The World's Biggest Sports Stadiums

The World's Biggest Sports Stadiums

For most major sports stadiums in the U.S., the trend is clear: big and casual are out, small and urgent are in.

Mostly gone are the days that baseball fans could make a last-minute decision to go to a game on a summer evening, walk up to the ticket booth just before the first pitch and buy a pair in the mezzanine. The slew of new stadiums around the league represent a new model: less capacity, higher prices and more urgency. Want to go to that game in August? Better get those tickets now.

In Pictures: The World's Biggest Sports Stadiums

The super stadiums of the NFL follow a similar model, even though the small number of games has always meant more sellouts and more urgency to get tickets in advance. The amenities of the new football stadiums--club seats, luxury suites and wait service--allow NFL clubs to squeeze the bulk of the gait revenue from high-paying customers while the blue collar fans have to scrounge to find seats upstairs. Sure, the big spenders have had the better seats at sporting events forever, but the caste system at a typical NFL game has never been more blatant than it is now.

In short, modern stadiums are built to maximize profits, not the number of people in the house. That's why you won't find any pro football or baseball venues on a list of the world's biggest sports stadiums.

That list is almost entirely reserved for one sport: auto racing. The world's marquee tracks all have room for more than 100,000 fans, with the Indianapolis Speedway in the U.S. and the Shanghai International Circuit in China cramming in more than 200,000 apiece.

Of the 46 stadiums across the world that house 100,000 or more people, 26 are auto racing tracks, according to Worldstadiums.com. The only exceptions to the top 10 list are a pair of giant horse racing venues in Japan--Tokyo Racecourse (capacity: 223,000) and Nakayama Racecourse in Chiba (just under 166,000).

Why are race tracks so big? Because they only host one or two big events per year. When the people aren't coming en masse every day or every week, you need to accommodate the hordes who show up for the big race once a year.

"You have to maximize revenue and capture the people around those events," says Don Hinchey, a sports business consultant with the Denver, Colo.-based Bonham Group.

All tracks supplement their big races--the Indy 500 at Indianapolis Speedway, the Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway in Florida, for instance--with minor events. But most of the dough comes from the big annual race.

A Daytona spokesman said the venue typically hosts eight or nine major weekend events per year, though he declined to offer attendance or revenue figures.

Even among non-race tracks, North American pro football or baseball stadiums are nowhere to be found on a list of the world's largest. Filling up that group are large multi-use facilities around the globe, many of which were built for the Olympic Games and now mostly house soccer. There are also a handful of U.S. college football houses (think Big Ten country: Penn State, Michigan and Ohio State).

Examples include soccer palace Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, which housed the 1968 Summer Olympics, and the Melbourne Cricket Grounds in Australia, home base of the 1956 Games. The three biggest: Rungrado May Day Stadium in Pyonyang, North Korea; Salt Lake Stadium in Kolkata, India; and Penn State's Beaver Stadium in State College, Pa.

But don't expect the next wave of baseball stadiums, whenever it comes, to return to a model of maximizing butts in seats.

"Baseball owners sometimes say they wish they had an extra 20,000 seats only because they can fill them on opening day or on a fireworks night," says Hinchey.

But then you still have the rest of the season. Better keep those seats limited and expensive.

In Pictures: The World's Biggest Sports Stadiums