Football Grounds Map: 24 Maps of Groundhopping and Lost Grounds
Groundhopping logs up to English ground no. 592, dead Scottish clubs, a pitch on the equator, dog rules at 1,045 grounds, ultras stickers and World Cup venues.
Updated
Search MapIndex for football grounds and 1,599 maps come back, 203 more for
groundhopping, and many of them are counts. One hopper has reached English ground
number 592 and Norwegian number 287; a German numbers his first match in each new
country, 57 of them planned; a Pole hunts the stadiums at Poland’s compass points, and
someone fits all 92 League grounds into eight days. Others count what is gone: 264 dead
Scottish clubs, 24 demolished World Cup stadiums, Belo Horizonte’s first fields under a
mall and a supermarket. And one fan mapped whether you may bring your dog to 1,045
non-league grounds.
English ground # 592 is The Stanks in Berwick, where on 18 July 2024 Berwick Rugby Club played a side called Moves Like Waga. The English count began at Elm Park, Reading, on 24 October 1995 with Reading v Bury, and a Norwegian one runs beside it, past number 287, from the old Fredrikstad Stadion, where there were “far too many games to list”. Each of the 1,250 grounds gets its number per country, the first match, every revisit and a link to the report on the author’s blog, vikinghopper. The recent entries travel far: five Argentine grounds in four days of September 2022, two grounds in Bishkek on 25 October 2025, the Thuwunna Stadium in Yangon on 24 February 2026. At Voldsløkka, Skeid’s former home, one line records “a sad non-match revisit” in June 2015.
At the Zerão in Macapá the equator runs along the halfway line, so one half of the pitch lies in the northern hemisphere and the other in the southern. Every one of the 81 grounds on this Italian list earns its place with an oddity like that: a steam train from the 1800s that passes between the pitch and the stand at Čierny Balog in Slovakia, a cable car that crosses over one goal in Taormina every 15 minutes, an oak left in the middle of a pitch on Saaremaa in Estonia because, legend says, the cables meant to pull it out kept snapping. At Kostajnica the border between Bosnia and Croatia crosses the pitch, two thirds on one side. Some are barely grounds: Tasiilaq’s in Greenland gets “Stadium” in quotation marks, and Sandwich Park on South Georgia is included as the nearest thing to a football pitch that far south.
On 12 September 1885 Aberdeen Rovers lost 35-0 to Dundee Harp, the second worst defeat in Scotland; the worst went to their neighbours Bon Accord, beaten 36-0 by Arbroath. Both are among the 264 dead clubs on this map, each with its years and its ground, many marked “(estimate)” or “(approximate)” where the field can no longer be pinned down. Rifle volunteer companies founded clubs, and so did a regiment: the 93rd Highland Regiment F.C. “lived nomadically”, playing wherever the regiment was stationed. Albatross F.C. may have belonged to a firm of oil and grease refiners, since one match secretary took his letters at its Stockwell Street premises, and Baillieston Juniors folded in 2005 after selling their ground and finding no new home.
At Barton Rovers there are bowls of fresh water inside and out and “Scooby snax” free behind the bar; at Tiverton Town the advice is to look out for the CEO’s dog. This map, made by @benchillingham, covers steps 1 to 6 of the English non-league pyramid and gives 1,045 grounds two answers, dogs and guide dogs, plus the details. Where a club never replied, it says so, and sometimes quotes a fan on Twitter instead, as for Chesterfield and Maidenhead United. Weymouth lets dogs into the bar, “but it can get very busy”, Guiseley wants them over six months old and house trained, and Aldershot Town admits guide dogs only.
“27.9.2005: Juventus - Rapid 3:0 (1:0), Champions League, 2. Gruppenspiel, Stadio Delle Alpi, 11.156”: every one of the 2,350 entries on this map reads like that, with the half-time score, the round, the ground and the crowd, and most link to a match report on the author’s blog. Rapid Wien keep turning up as the away side, at Bruges and Bayern, at Vllaznia in Shkodër, against APOP Kinyras in Nicosia and at Hapoel Tel Aviv, who won 5-1 in 2009. In between the author stops at small grounds: on 14 March 2007, the day after Modena v Bologna, two Serie D games, Solbiatese v Atletico Calcio before about 80 people and Seregno v USO Calcio before about 100. The grounds lie in 43 countries.
Day 3 starts at Crewe’s Mornflake Stadium and ends at Fleetwood’s Highbury Stadium 17 grounds later, with Anfield, Goodison Park, Old Trafford and the Etihad on the way. This map plans the 92 as a road trip in eight daily layers and nothing else, no notes, only the order: Day 1 from Bournemouth west to Plymouth and back through Exeter and Bristol to Newport, Cardiff and Swansea, Day 4 up to Carlisle, Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough, Day 8 from Gillingham through south London to Brighton, Portsmouth and Southampton. Bradford City is marked by its ticket office.
The walls around a shopping-centre roundabout above the A47 at Givors may be “the most contested in France”, this map suggests. It logs where Saint-Étienne’s ultras groups, the Magic Fans 1991 and the Green Angels 1992, leave their marks around Lyon and beyond: MF91 on a stone wall along the Saône “seen June 2026”, GA92 under railway bridges and on roadside electrical boxes, regular raids on the Meyzieu tram stop, some tags reading “fuck OL”. Saint-Étienne holds 48 of the 99 sticker points and Paris Saint-Germain 17, and AEK Athens left graffiti at the Vienne toll plaza on the way north, “with a few rude words as a bonus”. The author is no bystander: at Givors he has “already over-stickered” them, and they have been back since.
Sweden 8, Luxembourg 0 at Solna on 7 October 2017 is country number 14, and Luxembourg keep coming back: Malta, San Marino, Belarus, Moldova, Lithuania and Ukraine were all first visited for a Luxembourg away game in 2018 and 2019. The German author gives each country one numbered point, the ground of the first match there, starting with 1. FC Kaiserslautern v Eintracht Frankfurt, 4:6 on penalties, at Trier’s Moselstadion on 24 July 1992, and reaching Bolivia v Uruguay in La Paz in 2015. Twenty-seven countries have their match. The other 30 points, from Feldkirch and Split to Phnom Penh and Agadir, carry only a ground and a dash: the list of what is still to come.
RAP of Amsterdam moved almost every year: the IJsclubterrein from 1888, 's Gravesandestraat in 1895, a cycle track in the Willemspark in 1896, the Schagerlaan in 1897, Oud Roosenburgh until 1905. Built from voetbalarchieven.nl, this map places 270 grounds of Dutch top-flight and professional clubs, each with the clubs and years it served. Ajax played in Het Houten Stadion, the wooden stadium, from 1911 to 1934 and at De Meer until 1996; AFC spent 1917 to 1920 at a farm called “Goed Genoeg”, good enough; the Olympic Stadium housed Blauw Wit, BVC Amsterdam, DWS and FC Amsterdam in turn.
Old Carthusians against Old Etonians on 6 October 2012, on the athletics track pitch at Charterhouse, drew a crowd of 9, entrance free, no programme. Horsham 1881 v Sabbath FC on a Sunday morning in May 2013 did worse: “3 men and a dog”. This log of one season, 28 games from June 2012 to May 2013, notes for each the price, the programme, the miles travelled and the attendance, with how it was counted: “38 (headcount)” at Feckenham, “100 or 150 (both local guesses)” at Kirchheim/Teck. It runs from Moyola Park in Northern Ireland to Ingolstadt, 704 miles for a €12 ticket, and keeps the failures: one game “called off due to weather”, another moved without warning, so the author saw a youth game instead.
Estadio Pocitos in Montevideo, a venue of the first World Cup in 1930, is one of 24 stadiums this map marks as demolished, along with Rome’s Stadio Nazionale PNF, Roker Park, Ayresome Park, the Pontiac Silverdome, Giants Stadium and Turin’s Stadio delle Alpi. Its 239 points gather every World Cup stadium on one layer, up to the 12 marked as new, among them the Neom and Qiddiya Coast stadiums planned for Saudi Arabia’s 2034 tournament and Morocco’s new Hassan II Stadium.
Kacper Sokołowski wants to stand in Czcibor Cedynia’s ground, “the westernmost in-use stadium of Poland”, and in its five counterparts at the other compass points, from Flota Świnoujście in the northwest to Otryt Lutowiska, the southernmost and southeasternmost at once. His 450 places fall into four layers: matches seen, grounds seen without a match, a wish list, and the abandoned pitches of clubs that no longer play, most of them village fields such as Sokół Grudusk or the pitch in Stupsk. The matches cluster around Warsaw, down to side pitches with names of their own: “Sahara” beside Polonia’s stadium, “Wembley” beside Drukarz’s, “Klatka”, the cage, at a school. Polonia Warszawa needs two points to hold all its dates, from Ruch Chorzów in 2012 to Odra Opole in May 2024.
St Just AFC Reserves against Perranporth Reserves on Saturday 26 February is the first match of a walk from Land’s End to John o’ Groats planned around football. The route crosses Dartmoor, follows the Pennines past Malham and Tan Hill and takes the West Highland Way and Loch Ness, and fixes a game wherever the dates allow: St Austell v Camelford on a Friday, Plymouth Argyle v AFC Wimbledon on a Tuesday, Clitheroe v Glossop North End and two days later Colne v Clitheroe. A rugby match slips in at Penzance, Cornish Pirates v Jersey Reds, and the arrival in Glasgow on 21 May is timed for the Scottish Cup Final. North of Glasgow the 93 points carry no more fixtures, only the path to Wick.
Atlético Mineiro’s Estádio Antônio Carlos, opened in 1928, was demolished, and the Diamond Mall shopping centre stands on it; América’s Estádio do Alameda gave way to a supermarket. This Portuguese map follows Belo Horizonte’s football from the improvised field in the Parque Municipal where Victor Serpa organised the city’s first football exhibition on 3 May 1904, through 17 grounds of the clubs that followed. The boys who later founded Atlético played on a hard, dusty field that, in Adelchi Ziller’s words, merged into the Avenida Afonso Pena; América’s first pitch in 1912 was neither grass nor earth but macadam. The Campo do Yale hosted the first match in the city that charged for tickets.
On 18 April 2022, 171 people watched SV 66 Oberbergkirchen lose 1:4 to DJK SV Pleiskirchen in a Bavarian Kreisklasse, and the author of this uMap was one of them. Its 4,673 points sort grounds into 22 layers by country and by German league level and region, each with a capacity and links to europlan-online.de, stadionwelt.de and the club’s fussball.de page, from the Maschparkstadion in Göttingen for 8,000 to the BSV-Arena in Stuhr for 2,000. One layer, KARTE, is the author’s own record of matches with kick-off time, result and crowd, from a friendly at Tiefenbach watched by 23 to Mosgiel AFC beating Northern Dunedin 5:0 in New Zealand in 2017.
Kampfbahn Glückauf, the Bökelberg, Campo Testaccio, the ruins of the Estádio Vidal Pinheiro in Porto: a layer of 33 demolished, lost or old grounds sits beside this groundhopper’s lists of stadiums visited and still to visit, 634 places in 35 countries. The lost grounds get only a name and a label, “(Demolished)”, “(Old Ground)” or “(Lost Ground)”, and the choice shows where the author has been looking: Dutch old grounds such as FC Groningen’s Oosterpark and Heracles’ Bornsestraat, Cathkin Park and Shawfield in Glasgow, Rome’s Stadio Flaminio, Cagliari’s Sant’Elia and Brentford’s Griffin Park.
The count began at Vicarage Road on 3 November 2012, Watford v Leicester City, and the 92 has moved under its feet since: Griffin Park, White Hart Lane, the Boleyn Ground and Kingsmeadow are all marked “(New ground to be visited)”. Two layers keep the score, 46+5 grounds visited and 45 to go, and each visit is written in shorthand, EPL down to FLT for the Football League Trophy and F for a friendly, with renamed grounds noted as “visited as ‘KC Stadium’” or “‘Ricoh Arena’”. The newest visits count women’s football too: Chelsea Women v Manchester United Women at Stamford Bridge in January 2024 ticks off Chelsea.
The Estadio Mundial 82 in Murcia was paid for with the money the 1982 World Cup brought to Spain “besides Naranjito”, and its teams still play there on earth, with tin dugouts. This map collects 48 football grounds of dirt rather than grass, most in Spain by region, a few in Italy, Morocco and Portugal, and its notes know the losing battles: CD Barajas keeps trying for artificial turf a few metres from one of the world’s biggest airports, and Avarero, once CD Figaredo’s home, has gone to weeds after a decade unused. CD Morés is one of the few senior clubs in Aragon still on earth, and in Salomó in Catalonia games are played “always respecting the 12 o’clock Mass”.
Raj Pauli in Delhi, the East River Pirates in New York, FC St. Pauli Las Cruces in New Mexico and St. Pauli Roj, a Kurdish antifascist fan club in northern Iraq, are among the international supporters’ clubs on this map of FC St. Pauli’s world. Its 126 places start at the Millerntor, where the note at the Gegengerade reads “Willkommen in der Hölle des Millerntor”, and spread through layers of Hamburg fan groups, Paulianer pubs, restaurants and B&Bs across Germany, fan initiatives and the club’s history. The international entries get one line each, in French: Collettivo Velico 359 in Pisa is an Italian group “linked to the sea and to piracy”.
To reach Brechin Victoria, take the train to Arbroath, walk out onto Keptie Street and catch the 140 to Rivers Street. This map of the Scottish Junior Football Association gives 107 clubs in its East, North and West regions a ground, a postcode and, for most, directions by public transport, written step by step down to the turn at the old dairy and the hotel where you take the left fork. Arbroath Victoria play at Ogilvy Park, Banks O’ Dee at Spain Park, Tayport at The Canniepart, and Montrose Roselea at Links Park, found by heading for the spire of the Auld Kirk.
In the basement of McConnell’s Bar on Hope Street the supporters’ group Celts for Change was born on 19 October 1993; by 9 December an estimated 850 fans filled Govan Town Hall, where around 65% voted against an immediate boycott. This map gathers 83 places of Celtic’s history: the St Mary’s church hall in the Calton where Brother Walfrid constituted the club on 6 November 1887, the Savoy Street shop of his Penny Dinners for poor children, the site of the first Celtic Park a little less than 500 metres from the present one, and the Broomielaw quays where Irish immigrants came ashore. It even holds a stadium that never was, the £100m ground proposed at Cambuslang in 1992.
FC Basel against FC Zürich was called off by a power cut, so St. Jakob-Park needed a second trip, for Basel 1, St. Gallen 1. This French fan keeps FC Nantes On Tour (27 grounds) and Liverpool FC On Tour (14) apart from the rest, 118 football grounds “sans FCN/LFC”, each with the score and a link to a report on au-stade.fr: West Ham 1, Crystal Palace 3 at the Boleyn Ground in February 2015, Prescot Cables v City of Liverpool in the FA Cup, Ireland 0, Iceland 1 at the Aviva. Other sports get their own layers, hockey grounds, tennis venues and NFL games at Wembley and Twickenham, and 42 football grounds wait on the wishlist.
Kevin De Bruyne is already on a façade in the rue Bieldekens in Drongen, Jan Vertonghen on the Tilroda sports hall in Temse, Romelu Lukaku in front of ‘Het Landhuis’ in Bornem. This map of 25 graffiti portraits of Belgium’s Red Devils, painted mostly on village sports halls and clubhouse walls, marks which are done and which are still to come: Amadou Onana and Orel Mangala by the Atomium, Axel Witsel, Arthur Theate and Loïs Openda on Liège’s place Saint-Lambert, Thomas Meunier on the clubhouse of R.U.S. Sainte-Ode. For Jeremy Doku in Antwerp and Maxim De Cuyper in Knokke-Heist the exact wall had not yet been announced.
Basile, 21, a student in Lille, counts 280 matches and some forty stadiums in five countries, and goes about it like a sociologist: he arrives long before kick-off, walks around the town and watches how the supporters get ready. Six French groundhoppers tell how they started on this small map. Guillaume, 24, in Toulouse, was groundhopping without knowing it, noting stadiums and keeping tickets, until he moved to England in 2016; Steve, 35, first went to England in 2008 for three matches, two of which were called off, and then went back about four times a year. For Philip, 33, a good groundhop depends on who sits next to you; in Metz it was a man who never misses a match.
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