“Football is more than a game; it is a passion. It is something that comes from inside and touches people’s hearts.”
So said Chelsea striker Didier Drogba about the “beautiful game” and, as one of the world’s most popular sports, it brings in hundreds of thousands of spectators to grounds across the world every week for 90 minutes of pure passion.
One of the loudest – eighth loudest in Europe according to a study by 1Sports1 – is Newcastle United’s home of St James Park. The 52,000-seater stadium, built in the centre of the North-Eastern UK city – is known for its noise and passion. I should know, I am a lifelong Newcastle fan and, for much of my life, I was a season ticket holder at SJP.
But if football is a sport known for its passion, and that passion is often reflected in the noise made on the terraces, what does it feel like to be a sports fan – and this could apply to any sport – who can’t hear the roar of the crowd?
The World Health Organisation estimates that by 2050 over 700 million people – around one in every ten people – will have disabling hearing loss. Currently, over 5% of the global population require rehabilitation to address their disabling hearing loss (including 34 million children).
As Ryan Gregson and David Wilson – two lifelong Newcastle fans who are deaf – explain in the video here, they experience football in a different way.
“We’ve never heard the singing crowds. We never hear the stadium roar,” they said. “On a match day, there is a buzz around the place, it is electric. We see the atmosphere and the passion.”
This gulf in experience is one of the reasons that Saudi Arabian events and experience company Sela launched its #UnsilenceTheCrowd campaign, which uses a mixture of IoT and haptic clothing to transform the experience of deaf fans.
On April 13, Newcastle played Tottenham Hotspur at St James’ Park in the Premier League. For Ryan, David and several other selected deaf fans, it wasn’t just another matchday.
In partnership with deafness charity the Royal National Institute of the Deaf, and Newcastle United, Sela unveiled its campaign.
The Saudi company has been the official shirt sponsor of Newcastle United since the start of the 2023/24 Premier League season, but in the game against Spurs, Newcastle players such as Alexander Isak and Anthony Gordon instead wore the infamous black and white jersey-bearing RNID’s name instead.
In the crowd, deaf fans were also given a special RNID version of the Newcastle strip – one with built in haptic feedback. Linked to broadcast mics around the stadium that could detect crowd noise, the shirts vibrate along with the crowd.
A spokesperson for Sela explained that the noise from the mics – placed at all four corners of the pitch – was fed through specialist software that transforms the real-time analogue sound from the crowd into data as digital sound.
The data is then transmitted wirelessly to the haptic shirts through an antenna. The ‘electric brain’ in the shirt then operates built-in modules, causing motors to vibrate in resonance with the crowd’s cheering, providing a tactile sensory experience for the wearer.
The shirt generates different vibrating patterns in response to home goals, clapping, singing and away goals – although the latter action for this game was not required as Newcastle beat Spurs 4-0.
The shirts themselves were made by wearable-technology fashion brand CuteCircuit, which first developed the haptic Sound Shirt in 2019, when it was selected to be part of the annual exhibition at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
What was the thinking behind the innovation? Ibrahim Mohtaseb, senior vice president of Sela, explains: “Ensuring every fan can experience the amazing atmosphere is so important to us as a sponsor of Newcastle United.
“St James’ Park is renowned for its noise and passion. Through this initiative we hope to enable deaf fans and fans with hearing loss to feel a part of this.”
This isn’t just a one-off either. Sela has committed to making 30 of the haptic shirts, which weigh slightly more than a normal garment due to batteries (one source likened them to padding cricketers wear), available to fans with hearing loss for the rest of the current season at least.
For the RNID, the opportunity to not just have its logo broadcast to millions of viewers, but also to consult on something that could help the community it supports, was one too big to turn down.
Sela first approached the RNID, with the Saudi company explaining that it wanted to launch an inclusivity campaign for deaf fans.
For Lauren Ward – tech lead at the RNID – while this wasn’t the first time she has seen haptic technology used in clothing for deaf people, it was the first time it had been used for sports.
Speaking to TechInformed, she explains: “Most of the usages of haptic shirts have been focussed on music, because quite often deaf people who attend concerts will try to position themselves near speakers to feel the vibrations. So, several festivals have implemented haptic vests for deaf concert goers.”
In 2022, for example, the Mighty Hoopla festival in London’s Brockwell Park partnered with Vodafone to make several haptic vests available for deaf concert goers, allowing them to feel the music of acts such as Jessie Ware through multi-sensory feedback.
In that instance, the concertgoers wore specially designed vests, while Sela worked with CuteCircuit to integrate the haptic into the Newcastle “Sound Shirts”, making them a lot less bulky.
The Sound Shirts contain an array of motors allowing different types of movement depending on what the crowd is doing. This is vital in this technology, Ward adds, because it allows solutions to develop their own form of “language”.
That means that each shirt – whether being used for a football game, or for a concert, can be adjusted to reflect the mood the artist or environment wants to portray. It also means the shirts can be toggled depending on the user – someone who has hearing loss in the outer ear may have a different experience to someone with inner loss.
The shirts were tested at an event prior to the game, in which Newcastle players such as Dan Burn and England international Kieran Trippier met with local deaf fans. Burn even celebrated a goal during the game with a signed salute to the fanbase.
This group tried out the sound shirts and offered feedback of their experiences, so Sela, the RNID and tech partners could adjust them ahead of matchday.
Ward says the response was overwhelmingly positive. “It obviously isn’t a solution for everyone, but it is definitely something that is desirable and the response to it has been positive,” she adds.
“Everyone’s experience of hearing loss is so unique so there is never going to be a one-size-fits-all technology solution. But the more options people must pick from to create an accessible experience, the better.”
While vibrating clothes aren’t a new concept why is it only now that these solutions are being used to improve inclusivity?
Ward (pictured below with Mohtaseb and Newcastle chief commercial officer Peter Silverstone explains it is in part down to power and latency. The latter is especially relevant when it comes to experiences.
“You don’t want there to be a significant delay between the crowd reaction or the music, and the clothing itself,” she explains.
“Whereas 10 years ago you might have to pre-programme clothing for a concert, today, with 5G sensors, that connection can have extremely low latencies – to the point of almost working in real-time. That makes the experience much more inclusive and engaging.”
Sela hopes that the UnsilenceTheCrowd campaign will set an example for other football clubs to follow in the boots of Newcastle United and adopt similarly inclusive technologies.
“We would welcome the whole football family to join us by adopting the technology. By acting now, we can collectively make watching live football matches an incredible experience for everyone who loves the game,” says Sela’s Mohtaseb
The beautiful game certainly would benefit. Research from the RNID found that 93% of deaf people agree you can’t beat the thrill of watching a live sport event in a stadium. But that experience is, as we’ve established, very different from those who can hear it.
Looking beyond football and music, Ward says other live experiences could adopt haptic technology – linked to real sensors – to make them more accessible for deaf people.
The film Ready Player One involved a virtual world – like a metaverse – accessed via a VR headset, but players in the film could also buy a haptic suit to up their experience.
This kind of usage – in tandem with VR or AR – is another area being explored, Ward reveals. With most XR experiences, communication for deaf people is done through vision – i.e. subtitles. But this can be compound feelings such as motion sickness that have already proved problematic for some platforms.
“Signing avatars in a VR world makes sense for those who use sign language, but there is definitely potential for inclusivity around virtual realities and mixed realities, using haptics to link with the visuals in an alternate reality world.”
The development of the Newcastle shirts was quite quick but offered a real-world example of tech being used to boost inclusivity.
As Newcastle fan Gregson told CNN after the Tottenham games: “It was like we felt fully involved, as one with the crowd and the stadium. What a day. What a game. What a shirt.” And that is what it is all about.
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