At Parc des Princes on World Autism Awareness Day

What we learned on Inclusion as an environment

From structured participation in sport to the deeper question of lived experience, the day revealed how inclusion can be designed, sustained, and understood as a wider human condition, on the pitch and beyond.

The Day

In celebration of World Autism Awareness Day, we were invited to the Parc des Princes by Sport and Citizenship to witness the ONE TEAM programme led by Paris Saint Germain for Communities. Across the stadium and its wider spaces, we experienced a carefully designed ecology of inclusion.

The day unfolded across two interrelated settings. 

• The first was an immersive programme of activities designed for 1,000 children distributed through the stadium environment: around the pitch, across the concourses, and through a series of differentiated spaces for sport, sensory regulation, rest, creativity and guided engagement. 

• The second unfolded indoors during the ONE TEAM conference, where what had been lived in practice was articulated through the languages of method, partnership, rights and impact analysis.

  
  

Together, these two movements revealed that inclusion is not an intention added afterwards. It is shaped through environment.

What struck us first was that the event had not been arranged as a generic sports occasion with a few adaptations added at the margins. Across the Parc des Princes complex, participation had been organised as a differentiated field.

Sporting activities sat alongside calmer and more mediating spaces, including sensory rooms, rest areas, educational activities, information points, interactive stations and places for pause, movement and re-entry, as well as moments of lightness such as photo opportunities and shared food spaces.

As we moved through the stadium spaces, it became apparent that self-regulation had been designed into the event itself. A child could step back, settle, move intensely, engage symbolically, or return to activity without being treated as having fallen outside the event. Regulation was held within participation rather than outside of it.

Inclusion Designed In

That design choice carries enormous significance.

The environment adjusts to the child.

Withdrawal is not treated as failure. Rest is not treated as absence. Intense movement is not treated as disruption. Each becomes part of a wider ecology in which participation can take different forms and follow different rhythms. The child is not asked to conform to one single tempo of engagement. The environment itself offers multiple thresholds into belonging.

At the centre of this stands ONE TEAM, the programme led by Paris Saint-Germain for Communities. As the conference materials made clear, ONE TEAM rests on a key innovation: bringing together autistic and neurotypical children aged 8 to 13 within the same sporting sessions, from the outset, as a shared and structured practice. This mixity is the operating principle of the method.

Supported by educators trained in specific needs and guided by expert and partner organisations, the programme creates the conditions for children to encounter and adjust to one another over time.

The programme is conceived upstream as a structured tool for social inclusion, designed to generate learning through direct experience of difference, rather than through separation or parallel tracks, and with the capacity to be transmitted and adapted across contexts.

Fabien Allègre for PSG for Communities and Natalia Vodianova for naked heart france

During the conference, that method came into sharper focus. We heard of the importance of stable routines, visual supports, communication scaffolds, predictable sequences and repeated practice. We heard how children are helped to locate themselves within a framework that is readable, secure and routine-based. One phrase remained with us in particular: l’inclusion n’est pas un miracle. C’est une méthode. Inclusion is not a miracle. It is a method.

The emotional force of the day was no less important than its methodological rigour. Again and again, the discussion returned to joy, pride, confidence and ordinary social participation. What is at stake extends beyond access to sport. It concerns access to shared life.

The conference then widened the frame further, bringing together naked heart france, Maïa Autisme, Sport et Citoyenneté, the French government (National Strategy on Neurodevelopmental Disorders), UNESCO (Fit For Life, an international programme promoting sport for all), Tibu Africa (launch of ONE TEAM in Morroco), experts in disability rights and access to sport, and a Paralympic swimming champion.

The programme is being shaped as an emerging framework for international roll-out, expanding to other continents and collective sports.

The Matter of Impact

Since 2024 when the programme was launched, Sport & Citizenship has been tasked to analyse the impact, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches across a broad set of indicators.

The immediacy of a smile on a child face is a strong feedback. Families and educators do also testify to visible progress.

For all the strength of the model, one frontier remained open.

How to fully capture the interior experience of the child, especially where verbal language is partial, delayed or absent?

How do we remain faithful to perception, overload, enjoyment, safety, confidence and meaning when speech is not the primary pathway? How do we approach lived experience more generally, including for neurotypical children?

At RIZOM, we are interested in how meaning emerges through images, metaphors, visual selections and relational patterns, especially where verbal fluency is not the principal route of expression.

What ONE TEAM made visible is that inclusion can be designed as an environment. The next frontier lies in refining how that environment is experienced and interpreted from within. This calls for new instruments of listening. It calls for approaches that do not flatten experience into predefined categories or force it into forms of expression that remain external to the child.

Beyond the Pitch

There is a wider relevance here. The lesson of the day reaches beyond autism and beyond childhood. It also speaks to neurodivergent adults in organisations, and to the wider conditions under which human beings are able to participate meaningfully in a rapidly changing world.

This matters because AI is already flattening certain dimensions of work and communication. It standardises outputs, accelerates tempo, and privileges forms of speed, conformity and repetition that can narrow the field of what counts as valid participation. In that context, inclusion is vital to human adaptability.

Neurodivergent individuals often think laterally, perceive patterns differently, regulate differently, and approach problems through pathways that do not align with institutional norms. These differences are not marginal. They form part of the plurality of intelligence required to navigate complexity.

What we experienced at Parc des Princes offered a concrete illustration.

Human participation deepens when environments allow for multiple rhythms, multiple thresholds and multiple ways of making meaning.

The same principle applies on a football pitch and in a workplace. In that sense, inclusion becomes a condition of resilience.

The ONE TEAM programme shows that inclusion can be built in practice. It can be structured, sustained and shared. The next target is to deepen how lived experience is sensed and interpreted from within.

That is where a new chapter begins, not only for inclusive sport, but for how participation, dignity, and human value are understood more broadly.