Could Your Town Fit in Its Stadium? Sports Venues Bigger than the Towns They Stand In

I compare the capacity of 11,658 sports venues of 1,000 seats or more in Wikidata with the population of the place each stands in. A first pass finds 321 venues with more seats than their place has people, but most are artefacts of how places are recorded: of 375 venues read by eye, 133 stand in a district or suburb of a larger city, 17 have a wrong population, are not real venues or have been demolished, 3 are placed in a county or borough, 2 are unresolved, and 33 are real towns whose capacity or population needed correcting (50.1% in all). After correction, 190 venues in 48 countries are bigger than their town, 73 of them at least twice. The largest ratios belong to a minor-league ballpark in the village of Sauget, Illinois (42.5 seats per resident), a Gaelic games ground in the Irish town of Clones (15.4), a football ground in Aixovall, Andorra, and American college and professional stadiums in small municipalities, led by Beaver Stadium (9.9 times College Township). Racecourses, motor circuits and winter sports venues reach higher still (Oakbank Racecourse 80.9, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway 18.4) and are reported separately. In Britain and Ireland, Gaelic games county grounds lead (St Tiernach's Park, Clones, 15.4; Semple Stadium, Thurles, 5.6); the highest English Football League ratio is Bolton Wanderers' ground at Horwich (1.4). By country, Wikidata's venues amount to 311 seats per 1,000 people in Qatar and 210 in Ireland, against 106 in the United Kingdom.

Interactive page: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/stadium-towns/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/stadium-towns. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/stadium-towns/.

Sources: Wikidata (CC0), queried with QLever; Natural Earth (public domain); Irish town populations from the CSO Census of Population 2022; current capacities of checked grounds from Wikipedia and club pages. Derived data CC0; text and figures CC BY 4.0; code MIT.