05 Feb League leading accessibility at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium

Emirates Stadium has served as the home stadium of Arsenal Football Club in north London since it opened in 2006.

In 2025 the club carried out an accessibility audit and determined they needed to install assistive listening systems at all of their customer touch points. Following previous work to upgrade the window intercom systems at their ticket offices in 2022, Contacta were asked to help make the rest of the stadium accessible to visitors and supporters with hearing loss.

“It made sense to work with Contacta,” said Arsenal’s Disability Access Manager, Aaron Heskins.  “Access and inclusion are a focus for us year-round, and we work closely across the club and with Contacta to ensure that this is embedded in everything we do.”

Our engineers carried out surveys throughout the ground and its precinct.  This included their flagship store The Armoury, the Arsenal museum and tour entrance, and their food and other retail spaces.

Our team specified a mix of our IL-K200-20-00 under-the-counter hearing loop systems and IL-K300-25-00 above-the-counter loop systems.  We worked with Arsenal to develop solutions that fitted the spaces available and met the IEC standard for hearing loop performance.

121 counter loops were installed throughout the stadium, with our engineers working around the club’s busy schedule.

This was most challenging in Arsenal’s Royal Oak bar which offers multi-purpose spaces for conferences, exhibitions, events and seminars.   Here, wireless RF systems were specified. The transmitters can be moved to whichever space is in use and connected to the existing sound systems.

Our engineers installed two RF-TXRM-865 stationery transmitters with 10 RF-RX1-865 personal receivers equipped with inductive neckloops for hearing aid users. The club is also equipped with headphones so anyone in need of extra help can access clear sound directly from the transmitter.

Arsenal are ahead of the curve when it comes to an industry-wide push to make the game a more inclusive experience for supporters.

They were the first Premier League club to fully integrate BSL into their matchdays and have a BSL interpreter pitch-side.  The club has also added live captions to the stadium’s in-bowl screens.

“We’re always striving to create an inclusive environment, to ensure that everyone can feel an equal sense of pride and belonging to Arsenal,” explained Aaron.  “A new Best Practice guide is currently being produced by the charity, Level Playing Field, for all stadia, but this recent installation is part of our ambition to be ahead of that and be welcoming to supporters with a range of needs.”

An annual maintenance agreement will ensure the assistive listening systems we’ve installed continue to offer easy access to sound for visitors and supporters with hearing loss.  Contacta will also install hearing loops in Arsenal’s newly-refurbished offices, Highbury House.

“The installation was really interesting as we got to see every side of the football fan experience,” said Contacta engineer, Stuart Ward.  “From installing hearing loops at the food and drink stands most of the fans would use, to the club class restaurants and bars, and even on box level.

“It’s the largest scale installation Contacta has done at an individual football club.  It really has the end user in mind.”