It’s not just a game. Sports in the United States are part of a multibillion-dollar industry. In 2023, US athletic leagues generated more than $49 billion in revenue. Around 70 percent of Americans are fans of sports, and nearly eight million US high schoolers competed in sports last year.
But where do these activities take place? And which regions favor certain sports?
One way to answer these questions is to simply map the spaces where various sports take place. You could map every baseball, football, and soccer field. Then map every basketball court. And add to it every tennis court, golf course, and hockey rink. That’s exactly what we did. But we didn’t stop at merely mapping the locations of these spaces. Doing so would by and large reveal different variations of a population map: where there are more people, there are likely to be more athletic spaces of any kind.
Instead, this map is based on per capita normalization. It shows the number of athletic spaces relative to population size. In other words, it maps where baseball fields, basketball courts, hockey rinks, and other spaces are over or underrepresented according to the local population. The United States’ four favorite sports to watch are shown together on the main map. Individual sports are emphasized in a series of smaller maps.
Based on this analysis, baseball really is America’s pastime. It is not only popular to watch, but baseball takes place almost everywhere. The data shows 126,596 baseball fields across the country, spread densely throughout most of it. The 144,551 tennis courts recorded are similarly ubiquitous, while hockey’s 2,572 rinks are more scattered with a clear northern bias.
The data for all 431,229 athletic spaces analyzed comes from OpenStreetMap (OSM). It features any athletic spaces within OSM, including those at playgrounds, schools, and both indoor and outdoor spaces. Like any crowdsourced project, OSM does not have perfect coverage and reflects the effort to map features as much as it does the existence of features. As an evolving database, it improves and grows every day.
