hey batter batter

Last night I went to watch the Paris FC vs FC Barcelona Women’s UEFA Champions League game as part of a special popularity raising event organized by several universities around Paris, who were offering free tickets to students in an attempt to beat the all-time Women’s UCL Paris FC attendance record—and they did! The 20,000 capacity stadium ended up filling about 15,200 of its seats. This was the first time I’ve been to a sports game in quite a while—I used to go to Beavers games when I was at Oregon State with some amount of frequency, but this tapered off significantly towards the end largely because they were really too pricey to justify; a game against Utah would be $5 for like the student ticket, which is great, but even against UCLA or something it would go as high as $45, and that really does seem like a formidable sum when you’re on a meager student salary. Like I could get a new shirt with that money, you know.

Going to sports games was a fairly sparse thing in my childhood—we were in that middle zone where we weren’t invested enough for this to be a necessary purchase but we also weren’t rich enough for it to be a luxury worth affording. What ended up happening was that I can basically count the games I went to in person in my hand; a few Cardinals games and one Blues game all the way back when I lived in St. Louis, and since then just a single Indian Super League game a few years ago in 2018 or 2019, I think. I was always pretty substandard as a soccer player but my brother turned out to be quite good, and we would go to watch him play as part of his club with some amount of frequency, but these were junior, U-14 and U-16 games. Which is funny, because sports was a pretty big part of my childhood, as a whole; I wasn’t that big of a player (really just into neighborhood soccer, some amount of long-distance running and swimming) but certainly into consuming sports as entertainment¹.

This lack of going to games makes the memory of the few times I did go to one quite magical in my head, crossed as it is with the perspective of a child. This particular game was less so. We were seated on the stand right behind the goalpost—I’m not sure what to call it in the context of soccer, I’d say ‘end zone’ otherwise—next to a bunch of French teenagers who found it very entertaining that I was speaking English and wearing my University of Michigan hoodie². Eventually they started chatting me up and calling me their ‘bro’ or whatever, which was very funny. But all this is ultimately fine. The game itself was actually really good, Barcelona winning 2-0 and PFC screwing up too many goddamn chances through poor finishing, but there was also suspense throughout—like it never really slowed down into a tactical mess, the Barcelona team maintained the press well enough to create several strong chances even if they only ended up converting two of them.

Ultimately this was one of those experiences which is quite routine as an adult but very much an event as a kid, kind of like going to the mall or the dentist, which makes me feel somewhat strange about the whole thing. Did I enjoy it? Sure, but it wasn’t a late-summer evening game with hot dogs and a full crowd, but that’s secondary to my immediate observation that stadium floodlights kind of suck now. Because I haven’t been to a game in literal years all my memories of stadium floodlights are what are apparently called ‘halogen lamps’ as opposed to LEDs, whereas they’re all LEDs now. The key difference is that halogen lamps create light via heat (so they become really hot very quickly and consume more power) while LEDs use something called electroluminescence, which means that they light up when electricity is passed through them, and hence consume significantly less power while also not making any heat. This means that LEDs are a lot better when it comes to most purposes apart from setting a nice ambience and with respect to the actual visibility of the stadium, which seem to me to be the most crucial components for having a good time at the game. So why is it that LEDs have basically replaced halogen in all stadium floodlights, now?

It looks like the answer is a mixture of cost and efficiency, which is okay, but also because of several other reasons:

1. The light peaks differently and hence is angled differently, which means that LEDs provide better illumination to the players (and so they can see the ball better). This also ensures significantly less light pollution outside the stadium.

2. 4K and 8K video broadcasting apparently need more consistent lighting with higher peaks, and hence it makes sense to use LEDs in that context.

Of course, the downside is that it makes the stadium look like this:

I don’t know, I just don’t like this neon green look that’s going on. It’s too bright and doesn’t feel like a game. Furthermore, it doesn’t even look like there’s any kind of acceptable compromise here, because these two things are inherently at odds—you can’t really design any better intermediate which performs both because you either choose to optimize for broadcasting and the player view or for the live spectator view, and we all know who wins out in that regard. Maybe Stade Jean-Bouin just has too many lights, or something, or they haven’t calibrated the colors correctly, but I have a strong view of Stade Sébastien Charléty from my balcony and even that looks like it has similar problems.

I guess this is just one of those things that we’ve lost to history permanently, and I’m living with freak nostalgia because I’m not a person who regularly goes to these games—perhaps my annoyance is not particularly different from my annoyance about the fact that I’m, like, a lot bigger in size, now, and so stadiums look smaller and significantly more comprehensible. Because I associate stadiums with grandiosity and life-and-death matters, almost liminal in scope, not functional places where people actually go. The act of thinking about them as logistical operations and maximizing their efficiency always feels like sacrilege.

I guess you can’t really shake off your heritage, no matter how hard you try—to me falling in love feels like ball games in the summer, hot dogs, abandoned parking lots, autumn leaves, cigarette smoke, driving into the sunset. And a big part of that is halogen lamps, and that makes me kind of sad.