The Champions Club was Diageo’s private hospitality lounge at the 2026 FIFA World Cup Final — a fully built environment inside a tent structure at MetLife Stadium, roughly 100 feet by 48 with a sloping ceiling and no existing rigging of any kind. Cocktail Academy’s design ran on fluted molo walls, deep green turf, and warm brand color across a bar, a lounge, a locker-room installation, and a DJ area. Everything had to read as a finished interior rather than a tent, on a date that could not move.
Revolutionary Lighting handled lighting design and lighting systems design, drawn and pre-visualized in Vectorworks. The tent had a hard weight limit on what we could hang, so every choice worked backward from that: flat truss instead of box truss at center, and Martin Mac One profiles because they’re among the lightest moving lights that would still do the job. Everything else in the room was Astera — towers, booms, and the fixtures grazing the molo walls, mounted vertically so the light traveled horizontally across the texture and let the shadows do the modeling. Wireless CRMX meant no DMX runs anywhere on the floor. The only cable runs were for power. The rig was installed in one day with a crew of nine from IATSE, and we returned once the furniture was installed to re-focus every fixture against the finished room.
Produced by Cocktail Academy for Diageo. Technical production by Devlins. Lighting design and lighting systems design by Revolutionary Lighting. Photography by Clark Studios.
Gear: 14 Martin Mac One · 22 Astera QuikSpot · 12 Astera AX2 100 · 2 Astera AX2 50 · 6 Astera QuikPunch · 8 towers · 4 booms · center truss
