Fulham Football Club has gotten a modern-tech makeover in regards to controlling trouble on its home turf. Grounds and security staff at Craven Cottage will now benefit from high definition CCTV linked to an iPad to bring more efficiency when identifying and handling crowd disturbances.
The advanced security set-up is a step-up from dated VHS tape changeover that the club until now employed. The new CCTV system is connected by an Ethernet system back to an IP computer network and allows Fulham FC staff to link wireless to the 63 HD cameras located around the grounds and access video through Wi-Fi gadgets, including tablets and smartphones. The crowd footage can be magnified which a ‘pinch-to-zoom’ function and to a high quality and the camera can be angled using a finger movement on the touchscreen. This makes situations easier to properly access and troublemakers can be identified and quickly dealt with by security staff.
Nicolas Pendlebury of Fulham’s IT team says “Incidents that happened were taking days to recover. We can now do that within seconds.”
“Say there are five fans in the away end breaking seats, we would bookmark the image in the application, email those photos to one of our response team and say ‘please eject these people’” – he adds.
Fulham are also thinking ahead to facial recognition, as part of this massive advancement in identifying and reducing the amount of hooliganism which tarnishes the beautiful game, and makes a much safer environment for those who just want a good Saturday afternoon on the terraces.
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