Football for Everyone? Not If You’re Deaf

Football calls itself the world’s game. It sings of unity, equality, belonging. It promises that when you step onto a pitch - or into a stadium - nothing else matters.

I want to believe it. I grew up loving football - the colours, the stories, the feeling that this was the one place where the world could come together.

And yet love makes betrayal cut deeper. Football has never been the world’s game. It has been and still is the hearing world’s game.

Because the heartbeat of football - the roar that shakes a stand, the whistle that orders time, the chant that turns strangers into brothers - is built on sound. It markets itself as universal, but it has always been conditional. Conditional on ears that work. Conditional on a belonging measured in noise.

So for millions of us, football isn’t just goals and glory. It is a mirror held up to exclusion. A weekly reminder that even in the world’s favourite sport, silence is treated like a disqualification.

The Myth of “It’s Already Visual”

People love to say football is a visual game. You watch the ball, the player, the space. They insist Deaf players should therefore compete on equal terms.

But that’s a comforting myth - not reality.

Look closer, and you see how deeply the game is wired to sound.

The referee’s whistle doesn’t just make a noise - it dictates time itself, starting, pausing, and ending the match.

Coaches don’t just talk - they scream tactical instructions that Deaf players are never given the tools to access.

Teammates don’t just move - they trigger presses and warnings with shouted words hurled across the pitch.

And the crowd? Their noise is elevated to the sacred “twelfth man,” as though belonging itself must be measured in decibels.

Football is not visual by design. It is hearing-first by habit. A habit repeated so often, for so long, that most people don’t even notice it anymore. But for us, it’s impossible to escape.

Deaf players aren’t “slow.” They aren’t “behind.” They aren’t excluded by biology. They are excluded because the game was built on signals they were never meant to receive.

So the real question isn’t: can Deaf people play football?

The real question is: why does football cling so stubbornly to hearing-first systems when nothing in the sport actually depends on sound?

And the receipts are plain: IFAB’s own Laws of the Game still define the whistle as the referee’s primary tool for authority. Flags and gestures are listed as “additional” - an afterthought.

In other words, authority is designed to travel through sound, not sight. That’s not nature. That’s design.

The Double Punishment

Deaf players are punished twice by two systems that both pretend to be fair.

In the Paralympics, they are told they are too able. In mainstream football, they are told they are too inconvenient. So they fall through the cracks, not because they lack talent, but because the world refuses to hold space for them.

The Deaflympics is waved around as proof of inclusion. But what kind of inclusion forces athletes to rattle buckets on high streets just to wear their country’s badge? What kind of “pathway” says: you are good enough to play for your nation, but not good enough for your nation to pay for you?

Meanwhile, Olympians and Paralympians are flown business class, dressed head to toe in sponsored kit, funded to the highest standards of sports science. Deaf athletes; equally elite, equally devoted are left selling raffle tickets and begging strangers online for the right to compete.

This is not just unequal. It is humiliating.

And football, the richest sport on earth, is the most shameless of all. A game that can casually spend £100 million on a single teenager’s transfer fee claims it cannot afford interpreters for training. Clubs that earn billions from shirt sales tell Deaf players there is “no budget” for support. National federations that pour fortunes into global tours still expect their Deaf squads to crowdfund their own flights.

This is not a lack of resources. It is a lack of respect.

And it is not hypothetical. In October 2025, MPs were forced to confront the fact that GB’s Deaflympics squad had to raise almost £450,000 to compete in Tokyo, while UK Sport continues to invest £330 million into Olympic and Paralympic programmes. UK Deaf Sport called the disparity “shameful.” That word is too polite. It is abandonment dressed up as policy.

And the wound cuts deepest because Deaf athletes love this game too. They love it with the same hunger, the same obsession, the same willingness to break their bodies and give their futures for it.

But football does not love them back.

That is the real double punishment: not just being excluded, but being excluded from the thing you love most.

Deaf Fans: Paying for Half the Game

Football isn’t only played. It’s lived. It’s the chants, the stories, the rituals passed from parent to child. It’s the one place where millions are told they belong.

Except we don’t.

Deaf fans pay the same ticket price. We buy the same shirts. We sign up for the same subscriptions. We queue at the same turnstiles. We stand shoulder to shoulder in the terraces. We love the game no less.

But what do we actually get for our money?

• A VAR decision we cannot hear explained.

• Substitutions and stoppage time announced only through loudspeakers.

• Fire alarms that blare without a single visual warning, leaving Deaf supporters sitting in danger while others are already evacuating.

• Commentary with no captions. Analysis with no context. Entire matches that we pay to watch but cannot fully understand.

We are charged for the full experience and handed half a product. In any other industry, that would be called fraud. In football, it is excused as tradition.

And this isn’t just anecdote. Disabled supporters’ surveys consistently report poor accessibility, weak communication, and fans left feeling unwelcome. UEFA-level away support has been described as “non-existent.” Deaf fans are inside that data — but too often invisible in its solutions.

And it doesn’t stop there. Football culture worships the roar of the crowd. The chant that shakes the stands. The noise that supposedly binds strangers into one family. But that “unity” is built on exclusion. Because if you cannot hear the hymn, you are left outside the religion.

Think about that. The stadium - the place that markets itself as the great sanctuary of belonging - reminds Deaf people at every turn that belonging has a volume, and silence means exile.

It is not just exclusion. It is humiliation.

Imagine sitting among 60,000 people, every body around you erupting in joy or fury at a VAR call, and you have no idea what has happened. You feel the vibration of their chants in your chest, but you are locked out of the meaning. You love football with all your heart, but the game refuses to love you back.

And the most upsetting part? Deaf fans are not asking for luxuries. We are not demanding the impossible. We are asking for fairness - captions on stadium screens, visual alerts for safety, accessible commentary. Solutions that are simple, affordable, already available. Football just chooses not to deliver them.

Because to football, Deaf fans are valuable enough to buy the ticket but not valuable enough to be given the game we paid for.

And don’t tell us it’s impossible. One-off pilots already prove feasibility. Newcastle United’s “Unsilence the Crowd” experiment with haptic shirts showed the potential of redesign. But a stunt is not a system. A trial is not a transformation. Until it is embedded in every stadium, everywhere, it is nothing more than PR.

Football can make us pay for the whole game. But until it decides to give us the whole game, it is not selling unity. It is selling exclusion.

The Silence of the Fans

This is where it cuts the deepest.

Football fans will fight over anything else. They will march against ticket hikes. They will boycott club owners. They will demand safer standing, better scheduling, fair treatment for women’s football. They will paint banners, flood the streets, and chant until their throats bleed.

But when it comes to Deaf inclusion? Nothing. No chants. No banners. No marches. Just silence.

And silence, in this case, is not neutral. Silence is complicity. Every time a Deaf fan is left guessing in a stadium, every time a Deaf player is shut out of a trial, every time a Deaf athlete is forced to crowdfund their own national dream, hearing fans look away.

You roar for ninety minutes for your team but you cannot spare one voice for justice. That isn’t passion. That’s hypocrisy.

And it’s worse because Deaf fans are not distant or invisible. We are right there next to you in the terraces, in the pubs, in your families. You celebrate with us when the ball hits the net. You hug us when your side scores in the last minute. You know we are here. And yet when it comes to making sure we belong, you fall silent.

What does that say about football’s famous “community”? That it only exists as long as it’s convenient. That solidarity is reserved for ticket prices and kickoff times but not for people whose silence you would rather not confront.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if you chant “football for everyone” but don’t mean Deaf people, then your solidarity is fake. You are not defending the soul of the game. You are defending only your own comfort.

Because a community that abandons its own is not a family. It’s just a crowd.

Football as a Religion and Deaf People as Outsiders

People call football a religion. The stadiums are cathedrals. The chants are hymns. The scarves and shirts are vestments of devotion. Matchday is the weekly ritual where strangers become family, bound together by a faith that claims to unite the world.

But in this religion, Deaf people are not worshippers. We are outsiders. Heretics.

We can buy the shirt. We can sit in the pews of the terraces. We can stand among the congregation. But we cannot take part in the ritual. While thousands lift their voices, we stand in silence - not because we don’t believe, but because belief has been defined by sound.

The anthem. The chant. The whistle that begins the service. Every act of faith carries the same condition: participation has a volume, and if you cannot match it, your devotion is deemed less holy.

So what does that make us? Not casual observers. Not doubters. But devoted believers locked out of their own church. Cast out not for a lack of love, but for a lack of hearing.

And here lies the blasphemy: football claims to be sacred ground for all. Yet it has chosen to build its temples on noise. It has written its scriptures in sound. It has equated holiness with volume. And by doing so, it has decided that silence - our silence - is unworthy.

If football is a religion, then its exclusion of Deaf people is not just unfair. It is desecration. It is the corruption of its own gospel. It is proof that the so-called “world’s game” worships spectacle more than belonging.

Because what is faith worth if it bars its most faithful from the altar?

What is football worth if millions of believers are left standing outside the gates, praying to a god that never lets them in?

The Illusion of Unity

Football loves to market itself as inclusive. The slogans are everywhere.

• Kick It Out to challenge racism.

• Rainbow Laces to celebrate LGBTQ+ equality.

• Historic investment in the women’s game, filling Wembley with record-breaking crowds.

All of this is vital. All of this is necessary.

But ask yourself honestly: when have you ever seen a campaign for Deaf inclusion?

When has a stadium lit up in solidarity with the silence we live with every single day?

The uncomfortable truth is this: football’s unity is selective. It is not inclusion for all; it is inclusion for causes that can be branded, packaged, and sold. It embraces what looks powerful on a billboard, what plays well on television, what brings sponsors to the table.

And silence? Silence does not fit that mould.

• Silence cannot be tied on as a rainbow armband.

• Silence cannot be choreographed into a crowd chant.

• Silence cannot be turned into a 30-second ad spot about togetherness.

• Silence exposes gaps, failures, and uncomfortable questions — and football would rather look away.

And the record is damning:

• The Football Leadership Diversity Code (FA, 2020) trumpets progress on race and gender. Disability is legally referenced but excluded from the headline goals. Disability advocates publicly challenged the omission, but football moved on.

• UEFA’s #EqualGame proudly displays ethnicity, gender, sexuality. Deaf fans and players? Absent from the flagship materials.

• FIFA’s Diversity & Anti-Discrimination and Disability Football Toolkit gesture toward “disability,” but offer no Deaf-specific metrics, no budget, no accountability. A tick-box without teeth.

Meanwhile, Deaf athletes are left crowdfunding simply to wear the national shirt (as explained) like GB’s Deaf football squad, which had to raise nearly £500,000 for the 2025 Deaflympics, while Olympians and Paralympians were fully state-funded.

So why this silence? Why is Deaf inclusion the one campaign that never arrives?

Because football doesn’t fear the difficulty of inclusion - it fears the cost of admitting how much it has failed. To centre Deaf people would mean admitting the game was never truly “for everyone.”

It would mean redesigning stadiums, retraining staff, rewriting rituals. It would mean confronting the fact that for decades, football’s most famous slogans have been lies.

And there is something more brutal: football loves campaigns that add noise - banners, anthems, colour, spectacle. Deaf inclusion shines a spotlight on what is missing. It does not amplify noise; it confronts its dominance. And that is not easily marketable.

So let’s stop calling this an oversight. The absence of Deaf inclusion is not an accident. It is a choice. A choice made in boardrooms where silence is judged not as a human right, but as a poor investment.

That is the real illusion: football does not practise inclusion. It practises profitable inclusion.

Deaf Athletes: The Forgotten Middle

Society loves its sporting extremes. Paralympians are celebrated as inspirational - symbols of courage, grit, and triumph over adversity. Olympians are worshipped as elite - the flawless pinnacle of human performance.

And Deaf athletes? We are neither.

We sit in the middle - fully capable, fully competitive - but erased. Too “normal” to be cast as inspirational, too “inconvenient” to be supported as elite.

This middle is not neutral ground. It is a dead zone. A no-man’s-land where entire generations of Deaf talent are quietly abandoned, not because of their ability, but because they do not fit the stories sport wants to tell.

Take visibility. Paralympians are broadcast into millions of homes. Olympians become national heroes, their faces plastered across front pages, documentaries, and advertising campaigns. Deaf athletes? We are airbrushed out. Our tournaments rarely televised. Our medals invisible. Our names unspoken.

A Deaf footballer can score a hat-trick for their country and walk down the high street the next day without a single person recognising them. Not because they didn’t achieve enough, but because their story was never told. Their devotion, their sacrifice, their brilliance is erased at the source.

And invisibility has consequences. It kills opportunity before it even begins. Sponsors chase Olympians and Paralympians because they know there will be cameras. They know there will be headlines. They know the system will guarantee exposure.

For Deaf athletes, there is no stage, no coverage, no recognition. And without coverage, there is no sponsorship.

Without sponsorship, there is no income. And without income, athletes are forced into impossible choices: pay rent or chase the dream? Train another season or quit before debt swallows you whole?

This is not failure by nature. This is failure by design. A system that decides, before you even step onto the pitch, whether your story is worth selling.

And the violence of that decision runs deeper still. It tells Deaf children who dream of football, swimming, athletics: even if you succeed, you will not be seen.

It tells Deaf athletes: your work, your sacrifice, your excellence will never be enough for us to call you heroes.

The result? Dreams die quietly, not on the pitch but in the silence of neglect. Generations of talent are wasted - not lost to injury or lack of will, but discarded by a sporting system that refuses to imagine them as worthy of recognition.

So let’s stop dressing this up as oversight.

The erasure of Deaf athletes is not an accident. It is engineered neglect. It is the cost of a world that only knows how to celebrate extremes - pity or perfection - but has no space for those who live and compete in between.

And here is the provocation: if football, the richest sport on earth, swimming in billions from transfers, broadcast rights, and global sponsorships, cannot find the will to invest in and platform its Deaf athletes then every other sport will follow its example.

The exclusion of Deaf athletes becomes not just football’s shame, but society’s signal: that silence is reason enough to erase you.

Sound as Power

In football, sound is not background noise. It is authority.

The referee’s whistle doesn’t just make a sound - it governs time itself. It tells you when play begins, when it pauses, when it ends. It has the power to freeze the ball at your feet, to reverse a goal, to decide the fate of a match.

And if you cannot hear it, you are not just excluded. You are excluded from power.

This isn’t an accident. The International Football Association Board (IFAB) still defines the whistle as the referee’s “primary communication tool”, with flags or gestures listed only as “additional.” In other words: sound comes first, sight comes second - if it comes at all. That choice enshrines a hierarchy where authority is carried by sound waves, not by design accessible to all.

And that hierarchy matters. It means that in order to belong fully in the game, you must first belong to hearing. Power itself has been tied to noise.

But football is only making visible what society has been doing everywhere. The gavel in a courtroom. The school bell that dictates when children learn and when they rest. The raised voice in a boardroom that cuts through all others. Sound is used as a shortcut to command, a signal of who gets to control time, attention, and order.

So when a Deaf player misses a whistle, it is not their body failing them. It is the system revealing itself - a system that has chosen sound as the measure of belonging, and silence as the justification for exclusion.

This reframes the question. It is not: are Deaf players capable of competing?

The question is: is football willing to separate authority from noise?

Because until it does, sound will remain not just a signal, but a barrier. And silence will remain not just absence, but exile.

And that exile matters. Because it shows us that football is not just a game played with a ball. It is a microcosm of power itself - power that has always been designed to privilege those who hear, and to cast silence as weakness.

If football refuses to change, it is not just sport failing us. It is society confirming that authority will always belong to those who can make the most noise.

Football Already Redesigns Everything - Except This

People say Deaf inclusion is too complicated. Too expensive. Too impractical.

But that excuse collapses the moment you look at how football actually operates.

Football is a sport addicted to redesign.

It spent millions on goal-line technology because the idea of a disputed goal was suddenly intolerable. It built VAR systems that rewrote the entire fan experience overnight, turning stadium eruptions into awkward silences as referees checked a screen and fans adapted, because money and “accuracy” mattered more than tradition.

It embraced GPS vests, drones, and AI analytics because marginal gains meant more trophies, more sponsorship, more status. It has restructured entire leagues, broadcasting schedules, and commercial deals to elevate women’s football and rightly so because the reputational risk of ignoring women became greater than the cost of change.

Football changes when it wants to. It redesigns when profit, spectacle, or reputation demand it.

And yet, when it comes to Deaf people? The redesign never comes.

Captions on stadium screens. Visual alarms for safety. Standardised visual referee signals. Interpreters in training grounds. None of these are futuristic technologies. None of these are out of reach. They are all possible. They are all affordable. And they are all ignored.

Which proves something crucial: exclusion isn’t natural. It’s strategic.

If football can alter the laws of the game to accommodate technology, if it can rewire entire traditions overnight for profit, then Deaf exclusion is not about biology. It is a decision.

A decision made in boardrooms where every change is weighed not against fairness, but against revenue. A calculation that says: this doesn’t sell, so it doesn’t matter.

And that makes every marketing slogan hollow. “Football for all.” “Unity.” “One game, one world.” They sound noble. But they are not principles. They are products.

Because when football redesigns for accuracy, that is sport. When it redesigns for spectacle, that is entertainment.

When it redesigns for profit, that is capitalism. But when it refuses to redesign for Deaf people, that is exclusion - not by accident, but by intent.

And until football proves otherwise, every chant about equality is nothing more than another line in a billion-pound advertising campaign.

Football’s Global Shadow

Football is the biggest cultural export on earth. Bigger than music. Bigger than cinema. From Lagos to São Paulo to Mumbai, children grow up with it as their first language of belonging. They don’t need to share a tongue - the game itself becomes the conversation.

But if football is exported as hearing-first, then exclusion is exported with it.

• Every time a stadium in Europe normalises audio-only announcements, that model is copied elsewhere.

• Every time broadcasters fail to caption a match, that becomes the global standard.

• Every time a Deaf player is pushed out of an academy in England or Spain, it ripples into silence for Deaf kids in Ghana, India, Brazil who dream of following the same path.

Football doesn’t just sell goals and glory. It sells systems. And right now, it is exporting exclusion as part of its brand.

Think about the scale of that. The sport that claims to be “universal” is teaching billions of people that belonging has a sound.

That to be part of football’s story, you must first be able to hear it.

This isn’t just a sporting failure. It is a global injustice. Because when football exports itself, it doesn’t just export a game - it exports the very idea of unity. But only for those whose bodies fit its definition.

And for Deaf children worldwide, already navigating barriers in education, healthcare, and opportunity, football could have been the great equaliser - a space where silence was not a weakness but simply another way of belonging.

Instead, it becomes yet another reminder that even the “world’s game” was never meant for them.

This is what makes football’s neglect so dangerous: its influence multiplies harm. What happens in London doesn’t stay in London - it shapes Lagos. What happens in Madrid echoes in Mumbai. The silence that locks out a Deaf fan in Manchester reverberates into the lives of Deaf children who will never even step into a stadium, because they’ve already been told it isn’t theirs.

And the evidence is there.

Reviews of European clubs’ practices find communication and accessibility for disabled fans to be inconsistent at best and discriminatory at worst. This is not about one team, one league, one country. It is a system-wide failure and that system is being exported wholesale to the world.

Which means the question is bigger than football. It is about what kind of world we are building. A world where silence is treated as absence. A world where belonging is conditional. A world where the very thing sold as “universal” quietly writes millions of people out of its script.

So the real question becomes: what kind of silence are we willing to accept - not just in sport, but in the world we are exporting to the next generation?

The Design Test

Let’s flip the rules for once.

Imagine referees banned from whistles, forced to use lights and flags. Imagine coaches forbidden to shout, restricted to hand signals every player must learn. Imagine captains stripped of the right to bark orders, relying instead on gestures that unify communication across the team.

Would football collapse? Of course not. Within weeks, hearing players would adapt. Within months, it would feel normal. And within a season, nobody would even remember why it was ever different.

And that is the point. Football doesn’t need sound. It never did. It has chosen sound.

It has chosen whistles over lights. Shouts over signals. Noise over equity. It has chosen to treat silence not as a neutral condition, but as a barrier. Not as a chance to redesign, but as a reason to exclude.

The thought experiment shatters the myth at the heart of the game: Deaf players and fans are not excluded because football cannot function without sound. They are excluded because football refuses to imagine itself differently.

And we know this to be true. Because football has already proven its capacity to reinvent itself when it wants to.

• It didn’t collapse when VAR was introduced - it rewrote the rhythm of the sport overnight.

• It didn’t collapse when goal-line technology arrived - it embraced millions in investment to end debate.

• It didn’t collapse when women’s football was rebuilt - entire leagues, sponsorships, and broadcast structures were redesigned to catch up with reality.

• It didn’t collapse when billion-dollar analytics transformed training, recruitment, and strategy.

Time and again, football has reinvented itself. And every time, the justification was the same: accuracy, spectacle, reputation, profit.

The difference is simple. Those changes made money.

Deaf inclusion doesn’t and so it is ignored.

And that’s what The Design Test reveals. Exclusion is not biology. Exclusion is not fate. Exclusion is not inevitable.

Exclusion is a decision. A decision made in boardrooms where sound is defended as “tradition” while silence is dismissed as inconvenience. A decision that tells millions of us, you are not worth redesigning for.

So the next time a Deaf player misses a cue or a Deaf fan misses an announcement, don’t blame our ears.

Blame football’s refusal to adapt. Because if the system demanded change, the players would change. The fans would change. The game itself would change.

The only thing stopping it is will. And that means the real question is not can football change, but why won’t it?

The Unavoidable Question

I love football. I love it the way millions do - the way it binds strangers into family, the way it makes whole cities rise and fall with a single goal. It was supposed to be the one place where the world came together, where nothing else mattered.

But love makes betrayal cut deeper.

Because for me, football has never been the world’s game. It has only ever been the hearing world’s game.

And that leaves football with a choice it can no longer dodge.

It can keep things as they are - keep its whistles, its shouts, its slogans - and finally admit what it really is: not the world’s game, but the hearing world’s game.

A game built on noise, defended by habit, designed to exclude.

Or it can redesign itself. Not with hashtags. Not with token gestures. But with courage. With systems that make silence belong on equal terms. With the honesty to admit that equity is harder than slogans, but worth more than profit.

Because the barrier was never my ears. It was never Deafness. The barrier has always been will - football’s will to change, fans’ will to speak up, leaders’ will to prioritise belonging over convenience.

Until that will exists, every chant of “football for everyone” is hollow.

It is not unity. It is not equality. It is not belonging.

It is hypocrisy.

And I say this not because I want to abandon football, but because I refuse to let it abandon us. I refuse to stop demanding a game that is worthy of the love I, and millions of Deaf people, still carry for it.

So here is the unavoidable question - the one that will decide whether football can ever live up to its own myth:

Will football finally choose to be the world’s game or will it keep pretending, while Deaf people remain locked outside the gates?