A Crowded Field
Date Posted: November 14, 2019
Posted In: Ideas,
From St. Louis Public Radio: St. Louis’ new Major League Soccer stadium is planned for land just northwest of Union Station, across Market Street. When it’s complete in 2022, St. Louis will once again have three major league stadiums — Busch Stadium, Enterprise Center and the MLS stadium — all in a row, within about a mile of each other.
So we wondered, how common is that? Do other cities have “stadium districts”? Or, is it more likely that pro sports stadiums are spread apart?
To find out, we looked at the 153 teams across the five major professional sports leagues in North America — MLB, MLS, NBA, NFL and NHL. These teams play in more than 100 stadiums across 50 metro areas. About half of those metros have at least three pro sports stadiums currently built or at least planned to be constructed soon. Then, we found which three stadiums in each metro area are closest together.
The distances between them vary considerably. Philadelphia and Detroit both have three stadiums within less than a half-mile of each other. Compare that to Kansas City, where nearly 20 miles separates Sporting KC’s MLS stadium in Kansas from the two-stadium complex on the eastern edge of the city where the baseball and football teams play.
With the completion of the new MLS stadium, St. Louis will rejoin the list, in sixth position. Busch Stadium and the proposed MLS stadium are about 1.1 miles apart, with Enterprise Center almost exactly in the middle. If the St. Louis Rams were still playing in the Dome at America’s Center, the city would be fourth.