Premier League stadiums from satellite imagery: What our writers learned

AFC BournemouthArsenalAston VillaBrentfordBrighton & Hove AlbionBurnleyChelseaCrystal PalaceEvertonFulhamLeeds UnitedLiverpoolManchester CityManchester UnitedNewcastle UnitedNottingham ForestSunderlandTottenham HotspurWest Ham UnitedWolverhampton WanderersScores & ScheduleStandingsFantasyThe Athletic FC NewsletterPodcastsLiverpool vs. PSG ReactionsIraola to Leave BournemouthDe Laurentiis InterviewTop 15 Goalkeepers RankedMan Utd StumbleBird's-eye views of Old Trafford, Stamford Bridge and other top-flight grounds Photos: Planet Labs; design: Kelsea Petersen/The Athletic Share full articleYou may have seen a Premier League stadium up close. You might have seen one on television. But seeing one from a satellite uncovers things that are not obvious from the ground or television cameras. The Athletic tasked its expert writers with analysing their club’s grounds from above to see what they could find out. From the roads, railways and supermarkets that could cause problems for redevelopment to the regeneration of areas, this is what they discovered. What becomes immediately clear when looking at this image is how extraordinary an achievement the Emirates Stadium was. To construct a new ground in such a built-up, residential area — within half a mile of Highbury, visible in the top right — was a remarkable feat. Arsenal were pondering a potential permanent move to Wembley when land agent Anthony Spencer, himself an Arsenal fan, discovered the Ashburton Grove site, then home to a council waste depot and a clutch of smaller businesses. Arsenal bought up the premises from more than 250 companies and attained council permission to transform a designated industrial site into a world-class stadium. Villa Park is nestled in a dense, urban area — a mix of industrial estates and residential housing. It does have Aston Park, its chief green space, though, accompanied by the historic Aston Hall (middle right). Running alongside it is Witton Road, connected to its namesake train station near the M6 motorway (bottom right). The lack of space around Villa Park has impeded any ability to expand or introduce alternative pedestrian or travel routes. It can be very busy and cramped on a matchday. An anomaly in the Premier League, not just because of its size — considerably the smallest capacity in the top flight — but due to the surrounding area. Once off the main road into the town centre, Vitality Stadium is nestled in a leafy suburb, with Kings Park surrounding it. There is an athletics track behind the Ted MacDougall stand, with the team, until last year, training on the pitches just in front of it. This had been Bournemouth’s training ground for more than a decade, with players previously getting changed in Vitality Stadium’s changing rooms before making the 30 or so metre walk to the training pitches, which intersect a popular dog walking route in Dorset. Dog walkers tend to start by the main Kings Park sports field, which is adjacent to the stadium and sandwiched by the main car park, owned by the local council. Walkers then follow the path around the perimeter of Bournemouth’s training ground, which was, understandably, covered off from prying eyes. The 17,250-seater stadium is located in a picturesque part of west London, right next to the Thames. Chief executive Jon Varney described the Gtech Community Stadium as “small but perfectly formed” in an interview with The Athletic in 2021. It is remarkable how the stadium has been wedged in between three railway lines and the M4 motorway, making any potential future expansion extremely difficult. After it was opened in August 2020, a lot of high-rise flats have been built adjacent to it. Although easy to spot from above, lots of people walk straight past it, as it is hidden by those buildings. The layout around the Amex highlights that it can be time-consuming to access the 15-year-old stadium by road before and after matches. The routes are prone to congestion, especially if there is a crash or breakdown. The lunchtime kick-off for the last home game against Liverpool was delayed by 15 minutes due to a nearby accident. The club encourages fans to use public transport, although long queues can gather at the nearby Falmer train station. They are small prices to pay to have a permanent home in the city after two seasons of groundsharing in the late 1990s with Gillingham (a 150-mile round trip) and converting Withdean Athletics Track in a leafy Brighton suburb into a temporary solution, which ended up lasting for 12 seasons during the fight for planning permission to build the Amex. Football is the heartbeat of Burnley, so it is fitting that the satellite image showcases how embedded the stadium is in the town. It is surrounded by rows of terraced houses and is only a five-minute walk from the town centre. Turf Moor has been Burnley’s home since 1883, and it has gone through its fair share of renovations since, although its location does make any thought of expanding the 21,944 capacity difficult. Since ALK Capital took control of the club in December 2020, the ground has been given a modern facelift. Situated on Harry Potts Way, a road named after one of the club’s legendary figures — Potts played and managed the club, including leading them to their second first-division championship in 1960 — the stadium is also situated right next to Burnley Cricket Club. The most striking thing, looking down at Stamford Bridge, is how embedded it is into the fabric of that corner of London. Rather than having landed there like some sort of giant sporting spaceship surrounded by its own entourage of club paraphernalia, the ground just nestles comfortably into a tiny corner of space between Brompton Cemetery and Fulham Road. Of course, the less rose-tinted view is that Stamford Bridge is so deeply wedged into the landscape that it is nigh-on impossible to change, something successive club owners have wrestled with. Unlike some of the other images in this piece, you will see no car park, no industrial estate, no sizeable green space (bar Brompton Cemetery to the north west) — no empty land of any description to house an expanded stadium. Building a larger version of the ground on its small footprint (though the purchase of the Sir Oswald Stoll Mansions buildings off the West Stand in 2024 affords a little more wiggle room) would be incredibly complex. That is also without accounting for idiosyncrasies such as the protected view across south-west London to St Paul’s Cathedral that limits the possibility of building upwards (yes, really). If you expanded this picture upwards, you would see a huge, empty patch of land where the Earls Court Exhibition Centre used to stand. The perfect spot for a new football stadium — except, of course, for the small hitch that the land is not owned by Chelsea, but by a different company that is understandably attached to its own multi-billion-pound plans. The old brickfield and partial landfill site upon which Selhurst Park is built was purchased for £2,570 from the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway Company in 1922. It remains hemmed in on three sides by terraced houses, which, originally, would most likely have been occupied by railway workers — Selhurst depot is just out of shot — though the hope was that the installation of a football club on the site would bring more jobs to the area. The grander houses in the aerial view hint at the opulence of Sir Joseph Paxton’s ‘proper’ Crystal Palace, effectively a Victorian tourist attraction as England’s first ‘theme park’ when it moved to Sydenham Hill (around two miles up the hill) in 1852. To the north also lies Grangewood Park, one of the few remnants of the Great North Wood that once scaled the ridge. ‘Selhurst’ is thought to derive from the Old English for “dwelling in a wood”, or possibly “dwelling where willows grow”. There is precious little of it left these days. The stadium itself actually betrays scars of Palace’s boom and bust existence. The Whitehorse Lane end (at the north end of the ground) is hemmed in by Whitehorse Lane and, in the corner, the Sainsbury’s supermarket — the construction of which once staved off potential bankruptcy but has hampered ground redevelopment ever since. The Holmesdale Road stand, opened in 1995, stands relatively pristine, and it is easy to see why, in the late 1980s, the club considered selling advertising space on the roof of the Arthur Wait stand so that it might be seen by passing aircraft descending into Gatwick Airport. Most frustrating of all, also look at that swathe of land used for car parking behind the original main stand — designed by Archibald Leitch — which successive club owners have yearned to reclaim to help rebuild that side of the stadium. Maybe the current board will succeed where others failed. Everton’s new £800million ($1.1bn) Hill Dickinson Stadium is situated on the banks of the River Mersey, close to the Irish Sea, in Liverpool’s North Docks. The city centre is around two miles to the south. It is hoped the stadium will be a catalyst for the redevelopment of a semi-derelict, post-industrial area that had fallen on hard times. Immediately to the north is a wastewater treatment facility, while disused warehouses are also part of the landscape. Pubs, bars and boutique hotels have begun springing up. Everton have shown interest in a partnership with private enterprise or local authorities to redevelop the adjacent Nelson Dock, which they currently lease for matchday parking and operations. The nearby 22-acre Central Docks site, meanwhile, is the location for one of Europe’s biggest regeneration projects, with more than 2,000 homes and leisure and retail facilities expected to be built. Just look at it. Beautiful. Nestled on the bank of the River Thames, Craven Cottage has developed a reputation for being one of the Premier League’s most attractive away days. As synonymous with cheeseboards as it is with intimidating atmospheres, the stereotype of Fulham fans reflects the stadium’s plush location in an affluent corner of west London. Bordered by Stevenage Park to the north and Bishops Park to the south, the leafy walk from Putney Bridge is a fundamental part of the matchgoing experience. From above, you can even see the route supporters have beaten along the grass. Edging further into the Thames, the slight bulge of the Riverside Stand is a giveaway of its ultra-modern rebuild. The changes have not been universally popular — matchday tickets regularly top £100 — but the old Stevenage Road stand is Grade II-listed, restricting expansion or modernisation. Speaking to the Financial Times in October, owner Shahid Khan said the revamped Riverside Stand was designed to “make Fulham competitive and compliant with financial fair play rules”, with the introduction of extensive and lucrative hospitality areas. All in all, nearly 4,000 seats were added, pushing stadium capacity close to 30,000. The river has defined Craven Cottage and is shaping its future. Plans are in place to redevelop and expand Elland Road’s north and west stands. If that vision comes to fruition, capacity will reach around 53,000. Those stands will ultimately dwarf the Jack Charlton Stand, which you can see to the east. There is plenty of land to the west and north of the stadium, which is ripe for development. The club is excited about the potential for leisure and residential developments here, as part of the redevelopment of the ground. There are challenges here, too, though. To the north, you can see the M621, which effectively cut off this Beeston area from the rest of Leeds in the 1970s. To the south, there is Elland Road itself, an important street outside matchdays that will always restrict how much the club can develop its South Stand. Even in silence, from a satellite view, Anfield feels charged. It is compact, enclosed, and stitched into the fabric of the area amid rows of terraced housing and the picturesque Stanley Park, which used to act as a divide between it and the other club in the city, Everton. With so much renovation in recent years, perhaps the biggest takeaway is just how small The Kop now looks from the sky in comparison to the other stands. There’s little chance of an extension, either, given the logistical constraints, mainly from the major road — Walton Breck Road — that runs behind it, and the chaos it would cause to those living close by. With all the upgrades, Anfield holds its place as one of the most impressive stadiums in the Premier League. A picture of regeneration. The Etihad is surrounded by various hubs in what they call Sportcity. It used to be a symbol of post-industrial decline, but the old Commonwealth Games stadium has become the centre of a transformation. A bridge joins the ground to The Joie Stadium, home to the men’s first-team training, women’s first team, and the club’s academy sides, underlining how integrated they are as part of the business. But it is the visibility of the Connell Co-op college and the Manchester Institute of Health & Performance, situated on Alan Turing Way, that really captures just how central Manchester City’s ascent has been to redefining East Manchester. The Co-op Live building, which hosts some of the biggest concerts in the country, is another attraction they have helped fund. Since 2008, City Football Group has invested over £700m into the Etihad and the surrounding area. The motivation behind it may be questioned, with accusations of sportswashing, but there is no denying it has changed the face of an area that was little more than 80 acres of brownfield land. Newton Heath LYR, the club that would one day be known as Manchester United, was formed by the carriage and wagon workers of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway in 1878, around six miles north-east of Old Trafford. United moved to their current home in 1910, and the railway line that runs behind the Sir Bobby Charlton Stand is a neat, if accidental, link to that past. Yet it is also an obstacle to Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s plans for the future. The railway line was always said to make expanding and redeveloping Old Trafford’s existing structure problematic. Ratcliffe’s plans to build a new, 100,000-capacity stadium are almost just as complicated, however, as they require the freight terminal to the west to be relocated. This spotlights the iconic and unique position of St James’ Park, on the edge of Newcastle city centre and on the top of the hill leading down to the River Tyne. However, it also shows why expansion is so complicated. There are major throughways to the west (Barrack Road) and south (Strawberry Place), while there are listed buildings behind the East Stand. Behind the Leazes End (the northern-most stand) is Leazes Park, which also restricts an extension that way. Yet it is in that area of parkland nearby that Newcastle would ideally like to build a bigger, state-of-the-art stadium, keeping their ground close to the city centre but also potentially consuming green space in the process. This all helps to show just how complex the stadium question is for the club, as The Athletic outlined in this special report. Is there anywhere in England with more sporting history packed into such a tiny area than on the banks of the River Trent in Nottingham? The walk over Trent Bridge towards the City Ground has been an anticipation-building moment for fans of many visiting clubs over the years. The iconic, picturesque setting and the memories that Nottingham Forest supporters have ingrained in them are the main reasons so many were against the notion of moving away from what has been their home since 1898. But the mist does not only roll in off the Trent for Forest. On the opposite bank sits Meadow Lane, the home of Notts County, the oldest Football League club in the world. Nestling immediately across Radcliffe Road from the City Ground is Trent Bridge, home to Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club — and regular England international fixtures. Much like on its playing surface, Sunderland’s Stadium of Light looks rather different from above than even just a couple of years ago. The club’s home was built in 1997, and nuzzled alongside a bend in the River Wear, the south side of the club’s home is subject to significant and ongoing regeneration. Key to that is the Keel Crossing footbridge, which was completed in autumn 2025, offering city-centre dwellers a direct thoroughfare to the stadium. Previously, fans in the city’s main pubs had to walk a much less direct route and pass over the Wearmouth Bridge, a nearly 100-year-old road crossing. The new bridge opens directly onto Sheepfolds Stables, a food and drinks complex, popular pre- and post-match, that opened two years ago. Outside its doors, there will soon be 450 residential units on a plot that, until recently, housed an industrial estate; Sunderland AFC and the City Council have agreed plans that won’t preclude the club from extending the South Stand in the future. An extension took place at the opposite end in 2000, behind which sits an Olympic-sized swimming pool and, beyond that, the Beacon of Light, a community hub that is the home of the club’s Foundation of Light charity. To their east are the Hilton Garden Inn hotel, still owned by former club chairman Ellis Short, and the club shop. As a city, Sunderland is seeing notable investment, and the Stadium of Light, while forever across the river from the centre, feels closer than ever. The miracle of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is that it was built on almost exactly the same site as the old White Hart Lane stadium. This is right in the heart of Tottenham, and the stadium stands glistening at the heart of this busy city life. That is impressive in itself, although it makes the ground dependent on public transport links, which cannot always cope with more than 60,000 people trying to get in and out. The club even has ambitious plans to keep developing the area — work started on a new hotel next to the stadium, although that has been paused. You notice the legacy of the 2012 London Olympics from the stadium West Ham United have called home since 2016. The London Aquatics Centre, the oval-shaped building on the far right, and the athletics track next to the ground are key symbols of the grand event that took place here. The railway line in the distance connects to Stratford station, where many supporters arrive on their commute to the stadium. The tall red tower is the Olympic Park slide, a popular tourist attraction. The first thing that stands out when looking at Molineux from the air is what surrounds it — an Asda supermarket immediately to the north west, university buildings and student accommodation to the east, the densely populated housing estates of Whitmore Reans to the west, and the edge of the city centre beyond the ring road to the south. Molineux’s location is both its occasional curse — a lack of matchday parking and limited room to expand — but also its joy. Fans can wander from homes, from the railway stations, or from the city’s pubs in just a few minutes in time for kick-off. The other obvious feature is how the roof of the recently rebuilt Stan Cullis Stand (the ‘North Bank’) is noticeably newer and cleaner than those on the other three sides, underlining how a ground that was once state-of-the-art is now in need of some TLC and modernisation. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms