Overview

Being a football fan as well as a Sheffield United fan I want to travel to any football match to enjoy football! Next on the list was the Euro 2016 Quarterfinal between France and Iceland at the Stade de France. I am unfortunately confined to a wheelchair football grounds can sometimes seem daunting experiences: where is the accessible parking, where are the seats, are they accessible, where are there disabled toilets etc.? Watching football fills people with joy and with an understanding of the problems you might encounter, I want to share my experiences of football grounds with you so you can feel a bit more confident about stadium accessibility in the future.

Transport & Parking

The parking at the Stade de France is good. It is complicated to drive to due to the road closures around the stadium but eventually you reach P4, which is the disabled parking area. To request parking there you need to ring up the ticketing service for the event you are about to watch a few weeks before traveling to the stadium - in our case it was UEFA. Once you have done this you are free to park in the available blue badge spots. If there is no space left when you arrive there is an overflow car park across the road, specifically for the disabled and the fire brigade!

Access

Once through the police search and the turnstiles a member of staff walks you to the entrance. The woman who helped us was very slow but she directed us to the lifts, which take you down to the disabled seating. Unfortunately when we visited a lot of the lifts were broken, meaning there were long queues for wheelchair users. To help with getting out after it might be a good idea to go to a lift further away from the disabled seating area to minimise the number of people queuing in front of you. The accessible seating is on a raised platform but the view is still obscured slightly by people standing up in front, yet the stewards are quick to make people sit down. Another downside is that seating for carers is behind the wheelchair bay up some steps so you cannot sit next to those who you are visiting with - unless they stand up. A good thing about the raised platform is that you feel like a part of the crowd if you like that kind of thing!

Toilets

The disabled toilets are by the lifts so they are easy to find, however annoyingly lots of people who weren't disabled could also find them easily, meaning I had to wait to use the toilet. The layout of the toilets was strange, there were no grab rails if you need them and they were also dirty. It was not what you would expect of a relatively new ground, I was not impressed!

Staff

It was useful to be shown to the lifts by a member of staff and a nice chef from the corporate area let us use the lift there to make our way out of the stadium.

Anything else you wish to tell us?

It's not worth the visit for a friendly match or a concert. Being the quarterfinal of the Euro's meant it was definitely worth going but for anything less I wouldn't recommend it with the toilets being so bad. I want to give a special mention to Iceland for doing so well at the Euro's and the game itself lived up to expectations with France winning 5-2!