Adressing the “caged wheelchair section” controversy as a Fenerbahçe fan.

Hello Aston Villa Fans, congratulations on your win today. However, there was a post by your official X account @AVFCsupport that put a bit of a false light on the away wheelchair section and a subsequent unwarranted and unjustified framing Attack by our rival fans looking for an opportunity to shame us for nothing. So I'm here to address it:

The @AVFC support account posted the picture on the left with a caption that included "The wheelchair section is caged" and this has led to the false notion that it means we are locking up wheelchair users. Especially because the angle the picture was taken at makes it look worse than it actually is.

But the context is better visible when looking at the picture on the right. This was also posted by the same account but as a different post. If you look at the right picure, you will see that wheelchair away fans enter their section from the pitchside. The yellow fencing is not there to cage them in but to cage the regular away fans in. Omitting this yellow fencing would basically mean an open invitation for able-bodied away fans to initiate a pitchstorm. The yellow fence is also there to protect wheelchair users from projectiles being thrown towards them, as even with the netting, we have a history of unruly away fans throwing things towards the pitch which can often land in the wheelchair section. The picture on the left may imply that the section is closed off on all 4 ends but the picture on the right disproves that.

You generally have to understand that you are not the regular kind of away fan that's coming to our stadium. Turkish football fans have a reputation of being way more aggressive and we also had an instance a decade ago where rival fans stabbed one of our own – a child at that – to death.

Last but not least, I am all for better long term solution than this. Our wheelchair home fans have complained that the fencing has the issue that the middle horizontal bar sits right at their eye height and causes visibility impairments.

I am at the end of the day a disabled person (though not in a wheelchair) myself and have advocated for more barrier free living on a global stage before. So I am on the side of the wheelchair users. But let me reiterate: we are not caging them and these measurements is to keep them safe from aggressive able-bodied fans. I also don't like the fact that rival fans are now weaponizing people like me to spread hate against my club. We are not a tool to push agendas, we are regular people.