Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Which Football Team Should I Support?

Back in 2015 an interactive map called Which Team Should I Support used a Voronoi layer to divide England and Wales into areas assigned to the closest English Premier League teams. This map could therefore be used to quickly see which football team's ground was closest to your home in England and Wales. 

That map is now very out of date (some of the teams on the map have since been relegated from the EPL and it omits teams who have since been promoted). The 2015 map also only included Premier League teams and of course many people in the UK live closer to football teams which are not in the EPL. 

Luckily Automatic Knowledge has just released three interactive Voronoi maps which show which football team people in the UK live nearest to: 

  • The Premier League map shows which EPL team you live closest to 
  • The Top Four Leagues map shows which English top 4 tier football team you live closest to 
  • The Tiers 1-8 map shows which team in the top 8 tiers of the English football leagues you are nearest to

Alasdair Rae has written up an interesting blog post about these three maps. In Which Football Team is Nearest Me Alasdair looks a little more closely at the Voronoi catchment areas of English football teams. In particular he has worked out the total number of people living in each of the Premier League team's Voronoi polygons and in each polygon for the top 8 tiers of English football. 

In terms of the EPL Southampton are the team with the most people living closest to their stadium. 12.6% of the English population live in the Southampton Voronoi polygon. At the other end of the league, Chelsea have the smallest number of people living closest to their stadium. Only 1.7% of people living in England live in the Chelsea Voronoi polygon.

1 comment:

Doug said...

I just wanted to point out that for this year's Premier League, all of the United States (minus Alaska and Hawaii, the freak states) fall under the control of Everton. As an American/Evertonian, this makes me very happy.