Event: UAE Pro League Awards 2025–26
Date: 10 August 2026
Location: Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Client: UAE Pro League
Delivered by: Cueline Event Management
Role (Alexander Kotov): Lighting Design, Technical Drawings, Timecode
Project Overview
The UAE Pro League’s end-of-season awards close the domestic football calendar and are produced for television. The 2025–26 edition was staged inside the Emirates Palace ballroom — a hospitality room that had to read on camera as a stadium-scale awards set.
Technical Scope
- Full lighting design for a broadcast-first ceremony in a fixed-architecture ballroom
- Technical drawings: plot, rigging plan, power and data distribution, focus documentation
- Timecoded show build, cued to the broadcast running order
- Camera-balanced key, fill and audience wash across trophy presentation, stage and walk-on positions
Key Challenges
The venue set the design. A 6 m ceiling removed the vertical space a stadium look normally relies on, forcing the rig low and close to the audience, where fixture noise, glare and spill are all in shot. A 250 kg per point rigging limit capped what could hang anywhere on the grid, so the plot was driven by load distribution as much as by coverage — more points, lighter loads, and floor positions carrying what the roof could not.