Venue technology
What the buildings are made of and run on: roofs that open, pitches that roll out, screens the size of a house, and the sound and light that fill a stadium. Each guide is sourced, and each is tied to the venues in this site's records.
Key facts
These counts are what Wikipedia and Wikidata record. A venue with nothing recorded is unknown, not without, so the real totals are higher.
- Retractable roofs recorded
- 60
- Fixed roofs recorded
- 33
- Retractable pitches recorded
- 8
- Venues with a recorded surface
- 3,618
Retractable roofs
Sliding panels, fans and folding fabric: why venues build roofs that open, and which ones have them.
Playing surfaces
Natural, hybrid and artificial surfaces, and the stadiums that roll the pitch in and out.
Video boards and scoreboards
From hand-hung numbers to video walls: the history of the stadium screen and who supplies it.
Sound systems and acoustics
Public address, line arrays and why a roof makes a crowd louder.
Floodlights and stadium lighting
Metal halide, sodium and the switch to LED floodlights.
Where the venue figures come from
Roof, pitch, surface and video-board supplier fields come from Wikipedia stadium infoboxes, Wikipedia's stadium categories and Wikidata's "surface played on" property. Each row keeps the page it came from. The guides themselves are summaries of the Wikipedia articles listed at the foot of each page.