A late call as the Dutch team kept winning
The Dutch football team went further at the 2010 FIFA World Cup than many people had expected, all the way to the final. That meant late calls to plan for more fans at the free public screenings in the Netherlands, home to Mojo Barriers' international head office.
Fans wanted to watch the final together on Sunday 11 July, and then welcome the team home to celebrate finishing as runners-up to Spain.
850 metres for the final, 1,200 for the homecoming
After consultation on safe crowd management procedures and the infrastructure to support event security, Mojo set up 850 metres of barrier on the Museumplein (Museum Square) in Amsterdam. Five giant video screens there drew a crowd of 100,000 on 11 July.
For the homecoming on 13 July the layout was reconfigured: 1,200 metres of Mojo Barriers, including two VIP areas for 3,000 people each, ten video screens and an estimated crowd of 120,000 to 150,000.
Radio 538 produced the screening. The public celebration on 13 July was initiated by the City of Amsterdam together with the KNVB, the Royal Dutch Football Association, again with Radio 538 as producer.
From first call to load-in in days
Production started on Wednesday 7 July, when the call came in. The client held the first meetings on Thursday, set-up on site began on Friday, the barriers were loaded in on Sunday morning and the extra barriers followed on Monday.
Gertjan van den Berg, known as Iceberg, and Roderik Versnel of Sightline Productions led the technical production team. They worked closely with Mojo Barriers to prepare the city square as a safe venue for the football fans.
The only way to pull off a production of this scale with such short notice, was to work with suppliers we work with regularly, with experience and capability we can trust: Mojo Barriers is of course one of them and we were very happy that they could deliver this massive amount of barriers in such short amount of time, creating a safe event for crowd numbers we have never seen before in The Netherlands.
