Stadiums — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a stadium. There are more than 50,000 worldwide. Colour represents the sport played there, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the ground. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as the sport, the name and who runs it.

Where the data comes from

Every stadium here is something a mapper drew at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from aerial imagery. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any register of sports grounds.

What we include

We use one exact tag, `leisure=stadium`, which is the ground as a whole rather than the roofed structure standing on it. We leave out `building=stadium`, the structure on its own, so that one ground is not counted twice. We also leave out `leisure=sports_centre`, which covers smaller venues and is a different kind of place. We apply no size threshold, so a village ground with a few hundred seats appears alongside a national arena.

Colour

Colour represents the sport. We group the recorded values into a short list, so football, which OpenStreetMap tags as `soccer`, has its own colour, as do cricket and rugby, and the rest share a colour for other sports. Where a ground records more than one sport, it belongs to each of them. Many stadiums record no sport at all, and we draw those in grey and label them as unknown, because the tag is missing rather than because the sport is obscure.

At close zoom the outline replaces the dot

Zoom far enough in and each dot gives way to the shape the mapper drew. That outline is the object itself, and the dot is only a way of showing it when the whole country is on screen. A ground that looks like a neat circle from far away turns out to be an oval bowl, a rectangle with stands on three sides, or a running track with a pitch inside it.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the ground in square metres, measured on the globe. A ground four times the area draws twice as wide. The alternative you would want is the crowd it holds, and OpenStreetMap records a capacity for too few stadiums to size a worldwide map by, so we use the footprint, which nearly every ground has. Footprint is not attendance either. A ground with a running track or a car park inside its outline covers more land than a compact stand holding the same crowd.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a stadium there, not that a place has none. Mapping is more complete in western and central Europe, North America and Japan than in much of Africa and central Asia. No independent worldwide register of stadiums exists for us to check this against.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A ground shown here may have been demolished, and the edit history records when a mapper drew it rather than when it was built.

Source and licence

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