Lidl Final4 - Handball Final

Lidl Final4 – DHB-Pokal
Cologne, Germany

The Lidl Final4 is the culminating weekend of the DHB-Pokal — Germany's premier handball cup competition. Four of the country's top clubs met over two days at LANXESS Arena in Cologne. PlanValley handled technical direction and operation throughout, as well as creative direction and creation of the show programme surrounding the matches.

On the technical side, our disguise media servers drove the arena's LED floor, perimeter LEDs, and the main screen surfaces. Pre-programming was done in our in-house studio ahead of the on-site installation, covering content management and show setup. At the arena, our operation spanned the full range of match-day content from team announcements and audience engagement to advertisement playout.

As creative directors of the show programme surrounding the matches, we developed the player walk-in sequences, live match statistics displays, and the final trophy ceremony. For the half-time segment, we built a bespoke interactive game in-house as custom software and deployed it live within the arena environment.

Beyond the match-integrated content, Lidl Final4 featured four distinct arena shows, one for each match block. Pre-rendered content was produced in Blender and After Effects, while Notch handled the real-time visuals, driven dynamically in response to the show's live data feeds.

An important part of the show programme was the integration of the Kinexon sports tracking system to follow performers on stage. PlanValley developed a custom software bridge that made live player position and movement data — usually reserved for match statistics — available directly to the show environment, transforming real-time athletic data into a creative resource. Through this, on-pitch dynamics fed directly into the visual output, creating a live show that moved with the artists on the court.

Lighting design was treated as an integral part of the production rather than a support layer. The lighting programme was composed in close relation to the media server output, allowing arena-scale dynamics to act in concert with the screen content across all four shows.