Sport gets bigger every year. Bigger tournaments, new formats, more ways to consume and engage with the different competitions. Fandom gets bigger too. Yes, teams and athletes will become more or less popular depending on performance and star power but overall, the volume of sports fans increases each year. Some stats to back this up? Well… estimates I found online suggest that somewhere between 46% and 76%of the world’s population would claim to be sports fans. How you can accurately measure something like this I don’t know but safe to say it’s a lot of people. Just as it’s safe to say that a lot of people attend live sports events each year – by my very rough calculations it’s in the hundreds of millions of fans in Europe and the US alone.
Here’s another big number for you. It is estimated that just over 1 billion people worldwide have some form of disability. In a sports fan context, if we use the range above that means there are approximately half a billion disabled sports fans globally. Obviously, the logic here is very crude and that total may or may not be true, but the point holds – there is a huge audience that sport needs to make special provisions for if they are to make fandom accessible and allow disabled people to enjoy following the sports they love.
There are clear moral and social imperatives for sports rights holders and event organisers to invest in accessibility, but there is also a financial one too. In a purely commercial sense, disabled fans are fans like any others. They are people with money who are willing to pay for access to the unique narrative, emotions and sense of community that only sport fandom can deliver. Neglecting their needs simply alienates potential customers, putting them off attending and reducing the revenue potential.
Social legacy and a historical lack of investment mean that fears around accessibility impacts the attendance of sports fans who have some form of physical, sensory or neurological impairment. About 29% of fans with hearing loss avoid attending games due to accessibility concerns and research from the RNIB’s See Sport Differently Campaign shows that only 10% of blind and partially sighted people attended two or more live sports events,compared to 21% of the general population.
