Hardwell To Play At The UEFA Champions Festival In Kiev
With the UEFA Champions League final coming up next weekend in Kiev, Ukraine, fans of Liverpool and Real Madrid are gearing up for an exciting fmatch.
Before the Champions League takes place though, Hardwell has been announced to be playing the UEFA Champions Festival which will take place on May 25th at 9:30pm.
Hardwell will be joining Dua Lipa at this year’s event as she has been announced as the opening ceremony performance.
It’s a pretty fitting pairing when you think about it. The Champions Festival is essentially UEFA’s fan zone experience built around the final, giving supporters who couldn’t score a ticket to the match itself a place to soak up the atmosphere, and bringing in a global dance music headliner like Hardwell alongside a pop star like Dua Lipa is exactly the kind of crossover booking that shows how far electronic music has worked its way into mainstream sports culture. Hardwell headlining a UEFA event isn’t as random as it might sound either, considering the Dutch DJ has built a career on massive, festival sized production that translates well to a stage built for tens of thousands of soccer fans.
Dua Lipa’s opening ceremony slot ended up being one of the most talked about parts of the night, with her performance at NSC Olimpiyskiy in Kyiv airing to a global television audience before Real Madrid and Liverpool kicked off the final. Real Madrid would go on to win the match 3-1, claiming their third straight Champions League title, but the night kicked off with music first, exactly the way UEFA had planned it with both Hardwell’s festival set and Dua Lipa’s ceremony performance.
Between the pre match festival and the opening ceremony, Kiev turned into a full weekend of entertainment surrounding the biggest match in European club soccer, proving once again that a DJ set and a football final aren’t as strange a combination as they might have sounded a decade ago.
UEFA Champions Festival
International DJ @HARDWELL will be our guest artist at the UEFA Champions Festival in Kyiv 🎧 Who's going to be there? #LoveItLiveIt @pepsi pic.twitter.com/gzJb1vjt6k
— UEFA Champions League (@ChampionsLeague) May 15, 2018
https://twitter.com/ChampionsLeague/status/996321792129040384
