Premier League stadiums by capacity

All twenty grounds are listed, which took three routes and one correction. Neither Coventry City nor Hull City publishes a capacity anywhere reachable — both club sites render entirely in the browser, and Coventry's content API answers without carrying the figure. Both grounds came from somewhere other than the club. Hull City's is stated by Hull FC, the rugby league club that has shared the MKM Stadium since 2003. Coventry's is stated by the arena operator, a separate company from the club, as a "32,609-seat stadium bowl" — a figure not to be confused with the 8,000-capacity indoor arena in the same complex. Read both as seat counts rather than licensed matchday capacities. One number to distrust: 25,512 is widely quoted as the MKM Stadium's capacity, but Hull City's own records give it as the ground's highest attendance.

Full capacity table

Capacity figures are licensed totals: the maximum the safety authority permits for a Premier League match, including seats lost to segregation and the away allocation. They are not the same as attendance records, which predate all-seater conversion, and they shift year to year as clubs add rail seating or close a stand for works. That is why two published figures for the same ground can differ by a few hundred without either being wrong.

Which is the biggest Premier League stadium?

Old Trafford is the biggest Premier League stadium at 74,233, around 11,000 more than the next ground on the list. It has held that position since 2006, when the north-west and north-east quadrants were filled in. No current top-flight ground has come within 10,000 of it since. The gap widened this summer without a seat being added: West Ham's relegation took the 62,500-capacity London Stadium out of the division, leaving Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and Anfield as the closest to Old Trafford in size.

Which is the smallest Premier League stadium?

The Vitality Stadium is the smallest Premier League stadium at 11,286, small enough to fit inside Old Trafford six times over. Bournemouth have played top-flight football in a ground built for the fourth tier, and the constraint is physical: the site is hemmed in by Kings Park on three sides, which is why the club has spent a decade weighing redevelopment against a move.

Capacity is not standing

The order on this page is a physical one. It reflects how many people a ground is licensed to hold, and it moves only when seats are added, a stand closes, or a safety certificate is reissued. It says nothing about how the resident club is doing, and the two orders can be almost inverted: Bournemouth have finished above clubs playing in grounds three times the size of theirs, and Old Trafford has led this table through seasons United finished well down the division.

Relegation is the one place the two do meet, because it decides which grounds appear here at all. West Ham's demotion removed the 62,500-capacity London Stadium from the list this summer, and Coventry, Hull and Ipswich brought three grounds into it. For where the clubs themselves stand as the season runs, a Swedish-language league table is kept current through each round, with points, goal difference and matches played.

Stadium names and former names

Eight of the twenty grounds trade under a sponsor name, and the older name usually survives in match commentary and among supporters. The Etihad Stadium was the City of Manchester Stadium, built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games; Brighton's ground is the American Express Stadium commercially but Falmer Stadium in planning documents; Arsenal's Emirates Stadium sits on the Ashburton Grove site that gave the project its working name. Where a former name is still in common use, it appears on that ground's own page.

Where are the grounds?

London holds five of the twenty: Arsenal, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Fulham and Tottenham, with Brentford a sixth if you count the whole of Greater London rather than the postal town. The North West holds four, across Manchester and Liverpool. The remainder are spread thinly — one apiece in Newcastle, Sunderland, Leeds, Birmingham, Nottingham, Brighton, Ipswich, Hull, Coventry and Bournemouth. Relegation thinned both clusters at once this summer: West Ham took a London ground out of the division and Burnley a North West one, while Ipswich and Hull have pulled the map further east than it has been in years.

New and upcoming stadiums

Everton's move to the Hill Dickinson Stadium is the only completed relocation in this list, taking the club from 39,414 at Goodison Park to 52,888 on the Mersey waterfront. Manchester United have published plans for a 100,000-capacity replacement for Old Trafford, and Manchester City's north stand expansion lifts the Etihad above 60,000. None of that is reflected in the figures above until the seats exist and a licensed capacity is issued. Old Trafford's page tracks that project. A published figure can move without a brick being laid, which is why the concept behind each number is recorded alongside it in the table above.

The other rankings

• Largest stadiums in EuropeWembley leads at 90,000, not Camp Nou, which is operating at 62,652 during rebuilding.
• Biggest stadiums in the worldThe largest venue on earth is a cricket ground, and twelve of the top twenty are American college stadiums.
• Largest stadiums in the USAEight of America's ten biggest belong to universities rather than professional franchises.
• Danish Superliga stadiumsTwo grounds stand apart and the other ten sit within about thirteen hundred places of each other.

Guides

• Stadium capacity explainedWhy two sources print different numbers for one ground and both are right.
• Stadium seating and sectionsBlocks, away ends, safe standing, and why the accessible entrance is often not the one on your ticket.
• Stadium tours and ticketsAway tickets come from your own club, and tours stop on days you would not expect.