What it took to build Seattle's wildly popular World Cup floating fan zone

For one unforgettable month this summer, Seattle’s waterfront transformed into a global soccer destination. Thousands of fans flocked to Pier 62 and a one-of-a-kind floating fan festival built atop a working freight barge in Elliott Bay to watch FIFA World Cup 2026 matches.

From giant LED screens and live DJs to youth soccer clinics, concerts and packed watch parties, the fan experience buzzed from morning to night. But behind every match and celebration was an enormous production effort most visitors never saw.      

Seattle-based Blue Danube Productions designed and operated the audio, video and power systems for both Pier 62 and the floating barge, working alongside Rally Group, the lead production partner, supporting weeks of programming across what owner and CEO Mark Churchill describes for his team was like running "multiple events within an event."

Although the company has delivered major productions before, Churchill says this assignment was in a league of its own.

"The size and scale and length," he says. "We've done equally large buildouts before, but for a day or two. This being about a total of a 25-day run (and) having everything on site maintained and in working order for that amount of time required a significant amount of planning and onsite management."

The waterfront venue introduced challenges the team had never encountered.

For the first time, Blue Danube was producing an event on a floating venue, which meant swapping familiar building codes for maritime regulations.

"Usually, we're going to work with city inspectors on our power builds,” Churchill says. “This time we had the Coast Guard coming in, and it had very different requirements and regulations."

Simply getting equipment onto the barge required rethinking nearly every step of the load-in. For starters, the barge was station at Everett Ship Repair at the Everett shipyards, almost 30 nautical miles away. Then came the challenge of hauling equipment onto a platform the team had never worked with.

"Navigating a space like that, trying to get equipment on a barge where you're used to rolling your equipment off a truck, into a loading bay, elevator, and into a convention center,” Churchill says. “This was very different."

Instead of straightforward loading docks, crews maneuvered around cranes and active shipyard operations while also working with the tides. At times, changing water levels pushed gangways to nearly a 45-degree angle, forcing crews to carefully time equipment moves to keep everything safe.

Once the fan festival opened, Blue Danube maintained a daily crew of five to seven technicians for nearly four weeks. They monitored video, audio and power systems while adapting to a schedule that evolved as festivities progressed and the popularity of the watch parties grew.

Despite the complexity, including massive LED screens mounted on a floating platform exposed to the elements of Elliott Bay, the operation ran remarkably smoothly.

"It was truly, pardon the pun, smooth sailing," Churchill says. "We had contingency plans. We knew what could happen, and we were prepared, ready to deal with it."

For Churchill, the project represented more than a successful production. It demonstrated Seattle's ability to host events on one of the world's biggest stages.

"Seattle can actually show up and be a world-class event, sitting on the world stage," he says. "That's one of the biggest takeaways. One of the World Cup game broadcasts was done at the pier, and so truly the world was watching what we were able to accomplish.”