QATAR: Returning to one of Qatar’s most architecturally distinctive sporting venues, Auditoria delivered the complete stadium audio system design for the FIFA Arab Cup 2025 Opening Ceremony at Al Bayt Stadium, Al Khor, produced by Katara Studios. Staged on 1 December 2025, the ceremony marked the official start of the tournament ahead of the final on 18 December, playing out before a live audience of more than 60,000 spectators through a visually ambitious production centred on themes of unity, renewal and cultural continuity.

For Auditoria, the project represented a second major engagement at Al Bayt Stadium, following its work on the FIFA World Cup 2022 Opening Ceremony. And while the creative brief for the Arab Cup was entirely new, the team arrived with an established understanding of the venue’s distinctive architectural and structural constraints.

Unlike conventional stadiums, Al Bayt’s fabric roof—designed to evoke a traditional Bedouin tent—conceals all roof steelwork, preventing the introduction of any new rigging points. This required the complete removal of the existing house system and its replacement with a newly designed solution, flown exclusively from the original hanging locations and strictly within the original weight loadings.

“The venue comes with a few technical constraints,” explains Scott Willsallen, Sound Designer at Auditoria. “We had a fixed number of hanging points, fixed weight capacities, and a very short timeline. The key was using those limits creatively rather than fighting them.”

Auditoria’s design deployed L-Acoustics K2 across both the upper and lower seating bowls, complemented by additional subwoofer arrays to extend low-frequency performance and deliver a more even full-range experience throughout the stadium. With on-field access tightly restricted to protect the playing surface, rehearsals were largely conducted off-site, placing greater emphasis on predictive modelling and pre-emptive optimisation. The entire system was modelled using Soundvision and EASE, with live measurement points inside the stadium used to calibrate predicted performance against real-world behaviour.

“The rehearsal window was tight, but that didn’t limit our ability to refine the system,” says Willsallen. “Because everything was flown and installed early, we could tune and optimise outside of rehearsal time. That gave us the headroom we needed to really focus on intelligibility and musical clarity.”

Narration formed a central narrative pillar of the 20-minute ceremony, placing speech intelligibility on equal footing with musical impact. The system was tuned to deliver clear spoken word coverage across all 60,000 seats while maintaining depth, energy and scale in the musical score. Katara Studios supplied fully prepared music stems, enabling dynamic on-site mixing to support the choreography and storytelling demands of the production.

“For a stadium of this scale, it sounded remarkably controlled,” adds Willsallen. “The narration was clean, the music carried real weight, and the broadcast feed translated beautifully. The system gave the composers and director exactly what they needed to tell the story.”

Following the opening ceremony, the audio system remained in place to support fixtures throughout the tournament. Auditoria worked closely with the Katara Studios production and technical teams, including Executive Producer and Head of Production Mahmoud Hamaky, Executive Creative Director Ahmed Al Baker, Technical Director Adrian Burke, and Systems Technical Manager Greg Kershaw, ensuring close coordination across creative, technical and operational disciplines.

“None of the restrictions became obstacles,” Willsallen reflects. “Everyone involved understands this environment inside out. That shared experience makes a huge difference and is what contributed to making this a very positive project from start to finish.”