Our commercial director, Carlos Lafuente, attended Sports Summit Madrid 2026, held on June 17 and 18 at the IFEMA Madrid exhibition center. In its second edition, the event returns to IFEMA with notable growth in exhibition area, participating companies and speakers, consolidating itself as the great meeting point for the sports industry in Spain.
Beyond the spectacle, Sports Summit was born with an idea that we at FanBase fully share: sport as a strategic industry, capable of generating wealth, employment and innovation. The congress fuses sport with sustainability, technology, health, tourism and public-private collaboration, the same axes that today define how stadiums and sports venues are conceived, tendered and equipped.
Precisely why the event is so relevant for us. The actors who shape each sports facility project coincide in the same space: clubs, federations, public administrations, architects and engineers, and construction companies. Understanding first-hand their priorities—how they plan their investments, what weighs on their decisions today, what the specifications require—is what allows us to best accompany them when the time comes to equip a stand.
Three keys to the event for club and stadium managers
If we had to summarize what a club or stadium manager should take away from this edition, it would be three ideas:
- Sustainability is already in business. ESG criteria are no longer an added value but have become a condition: they affect sponsorship, financing and licenses. For a club, having recycled and traceable materials in the stands is not only an environmental gesture, it is an argument before sponsors, administrations and the fans themselves.
- The stadium is a business asset, not just a playing field. The venue is at the center of the economic equation of modern sport: fan experience, premium areas, brand image and profitability of match day. Each equipment decision impacts income, not just aesthetics.
- Without a public-private alliance there is no project. A good part of the stadiums are municipally owned and are transferred for use to the clubs. Any renovation of stands involves aligning the club with the owner administration from the beginning; Anticipating this conversation speeds up deadlines and tenders.
In all three, the traceability of the materials begins to matter as much as the price. It is an area in which FanBase has been working for years, not reactively, but with real and verifiable projects.
Because for us, being present in this conversation is not an accessory. We have been working on technical plastic injection for more than 40 years and we manufacture the SPARK CR seat—monobloc polypropylene copolymer, with anti-UV and flame retardant protection, and compliance with UEFA/FIFA regulations—, with more than 40,000 units installed in stadiums in Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. Among our reference projects are the11,000-seat Goffert Stadium at the N.E.C. Nijmegen (Eredivisie, Netherlands), the 14,000 of the Reino de León Stadium of the Cultural y Deportiva Leonesa, the 4,850 of the El Collao Stadium of CD Alcoyano, the 4,529 of the Estadio do Leça (Leça FC, Portugal), the 4,000 of the Ciudad Deportiva of Granada CFand the 2,500 of the José Rico Pérez Stadium of Hércules CF. A solid base of real projects that supports each new proposal.
To this industrial experience we add a firm commitment to sustainable innovation, not as a slogan but with results: projects such as SPARK ECO, with seats made from recovered fishing nets, or our participation in the European R&D&I project DECAMP, aimed at developing seating solutions from recycled materials. Initiatives that place FanBase at the very center of the trends that Sports Summit put on the table.
Events like this confirm a clear direction: the sports facilities of the future will also be measured by their footprint, their traceability and their ability to innovate. It is exactly where we want to compete, and where we have been preparing to do so for years.
«We return with the certainty that sustainability is no longer an argument of sale to become a requirement. It is exactly the field in which FanBase has been working for years. » — Carlos Lafuente, Commercial Director of FanBase Seating