The risk of lightning strikes in stadiums: the example of football

A previous study on lightning-related human accidents in Europe (2010-2019), estimates that 10% of lightning victims were in a stadium, sports or leisure facility and the vast majority were playing football.

An in-depth analysis of 10 remarkable cases provides information on the thunderstorms responsible for these events: these were not sudden (in 7 out of 10 cases, the thunderstorm has been visible for more than 40 minutes), and the victims were not struck by exceptionally severe thunderstorms (in 6 out of 10 cases, there were less than 10 cloud-to-ground flashes within 10km of the victim) or by intense peak current (in 6 out of 10 cases, the flash was less than the 20kA which is the average value of CG current).

While the victims were children in 5 out of 10 cases, raising questions about the responsibility of adults, the analysis of post-accident declarations reveals at least the ineffectiveness of human judgement in ensuring safety, even though all these events could technically have been the subject of an early warning.

Above all, this fatalism can be counterproductive to any effective awareness-raising by wrongly considering these events as fateful...in the manner of a divine character that we would still attribute to lightning after ages...