This week Espanyol’s stadium in Barcelona played host to La Liga’s event showcasing its new technologies to a room full of sports industry professionals.

Those in attendance gathered to witness the evolution in technology that Spanish football is currently undergoing in order to create unique experiences on the field and off it to differentiate its league from the others around the world.

The La Liga Innovation Showcase shed light on the technologies that have been implemented into the world of football, such as Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and a variety of audio / visual effects that differentiate Spanish football to other leagues.

“A football match is a unique experience thanks to recent technological advances,” commented Joris Evers, La Liga’s Chief Communications Officer. “La Liga is demonstrating its leadership as we start to use these technologies to optimise scheduling of our matches.”

Below are three areas that were highlighted at the event as solutions to the problems such as attendance figures, TV viewership, and the overall experience of the game for the fan:

Calendar Selector / Sunlight Broadcast Planning

To solve the problem of Spain’s abundance of sunlight and its negative impact on the TV broadcast experience, the league has come up with the Calendar Selector product.

Calendar Selector’s mission is to maximize and increase stadium attendance and TV viewership through the incorporation of machine learning & algorithms that consider aspects like historical viewing, data of the attendees, and over 65 more variables to recommend the most favourable timing possible for matches.

Thanks to 3D reconstructions of La Liga stadiums, and the addition of “Sunlight” software, the areas with sun or shade are able to be recognized and henceforth their impact on the fans, players, and television image; sunlight software and calendar selector go hand in hand to deliver the optimal timing for a match and further satisfy the different stakeholders of La Liga.

Virtual Reality

Already being tested in other sports like the NBA, La Liga was next in line to experiment with virtual reality using Samsung Gear headsets. This approach is being tested in different locations of the Spanish department store El Corte Ingles where fans can enjoy the feeling of being inside a stadium and can watch their favourite players walk into the stadium, the dressing room, and onto the pitch – different views that link the fan and and the athlete to another level.

Replay 360 & Mediacoach

38 different cameras are installed inside the stadium, and give the fan different views all across the stadium, and even on the pitch, as they can observe the play through the eyes of the player. Additionally, ambient microphones are installed all along the stadium, and automatically turn on to recreate a more vivid noise for the TV viewer.

Noticeably, La Liga is using innovative techniques to stand out in technology and include it in the world of football, epitomizing its slogan, “it’s not football, it’s La Liga.”