Hong Kong Football Festival

Putting 43,000 Fans in the Show at Kai Tak Stadium

Hong Kong Football Festival 2026

When Manchester City, Inter Milan, Chelsea and Juventus all land in the same city inside of a week, the football takes care of itself. The harder question is what happens in the 80 minutes before kickoff, at half time, and in the moments the ball is out of play.

For the Hong Kong Football Festival 2026 at Kai Tak Stadium, CUE built a bespoke fan experience journey designed to answer exactly that, working alongside creative and production partner CLOU.

The brief

The Festival ran across two marquee fixtures and two open training sessions, drawing more than 42,000 fans for Manchester City against Inter Milan and more than 43,000 for Chelsea against Juventus. That is a 50,000 seat stadium filled with supporters from across Hong Kong, the mainland, and the travelling club support of four of Europe's biggest teams.

An audience that size set the terms of the build, and three requirements came out of the very first conversation.

The first was simplicity for the fan. Four separate experiences were planned for the bowl, and asking a supporter to find four different QR codes across a matchday was never going to work. Everything had to sit behind one scan.

The second was design fidelity. The activations had to feel like part of the Festival rather than a piece of software running inside it, so the design was built to the event's brand guidelines rather than to platform defaults: custom fonts, custom QR artwork, and brand colors applied down to the rims of the buttons.

The third was control over what actually reached the screen. With fan submissions going to a stadium display in front of tens of thousands of people, moderation could not be an afterthought. Every post ran through language filtration and then through an approve or reject queue staffed live, so nothing appeared on the big screen that the event had not cleared.

What we built

Everything ran through the CUE Content Hub, a single branded landing page reached from one QR code in the stadium. A fan scanned once and had four ways to take part and could move between them without ever scanning again.‍

PostUp put fans on the big screen with their own photos and video, framed in Festival branding.
A live message wall gave supporters a second way in, for the fans who wanted to say something rather than show something.
A song poll handed the crowd control of the music, letting fans vote on what played in the stadium.
A custom Man of the Match vote was the centerpiece. Fans picked a side, then picked a player, one vote each, closing at the final whistle.

CUE ran technical support live through every session alongside CLOU's operators in the stadium.

The result

“We were delighted to support the Hong Kong Football Festival, giving match-going spectators multiple opportunities to actively engage and contribute to the atmosphere throughout the event.

Alongside enabling fans to share their content and messages on the big screen, we developed a custom Man of the Match experience, putting the decision directly in the hands of supporters inside the stadium and giving them a meaningful role in recognising the standout player.

Across the five-day Festival, our activations generated more than 12,000 direct fan engagements, with tens of thousands more spectators experiencing the activations through the stadium’s big screens. It was an outstanding result and a great demonstration of how CUE’s technology can deliver reliable, innovative and highly engaging fan experiences at scale within live sport.”

- Jack Colton, CUE International Business Lead

More than 12,000 direct fan engagements. Every one of them an opted-in interaction captured in venue, owned by the event, and reportable the morning after.

Inter beat City on penalties. Juventus took the trophy match 1-0. And in between, tens of thousands of people in Kai Tak Stadium got to be part of the show rather than just watch it.