PFA Awards 2025
A Night to Celebrate Football’s Finest
The Professional Footballers' Association Awards is one of the most anticipated evenings in the sporting calendar, honouring the best talent in UK football. In 2025, this prestigious celebration took centre stage at the iconic Manchester Opera House. iMAG was proud to be chosen by INCA Productions to once again deliver a technically flawless visual solution for the prestigious occasion.
The Challenge
Delivering a live broadcast-standard production in a theatre environment required meticulous planning, exceptional hardware, and total alignment between teams. With cameras capturing every emotion on stage and playback sequences choreographed to the second, the visuals needed to deliver consistency, clarity, and dynamic presence.
The centrepiece of the show was a large-format LED wall, with specific requirements for colour accuracy and camera-friendly performance. Every component had to operate flawlessly in a tightly controlled space, with minimal margin for technical disruption.
The Solution
At the heart of the production was a 13-metre-wide by 8-metre-high LED screen, built using 416 panels of ROE Visual Ruby 2.6mm. Known for its premium image fidelity, the Ruby 2.6 delivers exceptional brightness, fine pixel pitch, and uniform colour accuracy, making it an ideal choice for camera-friendly live events. To drive this high-resolution display, our team deployed Brompton Technology’s Tessera SX40 LED processors, ensuring real-time colour management, ultra-smooth playback, and advanced calibration. These processors allowed us to maintain consistent visual quality from every seat in the venue and every camera lens.
To enhance the theatre's architecture and bring the PFA Awards identity into the room, a second square-format LED screen was installed high above the main stage, integrated seamlessly into the proscenium arch. Built using ROE Visual Vanish 8, this lightweight, semi-transparent screen offered 60% transparency, allowing the existing venue aesthetics to shine through while delivering bold animated branding and motion graphics throughout the show.
To ensure visual accessibility across the entire auditorium, iMAG also deployed a network of relay screens throughout the venue. These secondary displays replicated the main screen’s feed in real-time, ensuring no moment was missed, regardless of seating position or line of sight.
We also provided a multi-camera package to capture the entire show, including award announcements, performances, speeches, and crowd reactions, integrated seamlessly into the control workflow for live display on the main and relay screens.
The Result
The 2025 PFA Awards unfolded with seamless execution, delivering an immersive and highly polished visual experience to guests in the room and viewers on-screen.
The main Ruby screen served as a striking, high-definition centrepiece. The Vanish 8 proscenium screen added an elegant branding feature that complemented the theatre’s design, and the relay screens ensured complete audience engagement throughout the auditorium.
With live camera feeds, playback transitions, and control perfectly synchronised, the event flowed smoothly from start to finish. The entire delivery was met with exceptional feedback from INCA Productions and the show’s creative team.
Equipment used:
- ROE Visual Ruby 2.6mm
- ROE Visual Vanish 8
- Brompton Technology Tessera SX40 Processors
- Disguise GX 3 Media Server
- Barco E2 Gen 2
