How Many Lumens are Needed for Football Field and Stadium Lighting?

Lumen is an important aspect for stadium lighting. When purchasing the stadium lights, the first and foremost thing to consider is the lumen output of the lights. If the lumen is not sufficient, the lux value on the football field will be lower, and thus affect the performance of football players. Now the question is how many lumens are required for football stadium lights? The short answer is – it depends on level of competitions and light pole layout. The lumens required to light up the football field can be up to 3,000,000lm to 22,500,000lm, according to different lighting requirements.

How many lumens to light up football fields?

Level of competitions	Lux required	Lumen required
Recreational	200 lux	3,000,000lm
Training	250 lux	3,750,000lm
Amateur competition	300 to 500 lux	7,500,000lm
High school football field, professional	500 lux to 750 lux	11,250,000lm
National broadcasting football matches	1000 lux to 1500 lux	22,500,000lm
International broadcasting, 4KTV	1500 lux horizontal, with vertical illumination requirement	> 22,500,000lm

From the above table, we can see the lumen to light up the football field increases with the level of competition. If we are going to light up the community football field, we will probably need around 3 millions lumens, while need over 10 millions to light up the high school football pitch. So, we can’t rely on a single value when we are going to selecting the lumens required.

Height of light pole affects football field lighting lumens

When having the football field lighting design, we need to take a look at the height of light pole as it may affect the lumens required. Some football field lights mount at 15 meters, while other may mount at above 30 meters. The light loss can be quite significant if the lights are mounted above 30 meters light poles, thus, we need to add more lumens to compensate the loss. If you need more assistant, please feel free to contact our support team to get your free lighting deign.

Lumen for LED replacement

One of the advantages of replacing football stadium lighting with LED is that we can use a smaller wattage, and thus save running cost. Generally, 50,000 lumens LED is able to replace 1500 watt metal halide lights. However, it depends on the original lumens of metal halide and the new requirement. For instance, if you want to have a brighter football field, then we have to increase the lumen of the lighting a little.

If we take a look into the HID lamps, we will discover that the metal halide bulb emit the light in all 360 degrees, which means some of the light beam is wastes if we don’t have a proper reflector. On the other hand, LED solves this issue by using the 90, 45 or 15 degrees optics to concentrate the beam to light up the football stadium. It is especially important for standard football field as the light beam has to reach over 50 to 80 meters.

Another advantages of using LED stadium lighting is that LED can withstand extreme temperature, like very hot and cold, and even snowy weather. The solid state design of LED lights also ensure that the life span can be raised to 100,000 to 120,000 hours.

What is lumen?

When it comes to football stadium lighting lumen, we can know more about what lumen is. Lumen is basically the light output – measuring the total amount of visible light emitted from a light source. In this case, it would be the LED lighting. To simplify, higher the lumens, brighter the lights. Be aware that the lumen measures only the visible light, but not the invisible lights such as infrared or ultraviolet lights.

Lumen vs lux

Lumen and lux may be confusing if we put them together. In fact, lumen is the output of the light source, while lux is related to the light received by a specific area. For example, if 100 lumen is concentrated to light up the 1 sq. meter area of football field, then the illuminance will be 100 lux.

Lumen vs watt

What is the difference between lumen and watt? A short answer is a specific wattage of LED lights can emit a certain lumens. For instance, 1 1000 watt LED can emit 180,000 lumens. In this case, the LED lights have the luminous efficacy of 180,000 / 1000 = 180 lumens per watt. When comparing the lumens of different types of football stadium lights, we can take a look at the lumens per watt of the lights. We can save the running cost of the lights if we select the lights having higher lighting efficiency.