In a bid to improve ambience, make its games look better on TV, earn a little extra advertising revenue and save money on game-day operations, Italian soccer club Triestina has installed what is believed to be the sporting world's first "virtual crowd," The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
For its game on Saturday, the team debuted two-dimensional images of fans printed on a giant sheet of vinyl and stretched across about 10,000 empty seats.
The team, based in the northern Italian city of Trieste, will not say how much it paid to produce and install the PVC covering, which features images of real Triestina fans.
But between the money the team will save by eliminating stewards, attendants, medical staff and insurance for the shuttered seats (about $130,000 per season) and the extra ad revenue it may earn, team owner Stefano Fantinel says the experiment "will pay for itself very soon."
"It's a virtual tribune, with virtual fans," says Marco Cernaz, Triestina's general manager.
"We'd love to have a full stadium with real supporters. And we've done everything we can to get people through the gates. But the reality is that we can't. This way at least we create a bit of atmosphere, a bit of theater."
Triestina plays in Serie B, the second tier of Italian soccer.
