100 Years of Weserstadion: A Legends Match, a Clear Stance – and Our Portal in the Floodlight Lounge

On September 26, 2026, the Weserstadion celebrated: 100 years since its opening, marked with a legends match between Werder Bremen and a Real Madrid tradition squad. We were there with our interactive AI portal in the Floodlight Lounge – and the evening has stayed with me for days afterward, for more than one reason.

A match like out of another decade

On the pitch, it was a party: Werder won 4:3, with goals from Sokratis Papastathopoulos, Markus Rosenberg, Angelos Charisteas, and Diego, whose goal was celebrated with minutes of chanting – "Diego" chants you'd otherwise only hear from the 2003/2004 championship season. That season was in the air all evening anyway: Thomas Schaaf and Otto Rehhagel coached together from the sideline, Claudio Pizarro as assistant right in the middle of it, Ailton out on the pitch. Real Madrid fielded Pepe, Claude Makélélé, and Esteban Cambiasso among others, and Pepe, of all people – not exactly known for gentleness elsewhere – helped Ailton back to his feet after a challenge.

The stadium show itself had both humor and a sense of history. Just before full time, with the score at 4:3, the lights across the entire stadium demonstratively went out – a loving parody of the real floodlight failure during the 2004 Bundesliga season opener against Schalke, when a defective cable nicknamed "Carola" delayed the match for over an hour. This time, instead of a real outage, several minutes of a retrospective on 100 years of stadium history played across the video screens, accompanied by light effects and fireworks. Earlier, in the first half, referee Sven Jablonski had deliberately blown the whistle far too early, echoing a legendary wrong call from 1975 – waiters then ran across the pitch handing out drink combos nicknamed "Ahlenfelder," after the referee who blamed his mistake back then on a beer and a herbal liqueur before kickoff.

More than nostalgia: a clear stance

What impressed me just as much as the match itself was that Werder didn't tell its own history purely as a success story. The Weserstadion was taken over by the city in 1934 and renamed "Bremer Kampfbahn," serving among other things as a stage for Nazi propaganda events like the "Day of the Wehrmacht" – the club itself has, in recent years, worked through this period thoroughly and self-critically in its own club chronicle, up to and including an exhibition in the club museum on Jewish players and members at Werder. That a club currently celebrating its stadium's 100th anniversary doesn't let that part of its own history fall by the wayside, but makes it visible, impressed me – as did the clear, unambiguous stance against the far right and for diversity and inclusion that was palpable that evening. Celebration and responsibility weren't at odds that night; they belonged together.

Our portal in the Floodlight Lounge

Right in the middle of it: our interactive AI portal, which we set up through Luftschloss in the Floodlight Lounge. Without understatement, it was the hit of the evening there – guests lined up, tried it out, came back, showed it to the next group. That's exactly the moment we build installations like this for: not technology as an end in itself, but a tool that brings people together in conversation, on an evening that was already about coming together. Watching fans of every generation genuinely engage with it, in the middle of a stadium full of a hundred years of history, was the best confirmation this work could get.

Conclusion

100 years of the Weserstadion, a legends match with real wit, a stance that doesn't look away, and right in the middle of it, our portal delivering exactly what technology is supposed to do: bring people closer together instead of just entertaining them. An evening that showed a hundred-year-old club and an AI-powered experience fit together remarkably well, as long as both stand for the same thing.