"The coolest football pitch ever" at the roof top of the Bikini Mall in Berlin during European Nike Football X Cup final – made by cutting-edge glass floor technology of ASB. Leading squash court manufacture ASB has taken its pioneering glass floor concept successfully into the world’s most popular sport football.
Earlier this month, Nike installed “the coolest football pitch ever” on the roof top of the Bikini Mall in Berlin for the finals of the German Nike Football X Cup and the European Nike Football X Cup. Furthermore, Nike demonstrated its brand performance of the 2 Champions League finalists (FC Barcelona and Juventus Turin) and the event attracted several stars, including German World Cup hero Miroslav Klose and Brazilian’s soccer legend and two-times World Cup winner Ronaldo (Ronaldo Nazário de Lima) – who both tested the pitch and picked 3 of the players each to compete in a celebrity-studded tournament.
The arena, custom-built for the 3-day event, featured a 150 sq metre sports floor football pitch – equipped with an LED screen (featured more than 15 million LEDs – 10,000 per square metre) over the entire surface. The 10m x 15m pitch (pictured above) was created by sports floor specialists ASB – incorporating the technology of the “ASB GlassFloor”, the state-of-the-art squash court floor recently launched by the German company.
“The result of the cutting-edge technology is breathtaking,” said ASB MD Christof Babinsky. The ‘screen’ was used to imitate several different surfaces – like sand, grass, concrete, gravel and even outer space. The score was displayed live on the floor and different graphic animations in foul, goal or attempt situations made the fast game even more exciting”, added Babinsky.
This initiative follows the recent announcement of the installation of the 500th ASB “Movable Wall Court” facility. This squash court development provide maximum flexibility for sports centres, where walls can easily be moved either to extend singles squash courts into doubles courts, or convert a dedicated squash facility into an open arena for multi-sport usage.
The glass floor development now offers additional benefits – where the floor markings can instantly be adjusted to suit the arena usage, thereby avoiding the current situation where numerous different ‘pitch layouts’ have to co-exist side-by-side.
A variety of sports in addition to squash – eg. badminton, basketball, volleyball, handball, tennis or even boxing – could benefit from this new cutting-edge technology. “It would be great to see Klitschko on a glass floor,” concluded Babinsky. “This technology is also made for boxing!”
Impressions of the event are on the ASB facebook-site and some videos are on youtube.
