How we count
Stadium Atlas lists 2,233 stadiums and sports grounds that are open today and have a recorded capacity of at least 10,000. Every number comes from the English Wikipedia article of the stadium. This page explains how the figures were read, what each comparison means, and what was left out.
How to read a stadium page
The large figure is the recorded capacity. The drawing beside it is a sketch of a stand plan: each block is 1,000 recorded places, filling the lower tier first. Where the stadium is not the largest in its nation, outlined blocks continue up to the largest one, so the gap is visible. The text then gives the stadium's strongest facts, the ladder shows its neighbours by capacity in the same nation, and the last block lists the five nearest stadiums on the site.
Which stadiums are included
Candidates come from 75 Wikipedia capacity lists (worldwide, by continent, by sport and by nation) and from the FIFA World Cup and Super Bowl venue lists. Each candidate's own article was read. A stadium is kept when its infobox gives a capacity of 10,000 or more, an opening year, coordinates and a nation, and when nothing in the article marks it as closed, demolished or not yet open. Indoor arenas, racecourses and motor-racing circuits are left out.
Every article that appears in any of these lists with 10,000 places or more was read. For 1,831 of the checked articles, the capacity in the article matches a list value within 2%; where they differ, the article's own figure is used. Left out for lack of data: 211 articles with no opening year, 27 without coordinates and 246 without a capacity figure (many of those are city or club pages linked from the lists).
Stadiums of 60,000 or more that are not listed
All articles that Wikipedia's lists give 60,000 places or more are on the site except these eight:
- Shah Alam Stadium (list value 80,372): closed or demolished (infobox/category)
- Ralph Wilson Stadium (list value 71,608): closed or demolished (infobox/category)
- King Fahd Sports City Stadium (list value 70,200): closed (infobox Closed row, no later reopening)
- Nou Mestalla (list value 70,044): infobox Built row reads 2025–present and there is no Opened row: under construction
- Yellow River Sports Center (list value 61,000): article lead: under construction, scheduled to open in late 2026
- Bahir Dar Stadium (list value 60,000): article lead: undergoing renovation and reconstruction, expected to be completed by the end of 2026
- Odi Stadium (list value 60,000): article lead: derelict stadium
- Plateau United F.C. (list value 60,000): the list row links a football club article, not a stadium article
Capacity
Capacity is the first current figure in the article's infobox. When the infobox gives a history of capacities, the figure for the latest period is used; a figure marked as expected, planned, a record attendance or a past period is skipped. A second figure marked as expected is shown as such (Camp Nou, for example). The figure says how many people the venue is recorded to hold. It is not a safety limit, a concert layout or an official count.
Opening year
The opening year is the Opened (or Established) row of the infobox. Where there is none, the year in the article's "Sports venues completed in" category or the end of the infobox's construction period is used, and the page says "completed" instead of "opened". For two stadiums the year comes from another language version of Wikipedia (Guangxi Sports Centre Stadium from Spanish, Rufaro Stadium from Polish), and their pages say so. Grounds rebuilt on the same site keep the year their article gives.
Ranks and strong facts
Every rank compares the stadiums on this site, never all stadiums of the world: "the 3rd-largest of the 62 listed stadiums in Spain". Ranks count ties together ("joint 2nd"). The peer groups are the whole site, the continent, the nation, the four UK home nations, each sport, each sport within a nation, the decade of opening and the city.
A fact counts as strong when the stadium is in the top k of a group of n, with k = n ÷ 5 rounded down, at least 1 and at most 5 (the top 10 for the whole site, the top 5 for a continent of 20 or more); when it was a venue of the FIFA World Cup, the Olympic Games, the Commonwealth Games or the Super Bowl; when it carries a heritage listing, a retractable or fixed roof, artificial turf where that is rare in its nation, the most northern or southern position in its nation, or one of the five most remote positions in its continent. All capacity ranks together count as one kind of fact, so a page states one capacity rank only (several only when the stadium is the largest in each group). Of the 2,233 stadiums, 1358 have no strong fact, 597 have one kind, 227 have two and 51 have three or more.
Which stadiums have their own page
A stadium gets a page when it has two kinds of strong fact, or is the largest or oldest in a group of 20 or more, or holds 60,000 or more with at least one strong fact, and when the page carries at least 200 words of its own data. That applies to 407 stadiums. The others appear with all their figures in the nation and continent pages and in the finder.
The "From the record" block
Stadium pages repeat further infobox fields when the article gives them: the year construction began, owner, operator, architects and main contractors (organisations only; names that may belong to private persons are left out), field size (only when given in metres), construction cost exactly as stated, without conversion, the record attendance with its year, elevation and the year of the first men's Test. The block then adds comparisons computed here: the stadium's position in its nation when stadiums are ordered by opening year, its share of the nation's combined listed capacity, its capacity divided by the median capacity of the nation's listed stadiums, how many of the nation's stadiums opened in the same decade or year, how its latest renovation year compares with the others in its nation, the nearest stadium on the site with a larger capacity, and the number of listed stadiums within 10 km. A comparison is left out when the stadium's text already ranks it on the same measure.
Sports, events, roofs and heritage
A stadium is "listed for" a sport when it appears in Wikipedia's capacity list for that sport (athletics also from the article's venue categories). World Cup venues come from the list of FIFA World Cup stadiums (1930–2026), Super Bowl hosts from the Super Bowl venue table (games up to February 2026). Olympic and Commonwealth Games use, roofs and heritage listings come from the article's categories; when a category is missing, the site says nothing, it never states that a stadium lacks something.
Nations, continents and distances
Each stadium is placed in the sovereign state named in its infobox location or in the lists; the four UK home nations are kept as a second level. Continents follow the United Nations M49 regions merged into six: Turkey, Cyprus and the Caucasus count as Asia, Russia as Europe, Central America and the Caribbean as North America. Distances are great-circle distances between the recorded coordinates (Earth radius 6,371 km). Positions that lay far from the rest of their nation were checked by hand.
Sources and licence
Facts from English Wikipedia articles, read on 28 October 2026, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Only facts were taken (numbers, years, names, categories); no text was copied. Each stadium page links its article. Stadium Atlas is independent and not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation.