“Will it ever be completely safe to be in a crowd again?”: the return of disabled supporters to football stadiums during COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Our aim in this short article is to provide an analysis of the implications of reopening football stadium doors to a group that have not been at the forefront of management consideration – disabled spectators. In order to achieve this aim, we uphold a social model approach to disability to review the current spectator sport situation across English professional football and outline the problems posed for disabled fans. We then provide the context to disabled people’s experiences in football fandom which have often been unsatisfactory. This context then underpins a series of implications that will arise from the reopening of stadia in England. To conclude this commentary, we provide several management recommendations that we argue should facilitate a more disability-inclusive restart for spectator sport.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• social model
• disability
• football fans

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For Silva and Howe (2019, p. 1), ableism

constructs the able body as conditional to a life worth living, thus devaluing all those perceived as ‘dis’-abled. This hegemonic ideology develops into a ‘logic of practice’ through a cultural appropriation of body’s lived complexity, by reducing it to symbolic dichotomies. (able/disabled)

In an organisational sense, ableism may manifest through policies and practices that are assumed to work for non-disabled people, with disabled people being considered as an after-thought.