Accessible seats keep getting built where the leftover space is

Wheelchair platforms are usually placed after the bowl is designed, which is why so many of them sit behind the corner flag.

Design a seating bowl and the good positions are decided early, in the geometry, before anyone has drawn a single accessible platform. Then the platform has to go somewhere flat, somewhere reachable by lift, somewhere without a step. What is left tends to be pitch level in a corner, or a shelf at the very back of an upper tier, and those two options are why so many disabled supporters watch either through a wall of standing people or from a great height with a companion seat that is not quite next to them.

The regulations mostly specify a count. Provide this many spaces for this capacity. They are far weaker on where, and weakest of all on whether those spaces are distributed across price bands.

That last one is the quiet scandal. In a lot of grounds every accessible space sits in the same one or two price categories, which means a disabled supporter cannot choose to sit cheaply behind the goal or expensively on the halfway line. They get the location the building could accommodate, at whatever that costs, and the choice available to everyone else simply does not exist for them.

Companion seating makes it worse in a way that is easy to fix and rarely fixed. If the rule is one companion per space, a family of four cannot sit together, because two of them are on the platform and two are in a different block behind glass. Flexible platforms with removable seating solve this. They cost money at the design stage and nothing afterwards.

Then there is the part nobody photographs. Sightline standards for accessible positions usually assume the crowd in front is seated. At a ground where the home end stands for ninety minutes, a platform designed to that standard is unusable in practice on precisely the days that matter, and the venue can still show a compliance certificate.

I would put the test differently from the regulations. Not how many spaces, but this: can a disabled supporter buy a seat in the same price band, in the same part of the ground, with the same people, as everyone they came with?

Most grounds fail that question. A fair number of new ones, built from scratch, with a clean site and a blank drawing, still fail it.