisie team to upgrade its stadium lighting to LED, installing more than 250 Philips ArenaVision floodlights. These powerful luminaires comply with the strictest broadcasting standards to enable flicker-free and super-slow-motion replay, ensuring that TV viewers don’t miss any of the action.
Light, sound, and video are also fully integrated into the football match experience, with special light effects to celebrate a goal being scored, for example. As an added benefit, the LED lighting system has reduced energy consumption and maintenance by about a third compared with the stadium’s previous system.
Optimizing the playing field
More recently, in 2024, the Eindhoven football team updated its stadium lighting to add another Signify innovation: a specialized lighting solution to ensure that the grass in its stadium can grow and recover under ideal conditions.
The system combines high-performance Philips GreenPower LED grow lights with infrared lamps to provide optimal illumination, guided by data collected through sensors that continuously measure environmental factors such as daylight, temperature, and humidity.
A central control system processes the sensor data to determine how much light and heat the grass needs and then adjusts accordingly. In addition to improving the condition and quality of the playing field, the efficiency of the system has resulted in energy savings of 50% over the previous lighting system.
Innovation behind the scenes
Away from the action on the field, Philips Stadion uses a variety of other Signify lighting solutions to ensure a positive experience by providing a safe and well-connected space for athletes and visitors.
Philips UV-C disinfection lighting is installed in the team’s changing rooms, medical facilities, and training spaces to safeguard player and visitor health. When combined with basic ventilation, these luminaires can inactivate 99.99% of harmful pathogens in the air.
Special events and guests are often hosted in the stadium’s Guus Hiddink Room, which not only offers a spectacular view of the field, but also features full-color and tunable white LED luminaires from Color Kinetics. These lights can totally alter the room’s ambiance—perfect for creating the right atmosphere for meetings and presentations.
The stadium also boasts Signify’s Trulifi technology, providing a lightning-fast and secure wireless Internet connection for journalists, supporters, and business guests even when the venue is at full capacity.
A top-tier stadium with lighting to match
At Philips Stadion, lighting does far more than illuminate the field—it enhances every aspect of the sporting experience, from safeguarding players’ health and ensuring pristine pitch conditions to creating unforgettable moments for fans.
Signify’s pioneering lighting solutions play a key role in providing the ultimate stadium experience, and Philips Stadion stands as a shining example of how innovation can transform not just how we see the game, but how we experience it.
Signify (Euronext: LIGHT) is the world leader in lighting for professionals, consumers and the Internet of Things. Our Philips products, Interact systems and data-enabled services, deliver business value and transform life in homes, buildings and public spaces. In 2023, we had sales of EUR 6.7 billion, approximately 32,000 employees and a presence in over 70 countries. We unlock the extraordinary potential of light for brighter lives and a better world. We have been in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index since our IPO for seven consecutive years and have achieved the EcoVadis Platinum rating for four consecutive years, placing Signify in the top one percent of companies assessed. News from Signify can be found in the Newsroom, on X, LinkedIn and Instagram. Information for investors is located on the Investor Relations page.
