How VenueStats compiles its data

This page explains how the facts on a venue page are put together, so you can judge how far to trust them. The sources themselves are listed on the Sources page. Every figure below is counted from the database when the site is built.

Venues and name eras

A venue is a place: a stadium or arena at a set of coordinates, with an opening year and, if it has closed, a closing year. Its name is not the venue. Naming-rights deals and renamings change what a building is called without changing the building, so each name is recorded as an era with its own start and end dates, and a rename adds an era instead of overwriting the old name.

Each era with a distinct name gets its own page, which is why 989 venues have 1,555 pages. 365 of the venues have been known by more than one name. A former-name page points search engines to the current-name page as the canonical one, since both describe the same place, and a venue that goes back to a name it once held keeps a single page under that name.

Dates, and what "inferred" means

Opening and closing years are read from the sources listed on the Sources page. Name-era boundaries are harder, because a rename is often reported by season rather than by day. Where a boundary could not be read from a source, it is worked out from the evidence around it, for example by dating a new name from the first season in which it appears, and the era is marked internally as inferred with a note saying how. An inferred date is a best estimate and not a sourced fact, and the mark exists so that it can be replaced when a real date turns up. 258 name eras currently carry such a mark.

Capacity

Capacity is stored as a list of claims, not a single number. Each claim has a figure, the layout it applies to (a stadium seats a different crowd for football than for a concert), the dates it was true for, and the source it came from. There are 1,134 claims across 755 venues.

When sources disagree, both claims are kept, because the disagreement is itself information. The page shows one headline figure, chosen in this order: a claim that is valid today beats one that has expired; among claims that are equally valid, the better-sourced one wins; and among those, the figure for the general layout comes before a layout specific to a sport. A venue that only has figures for particular layouts shows the layout that matches the sport its teams play, and says which layout it is. A table of every layout appears when a venue has more than one.

Tenants

Which teams played where is built from team-seasons: for every season a team played, the venue it called home. There are 26,764 of them for 641 teams. Consecutive seasons at one venue are rolled up into a stint, which is what the timeline and the Teams table on a venue page show, with the team's name and colours as they were at the time. A team that left a venue and came back has two stints. The "while based here" record counts a team's whole seasons while it was based at the venue, not only the games played in that building.

When sources disagree

Where Sports Reference and Wikipedia disagree about a team name, a name era or a franchise's history, Sports Reference wins unless there is a specific reason not to. Sports Reference's own tables are read closely, because a name's year range there only gives its first and last season, and the win-loss totals show where a franchise really changed names. Where Sports Reference has nothing to say, which is most of the time for venues and tenancy, Wikipedia and Wikidata are the sources. Conflicting claims are never averaged. For capacity both are kept and one is chosen by the rules above; for names and dates, the more authoritative source is used.

Facts that VenueStats joins together itself, such as tenancy, name eras and the years a building opened and closed, are credited on each page to VenueStats' own compilation from Sports Reference and Wikipedia, and link back to this page.

Addresses, elevation and photographs

Street addresses are reverse-geocoded from each venue's coordinates using OpenStreetMap data, so they describe what stands at that point today. For a venue that still stands, that is its address. For a demolished one it would be whatever was built on the site, so a closed venue shows only its city and state. There are 943 addresses, credited to OpenStreetMap contributors under the Open Database Licence.

Elevation is the height of the venue's coordinates above sea level from USGS and NASA SRTM data. Photographs are the primary image on Wikimedia Commons for the venue, 668 in all, and each is shown with its author and its licence.

Rankings

The ranks on a venue page (for example "#12 in the NFL by capacity") compare the venue with the current venues of each league it has hosted. Only venues that still have a current name era are ranked, and venues that opened in the same year share an age rank.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, the Contact page is the way to say so. Corrections are made in the database once and appear on every page that uses the fact.