Looking for the world’s biggest stadiums? Why American college football has most of them

Editor’s note: This article is part of our College Football Stadium Rankings series, highlighting the most interesting venues across the country.

Georgia punter Brett Thorson grew up on a dairy farm in Australia, about two hours from Melbourne. When he goes home, occasionally someone will ask what American college football is like, which leads to this back-and-forth:

“Oh, is the stadium big, or do you play in front of big crowds?”

“Oh yeah, our stadiums are pretty big.”

“How many?”

“Ninety-three thousand.”

Then there’s silence.

“It’s almost like they get hit with a bucket of water. They’re like, ‘Wait, 93,000?’”Thorson said, smiling. “It is crazy, because it’s so hard to comprehend that you have these NFL stadiums, baseball stadiums, but the biggest stadiums are for technically semi-professional students, 18- to 22-year-olds.”

Stephen Fry, the English actor, had the same reaction when he visited Auburn for the Iron Bowl in 2011. A video of his experience summed it up well:

“It’s an indication of the size of the U.S. economy, and their passion for sport, that this is the stadium for Auburn, no more than a medium-sized college, and this is their annual game against another college within the same state, the University of Alabama, based in Tuscaloosa only a few hours drive away. This fixture has the scale, intensity and hoopla of a grand national final, but in reality is nothing more a local derby between amateur students.

“Only in America.”

The European mind truly can’t comprehend. Fry wasn’t even in the biggest American college football stadium. Not even close. And Georgia’s 93,000-seat stadium that awes Thorson’s compatriots in Australia? Not the biggest on Georgia’s schedule.

By seating capacity, college football stadiums are eight of the 10 biggest in the world — and 14 of the top 25. The stadium for the college football team in Athens, Ga., holds 11,000 more people than the stadium in Athens, Greece, that hosted the 2004 Olympics.

College football stadiums in locales such as Lincoln, Neb., Clemson, S.C. and Norman, Okla., rank in the top 50 of the world. Others in Iowa City, Fayetteville, Ark., and Columbia, S.C., rank in the top 100.

All for a sport played by college students. How and why did this happen? There’s simple geography. There’s arithmetic. And, of course, there’s money.

But also a healthy dose of competition.

The first stadium boom

Franklin Field in Philadelphia, built in 1895 to house Penn’s football team, is credited as the first stadium built primarily for college football. But it was quickly deemed too small for big games and replaced eight years later. That set the tone.

Football was becoming popular, and there were no NFL teams yet.

The powerful college teams played in the Northeast, where the stadium boom began: Harvard built a 40,000-seater in 1903, Syracuse followed with a similar stadium in 1908 and six years later Princeton built one seating 45,000-plus. Then Yale blew past that with the Yale Bowl, seating 64,025, with temporary seats that could take it above 70,000.

Things really got rolling after World War I. More people had cars, and the highway system improved, making it easier to get to games. Student enrollment grew, too. And there was a general economic boom in the roaring ’20s, so schools poured money into their football stadiums.

“After the war, the country’s enthusiasm for having a good time and casting off the last vestiges of its restrictive Victorian principles would be one of the driving forces in the escalation of college football’s popularity during the 1920s,” Raymond Schmidt wrote in his 2007 book: “Shaping College Football: The Transformation of an American Sport, 1919-1930.” “In a nation still on a high from its performance in the war, football provided an opportunity to peacefully continue experiencing the excitement.”

Stanford opened its 65,000-seat stadium in 1921, largely as an answer to rival California having a successful team. In the century before NIL, you couldn’t (legally) buy a better team, but you could build a much bigger stadium. So Cal answered just two years later by expanding to 73,000.

Meanwhile, Ohio Stadium went to 63,000 and Memorial Stadium at Illinois went to 67,000. The Rose Bowl (57,000 then 76,000 by 1928) and Los Angeles Coliseum (75,000) were built to try to lure the Olympics.

Chicago built Soldier Field in 1924, with a capacity of 75,000-plus that could expand to 100,000. But while it eventually became the NFL’s home, it was originally built as a multiuse facility, including college games.

Even with capacities going up, people still couldn’t get in. The New York Times wrote: “Each year finds the interest in football growing more widespread, and greater numbers being turned away from the classic games of the season … As large as they build the stadiums, they are never large enough to meet the growing need.”

There was then — and still is — a fundamental economic motivation: There are few college football games per year. To maximize revenue, you need to maximize seats.

Notre Dame under Knute Rockne still had a small field — Cartier Field seated only 27,000 in 1927 — and that made it hard to convince good teams to play there. Rockne threatened to resign if he didn’t get a bigger stadium. Notre Dame Stadium opened in 1930, shortly before his death.

The big one was Michigan Stadium, built in 1927 with a capacity of 75,000. But Fielding Yost wanted as many as 140,000, which is why the footings in the stadium allowed it to be expanded to at least 100,000. Michigan’s administration backed him up, with a report calling for the stadium to be built with “the utmost simplicity. No attempt should be made to give it the form of a monument or memorial.”

In other words, focus on capacity.

Michigan got crowds of more than 84,000 for Ohio State and Minnesota (homecoming) and 83,000-plus for Navy. Two expansions took capacity to 100,001 for the 1956 season — athletic director Fritz Crisler added the one, meant to be a mystery.

When the Great Depression hit, gate receipts did go down. But the stadiums were already built. It simply stopped other schools from building large stadiums or expanding them — for a while, at least.

The South catches up

There were economic and political tensions in college sports after World War II: The Big Ten, northern and western schools wielded the most clout in the NCAA and tried to push through a “Sanity Code” that hinged on outlawing athletic scholarships. Southern schools chafed at it, alleging Big Ten schools were working around it with job plans for athletes.

“The Big Ten and its allies greedily wanted to resume their prewar domination of big-time college sports and its revenues; the upstart Southern, Southeastern and Southwest conferences wanted to expand their athletic programs, acquiring a larger piece of the economic pie,” Murray Sperber wrote in his 1998 book, “Onward to Victory.”

This wasn’t about stadium building, but it did symbolize what was to be the rise of the southern schools, which acquired more money to pour into their programs, especially the stadiums, in the days before players — or even coaches — were getting that money.

Tennessee, for instance, had a 17,860-seat stadium as of 1930. It gradually added seats, but by 1948 was still at only 46,290. As the sport gained in popularity and money grew after WWII, Tennessee kept building: 64,000-plus by 1968, 80,000-plus by 1976, then about 10,000 more seats in expansions in 1980 and 1996.

Enrollment was going up across the South, making it a factor: Not only were more students on campus, but more alumni felt an attachment to the school. When Georgia expanded Sanford Stadium yet again in 1966, athletic director Joel Eaves called it a “necessity” and said “we have regretted being unable to take care of all the ticket requests of alumni and Bulldog fans.”

As more southern stadiums expanded, the same competitive motivation from the 1920s kicked in. Georgia coach and athletic director Vince Dooley, when arguing for expansion from 59,000 to 77,000 in the early 1980s, mentioned keeping up with stadium expansions at Florida, Tennessee and Auburn. And in an answer to criticism that it would end a campus tradition — fans watching games from train tracks — Dooley answered: “We don’t want to change that tradition, but when it comes down to talking about a lot of money, it becomes an important factor — a deciding factor.”

That leads to another seeming question: What about NFL stadiums?

For one thing, college football had a big head start. Pro football didn’t become very popular — and lucrative — until the television era. Even as the NFL became the richest league in the country and glitzy stadiums sprang up for teams like the Cowboys and Rams, the capacities generally didn’t approach the college level: MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, which serves two teams in the largest metropolitan area in the country, seats 25,000 fewer people than the one four hours away at Penn State in the middle of nowhere in Central Pennsylvania.

The NFL has more games per year and less need to maximize every home game. There’s less competition to one-up your rivals, which drove much of the college football race. Many NFL stadiums are historically funded by taxpayers, so there were slightly more financial limitations. And even in the new era of luxury stadiums, the emphasis has been on making money via suites and other amenities rather than pure attendance. In contrast, many college stadiums were built with bleacher seating, with the aim of packing in more students and alumni.

College football, in fact, is often compared to another sport: European soccer, especially when it comes to passion, history and charm. But when it comes to stadium sizes, there’s still no comparison.

European soccer vs. American football

Professional soccer began its rise in Europe just before college football began in the U.S., and soccer stadiums cropped up first in Britain and elsewhere on the continent. The sport only grew, with the Premier League becoming the biggest destination for the most popular sport in the world after its formation in 1992. So why are its stadiums still eclipsed by college football?

Part of it is simple geography: There isn’t as much room in Europe, which often has multiple clubs in the same city or close by. Plus, American universities almost always own their stadium and the land around it. If they want to expand, they just do it. Or in the case of Penn State, just move the stadium, as it did with Beaver Field in 1960, when it was moved to the outskirts of campus and became Beaver Stadium, with extra space used for several rounds of expansions that took it over 100,000 seats by 2001.

European clubs have a harder time. When Arsenal, one of the top clubs in Europe, wanted to expand its London-area stadium in the late 1990s, it was denied permission by the town council, partly because it would have required demolishing 25 neighborhood houses. So the club found a spot at an industrial and waste disposal estate, bought it and built a stadium that now seats 60,704.

“A lot of it was restricted in the plot of land they had, and the cost,” said George Somerville, a Glasgow-based sportswriter who writes about college football. “Because until the money really came into the Premier League, it was going to be difficult to redevelop a football stadium. And I think that’s the difference.”

And, of course, international soccer teams are made up of pros. They have to acquire players through the transfer system and pour the money into that. College football programs didn’t have to do that until recently.

When clubs did spend on their stadium, it tended to be maintenance: Somerville said fans tend to complain more about the quality of the facilities.

The Hillsborough tragedy in 1988 had a huge impact, including legislatively, on getting rid of standing enclosures and making them all seated. The bathrooms, the concessions, sitting on concrete. These are old stadiums, many built in the late 19th century.

Somerville also pointed to the European soccer relegation system: Teams fluctuate between divisions based on performance, so revenues are dictated by what league they’re in. It’s more volatile, so there isn’t assurance of revenue.

Still, there is recent movement on bigger stadiums: Manchester United announced in March it intends to build a 100,000-seat stadium, and Barcelona is in the process of expanding Camp Nou past 100,000. But that’s on the higher end.

Tottenham Hotspur, building on the site of its original stadium (1909) in London, opened a new facility six years ago with a capacity of 62,027. That made it the third-largest stadium in England.

In the SEC, it would rank 12th.

Shock and awe

Somerville’s first college football game was at Alabama nine years ago. He called that an eye-opener. Then, last month, he went to The Athletic’s No. 1 college football stadium — LSU’s Tiger Stadium — for the first time.

“For all the sporting experiences I’ve had over the years, that was, ‘Wow, this is something else,'” he said. “This is a different planet.”

It’s not just the actual number of fans, Somerville added. It’s what they’re doing in that stadium.

“I think it’s the noise of college football stadiums that brings it home,” Somerville said.

Thorson echoed that. He had already been to Melbourne’s Cricket Grounds, the 11th-largest stadium in the world, when he went to Georgia. But the Melbourne stadium doesn’t always fill up, Thorson said, like stadiums do in college football.

“They’re loud for four hours,” Thorson said. “When we got housed at Tennessee a few years ago (giving up a touchdown), to hear that sound, it was almost deafening. It was almost like there’s a dream going on.”

That’s how Fry sounded that night at Auburn, a town with a population of 76,143, less than the number who crowd inside Jordan-Hare Stadium with its capacity of 88,043. Fry shook hands with the student section, touched the eagle mascot, looked around and marveled.

“I don’t know if anything sums up America better: It’s simultaneously preposterous, incredibly laughable, impressive, charming, ridiculous, expensive, over-populated, wonderful … America.”

The College Football Stadium Rankings series is part of a partnership with StubHub. The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Partners have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.

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