You come to the stadium, club scarf in hand. You sing the club anthem, and soon the game kicks off. The only catch: you are blind. Here is how Bayer 04 Leverkusen makes the game visible to visually impaired fans. At one end, there is a lobby with elevators to the interior levels of the BayArena; on the other, the tunnel opens onto the pitch.
That is where we were headed. Kickoff was minutes away. When I stepped out of the elevator and turned toward the tunnel, there was the whole team just inside, bouncing with excitement and raring to rush out to warm up.
Out they dashed. The crowd roared. I imagined I must have been a strange sightβif anyone noticed. Soccer fans take many things for granted. If anything, the World Cup in Qatar has only begun to teach us thatβfrom human rights and dignity to alcoholic beverages. Despite the outrage, whether deadly serious or banal, many soccer fans still plan to watch the spectacle.
Qatar and FIFA count on it. What if, however, you did not have the option? Petra introduces me to a tall, friendly man in a Leverkusen jacket and a black cap the team colors. Today, all the clubs in the 1st and 2nd Bundesliga, and now also throughout the 3rd Liga of Germany, offer a Blindenservice to visually impaired fans. Paffi brings me up from the sidelines to the stands and introduces me to the commentators, Phillip and Phillip. Phillip Wegmann has been working here for eight years and Phillip Heuser, his colleague, for seven.
Phillip W. He and Phillip H. In addition to that, Phillip W. The goal, he tells me, is that after a game, if you asked a person who could see and a blind person what had happened in a game, they both could tell you the same thingβas if the blind person had seen everything just as clearly asβor even more clearly thanβan ordinary spectator.
