In this guide
What a tifo is, and the main types
The word comes from Italian, where tifo means supporting a team and tifosi are the fans. Today it means any organised display by supporters in the stands. Most tifos are one of four types, and many big displays combine them.
- Card or sheet mosaic: every fan holds up a coloured card or plastic sheet, and the seats form a picture. The most accessible type: no painting, and it scales from one sector to a whole stadium.
- Giant banner: one huge painted or printed cloth pulled over a stand. Spectacular, but expensive, heavy and slow to produce.
- Flags and streamers: hundreds of hand flags or long strips in the club colours. Simple, cheap and great for movement.
- Combined displays: a banner in the middle, cards around it and flags in the lower rows, often revealed in stages.
If this is your group's first tifo, start with a card mosaic on one sector. It teaches you planning, distribution and timing at the lowest cost and risk.
Step 1: Pick an idea that reads from far away
Your tifo is seen from the opposite stand, by the TV cameras and in photos taken across the pitch, often 100 metres away or more. What looks rich on a laptop turns into noise at that distance.
- One message per tifo: a crest, a date, a short slogan or a single symbol.
- Three to five colours, ideally the club colours plus white or black for contrast.
- Big shapes and thick lines. A line should be at least two to three seats wide to stay visible.
- Text in capital letters, as few words as possible, each letter several rows tall.
Test the idea early: shrink the design to the size of a stamp on your screen. If you can still read it, the stadium will too.
Step 2: Map the stand seat by seat
A card mosaic is a picture with one pixel per seat, so you need the real grid: every sector, every row and how many seats each row has. Rows are rarely equal. Stairs, gangways, camera platforms and corners cut into the grid, and a design drawn on a perfect rectangle comes out distorted on the real stand.
Get the seating plan from the club or the ticketing map, count the rows on site and photograph the stand from the opposite side. Note which seats are blocked or usually empty.
In TifoMaker this map is built once: sectors, rows and seats, including irregular rows and several tiers. Every later tifo in the same stadium starts from it.
Step 3: Design on the real grid
With the map in place, paint the design onto the seats. Work from big to small: the background colour first, then the main shapes, then the details. Then check the result from where people will actually see it.
- View it from the opposite stand and from the main TV camera position, not only from above.
- Keep one or two rows and seats of space around shapes so they do not merge.
- Avoid colours that look alike from a distance, such as dark blue and black, or yellow and white in sunlight.
- Put a plain background colour at the edges of the sector, where empty or late-arriving seats are least visible.
If you start from a logo or a photo, TifoMaker maps the image onto the real seat layout. Then clean it up by hand: an automatic conversion always needs a human pass on the edges and the text.
Step 4: Count and order the materials
Once the design is final, count the cards per colour and per sector. Order 5 to 10 percent extra for damaged, wet or lost cards and for people who take two.
- Cards: coloured card stock or plastic sheets, big enough to cover a person's upper body when held up. Plastic survives rain; card is cheaper.
- Placement: each card goes on its exact seat, often taped to it, with the colour hidden until the signal.
- Instructions: a short note on every seat or on the back of the card, in the local language, with the signal and what to do.
TifoMaker exports the colour counts and a seat-by-seat plan per row, which becomes your packing and placement list.
Step 5: Get permission and build the team
Most stadiums require approval for any display: the club's supporter liaison officer and stadium security usually want to see the design, the materials and the plan. Ask early, because some clubs need weeks. Never block emergency exits, stairs or cameras.
- A coordinator who owns the timeline and talks to the club.
- A design lead who finalises the image and the colour counts.
- Placement teams, one per sector, who know their rows.
- Section leaders on match day who give the signal and keep people in their seats.
Step 6: Run match day
- Arrive early: placing cards on thousands of seats takes hours. Work row by row from the plan.
- Check every sector against the design before the gates open.
- Brief the people around you: what the card is for, when it goes up, and that it stays hidden until then.
- Give one clear signal, usually as the teams walk out, through the capos, a megaphone or, if the club agrees, the stadium screen.
- Hold the display for 30 to 60 seconds so photographers and TV cameras get the shot.
- Collect cards and rubbish afterwards. A clean stand makes the next approval easier.
A realistic timeline
- 6 to 8 weeks before: choose the idea and ask the club for approval.
- 4 to 6 weeks before: map the stand and finish the design.
- 3 to 4 weeks before: order and print the cards.
- 1 week before: prepare the placement lists per sector and brief the team.
- Match day: place the cards, check, brief, raise, collect.
Film and photograph the tifo from the opposite stand. It is your best argument for the next approval and your best recruiting tool.
Frequently asked questions
Written by Demetrios VlassisDemetrios Vlassis is the founder of TifoMaker and works in software development in Sofia. An Olympiacos supporter, he built TifoMaker to help fan clubs and event organizers plan tifos seat by seat.
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