Last month we took a look at the 20 Premier League stadiums. This month we will look at the statistics of the 18 Bundesliga stadiums.
So to get started with their most obvious feature: the Bundesliga stadiums are large, almost without exception. Whereas the Premier League stadiums averaged a capacity of 37,559, the Bundesliga stadiums add up another 11,000 places, resulting in an average capacity of 48,649 places per stadium.
The largest stadium in the Bundesliga is Dortmund’s Signal Iduna Park with a capacity of 80,720, followed by Berlin’s Olympiastadion (74,064) and Munich’s Allianz Arena (69,901). The smallest stadium is Freiburg’s MAGE-SOLAR-Stadion, which can hold 24,000 fans, followed by a group of four stadiums with a capacity of around 30,000.
The difference with the Premier League, which has nine stadiums with a capacity below 30,000, is striking. On top of this the Bundesliga has eight stadiums with a capacity of 50,000 or more, whereas the Premier League has only three.
However, it is important to bear in mind that a large part of the Bundesliga capacity consists of standing areas, almost 25% in fact. Which means that the average seating capacity of 37,797 is almost the same as in the Premier League.
Dortmund’s 25,000-terrace counts as the biggest standing area in Europe, which means that Berlin’s Olympiastadion – which does not have any standing areas – has the most seats of all Bundesliga stadiums. But also the Allianz Arena has more seats than Signal Iduna Park.
Apart from Dortmund, Mönchengladbach’s Borussia-Park and Kaiserslautern’s Fritz-Walter-Stadion also hold more than 15,000 standing places. But it are the MAGE-SOLAR-Stadion and Mainz’s Coface Arena that have the highest percentage of standing places, both topping 40%.
Then age. With the Premier League stadiums we could make a very clear divide between “old” (built before 1914) and “new” (built after 1996) stadiums. We see a similar divide in Germany, though both old and new stadiums are “newer”.
Only one of the Bundesliga stadiums, the Weserstadion, was built before the First World War, and another one, the Fritz-Walter-Stadion, just after. In a period in which there was few construction in England, a total of seven new Bundesliga stadiums were completed: three in the period between 1928 and 1936, and four between 1954 and 1974.
After 1974 no new stadiums were built until the 2000s, which largely coincides with the general drought of new stadiums in Europe in that period. However, whereas in many countries the first modern-age stadiums were built in the mid to late 1990s, it took until 2000 for the first newly built German stadium to open (the Imtech Arena).
Of course, all “old” stadiums have been completely redeveloped in the meantime, and it is in some cases even debatable whether a stadium is in fact “new” or “old”.
But in the end it does not matter if you have a big stadium if you cannot fill it every other week. It turns out though, that there is not much of a problem there, as the Bundesliga clubs sell on average 92% of their tickets.
That’s about the same percentage as in the Premier League, though the Premier League does have more clubs selling out on a consistent basis (half of them versus a third in the Bundesliga).
FC Bayern is the only club that has sold out all of its home matches this season, with Dortmund and Schalke selling out every apart from the odd match, and Augsburg and Mainz the far majority.
Hertha BSC has the worst occupancy rate, though has a large stadium too fill and relative to performance does not do bad at all. 1. FC Nürnberg is the only club not to have sold out one match this season, but still gets to host Bayern, which in Germany is almost a guaranteed sell-out.
If we look closer at the data, it does appear as if the newer stadiums attract higher attendances than the older ones, though there is not enough data to make hard conclusions. What we can say is that there does not seem to be any difference caused by size, as larger and smaller stadiums have similar occupancy rates.
The next league we will investigate will be the Primera División, which promises to be a rather different affair than the Premier League and Bundesliga.
