The road to Los Angeles runs through Liverpool

For one week in May 2027, the Inclusive Sport & Culture Festival will turn Liverpool's waterfront into a Paralympic proving ground.

Boccia players from dozens of countries arrive at M&S Bank Arena to compete for qualification for the Los Angeles 2028 Paralympic Games. Para canoeists race on the historic docks. Para athletes compete on the Pier Head, in the open air, free to watch, in front of thousands of people from across Liverpool and further afield. And through the same week, right across the city, the festival will showcase brand-new work made by D/Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent artists, in a groundbreaking £1m inclusive arts and culture programme delivered by Culture Liverpool.

Four sports. One cultural programme of real scale. Tens of thousands of fans. Fifteen months before the LA Games.

We think it will be the most exciting thing happening in British sport and culture next year.

Visibility counts, and this event will change everything

Here's what makes this different from almost every new event and brand partnership opportunity in the country.

Interest in Paralympic sport and fandom has grown hugely in the UK and globally in recent years, but outside of the Games there are very few opportunities for elite athletes to compete and for fans to engage. This event aims to bridge that gap, and much more.

We are bringing the sport to the people and showcasing incredible talent in an ambitious new, UK-owned event that aims to truly level the playing field.

What's more, it already really counts.

The ISCF's Boccia competition is being staged as a World Boccia Cup from 3 to 7 May, counting towards LA28 qualification. What happens on that floor follows those athletes to California.

New properties almost never get that. Sanction from an international federation isn't something an organiser can decide to have, and it isn't awarded on the strength of a pitch deck. It's awarded on the strength of the operation. Liverpool has it.

Sport and culture, side by side, at full strength

We built culture as half the festival, not a fringe around the edge.

The arts and culture programme is worth over a million pounds, funded by Arts Council England and delivered with Culture Liverpool, and it's led by D/Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent artists with a Cultural Advisory Group steering the artistic direction. Commissions, performances, new work, made by disabled artists rather than about them.

We haven't found another UK sport festival designed that way from the outset. It's the reason the culture is in the name, and it's the thing that makes this a week in a city rather than a fixture in a venue.

For a partner it also means something special: one festival, and one partnership that spans the best of inclusive sport and culture together, in one of the UK's great event cities.

Liverpool is going all in

This isn't a one-off landing in a city that happens to be free that week.

The ISCF opens an extraordinary run: the festival in May 2027, the Tour de France arriving that July, the IWBF European Wheelchair Basketball Championships in September, and UEFA EURO 2028 after that. Four major events, one city, with accessibility as the declared thread through all of them. Liverpool has decided this is what it wants to be known for.

Around 22% of Liverpool City Region residents are disabled, against an England average of 17.7%. This is a city making a very deliberate bet, in front of a population with a real stake in whether it comes off.

For a partner, that means an association that doesn't end when the arena empties in May. It runs into a second major Para sport event in the same city four months later, and on along the road to LA28.

What we're really trying to do

Now the ambitious part.

We want our events in Liverpool in 2027 to become the template for how events get built in this country.

Not a specialist event for a specialist audience. A demonstration, at full scale and in public, that when you design an event from the outset around the widest possible range of people, you get a better event for everyone. Easier to reach. Easier to navigate. Easier to bring your family to. Drop a kerb for a wheelchair and you help the parent with a buggy, the traveller with a case, the person on crutches. Every industry that has taken that seriously has ended up with a better product. Live events have a huge opportunity to do the same.

If it works here, in front of 25,000 people and a national audience, it stops being a nice idea and becomes a standard. That's the prize, and it's far bigger than one week in May.

The legacy is already running

We're not waiting until 2027 to start.

A major event is a large employer, a large buyer and a large training opportunity for the year or two it takes to build. Most of that capacity disappears when the event does. We would rather it stayed.

So the impact programme is about opportunity and growth: paid roles and apprenticeships on the delivery team, work experience, and recruitment designed to open doors rather than filter people out. The first of those positions are already live and recruiting, with disabled applicants actively encouraged. Events built by teams that reflect their audiences work better for everyone, so the aim is to change who works in this industry as well as who watches it.

Alongside it, a volunteering programme, and a schools programme delivered with Liverpool City Council that will bring large numbers of young people to watch disabled athletes compete at the top of their sport, in their own city. For many of them it will be the first time they've seen anything like it. Some of them will decide it's for them too.

Come with us

Partnership conversations are open now across multiple tiers, for both the ISCF in May 2027 and the IWBF European Wheelchair Basketball Championships that September, both delivered by UKEL in Liverpool.

Here's what's on offer. A brand-new international property with genuine competitive standing. A young, diverse, city-centre audience. A cultural programme with a year of stories still to tell. A city putting four major events behind the same idea. And a chance to help set a standard the rest of the industry will end up following.

The ISCF is still being built, which is the best possible time to join it. There's room to shape activation, to be part of the commissioning story as it unfolds through 2026 and into 2027, and to build across both Liverpool events rather than buying into something already finished.

Together we can achieve great things, so please get in touch with alastair@ukel.co.uk and let's talk.

The Inclusive Sport & Culture Festival takes place in Liverpool, 2 to 8 May 2027.