Is it too hot for the Tour de France?

Broadcaster RTBF has published a detailed examination of how global heating is affecting the Tour de France. In Blowing Hot on the Big Loop RTBF uses vintage photographs, historical climate data and rider accounts to explore the effect of climate change on the world's greatest cycle race.

In last year's Tour de France the rider Alexis Vuillermoz collapsed from heat stroke at the end of the ninth stage. The rider was taken to hospital for treatment and later had to retire from the race. His compatriot Romain Bardet later said that the sweltering heat in the 2022 Tour de France was like nothing he had ever experienced before.

Using vintage images of the Tour de France placed side-by-side with more recent images of the same mountain stage locations RTBF provides some compelling visual evidence of the changed conditions now facing the riders in the Big Loop. In all the vintage photos shown by RTBF snow is clearly visible by the roadside. Snow which is largely absent from the corresponding modern images. 

Of course RTBF could well have cherry picked which images to show, choosing only vintage pictures showing snow and modern photos without snow. What is harder to argue against is the climate data itself. Using historical temperature records RTBF chart how the temperatures have significantly increased in recent years throughout France. For example the map above shows the change in average temperatures at the end of June across France since 1971.

RTBF concludes its examination by pointing out that climate change predictions suggest that the conditions in the Tour de France are only going to become more extreme in the coming years. This obviously poses the question of whether it is becoming too hot to continue holding such an extreme endurance event as the Tour de France in the extreme heat of July.

How to Run Every Street

If you need to run off those few extra pounds you gained over Christmas or your New Year's Resolution is to exercise a lot more then you might like the #everystreet challenge interactive map.

#everystreet is a running challenge for joggers which involves attempting to run every street in your neighborhood or town. The #everystreet challenge interactive map can help you achieve this goal by planning out the most optimal route around your home. A route which will take in every single street within a defined boundary.

Share your location with the #everystreet challenge interactive map and then use the map's drawing tool to select the area in which you wish to run. Then just press the 'generate route' button and the interactive map will create an optimal route which you can follow to run every single street in the most efficient way possible. As well as a map of the route #everystreet challenge will tell you the total length of the route, the total street length, and how efficient the calculated route is (e.g. how much doubling back on streets you will have to do).

Via: Weekly OSM

For most locations the #everystreet challenge interactive map will devise a route which involves you having to back-track on yourself a little. If you can find a route that involves no self-intersecting sections then you could enter the route into the Long Tiny Route challenge.

Long Tiny Loop is an international fitness challenge to find "the longest possible non-self-intersecting loop within the smallest possible region, without revisiting any streets or intersections". The explanation for Long Tiny Loop is a little complicated but I can assure you that once you explore the maps at the top of the competition leaderboard you will quickly understand the concept. Basically you need to create a long but compact route which doesn't require you having to travel over the same ground more than once.

Scores for Long Tiny Loop are based on the ratio of the length of a route to the total diameter of the area in which you traveled. To enter a route into the competition you will need a Strava account. However you can explore the interactive maps of the routes which other people have entered without an account. At the time of writing the leading route is a 107km route around the streets of Brooklyn. A route which has a 3.6km diameter and which doesn't once require a runner to travel over a path already used.

The Tour de France Live Tracking Map

The Tour de France Live Tracking is the official Tour de France live tracking map which allows you to follow the world's premier cycle race in real-time on an interactive map. The map shows the live position of the front of the race the peloton and the back of the race. 

A yellow line shows the stage route of the race on the map. If you zoom in on the markers on the map you can view them moving in real-time. These numbered markers are colored to show you where the yellow, red polka dot and green jerseys are currently located.You can also click on these markers to view the individual riders in each group. 

If you click on the small inset altitude map you can view live data from the race. This data includes the current time difference between the front of the race and the peloton, the distance left in the race, the average speed and the current weather conditions. This live data view includes a real-time commentary stream, which provides real-time overview highlights from the race.

Le Monde has created a fascinating map showing how often the Tour de France has visited each département in France. How Many Times has the Tour de France Visited Your Département? provides a choropleth view of the départements most used in the world's greatest bike race.

This map includes a timeline tool which allows you to view the tour's favorite locations for any period in the race's history. As you can see in the screenshot above (showing every year of the Tour de France) the départements around the edge of France tend to see the Tour de France more than the départements in the country's interior.

This pattern was even more pronounced in the earliest years of the Tour de France. Adjust the timeline on the map to view the first ten years of the race (1903-1913) and that ring around the external border of France is even more pronounced.

The two départements which have been most ignored by the Tour de France don't actually feature on this map. The two départements on the island of Corsica have only seen the race once, when it visited in 2013. The least visited département on the mainland of France is Indre, which has only featured in 8 of the 104 Tour de France races.

Where UEFA 2020 Players Were Born

Where Do the Players Come From? is an interactive map which shows where ever single player in this year's EUFA 2020 tournament were born. The map uses information from Wikidata to plot the birthplace of all the players in every team in this year's European international football competition. 

The map uses scaled markers to show the number of players born in individual European cities. Helsinki appears to be the European city where the most players in this tournament were born. Nine players in the Finnish team were born in the city.

Lyndon Dykes of Scotland appears to be the player who was born furthest from Europe (and from the country he represents). Lyndon Dykes was born in Australia. However he isn't the player born the furthest south. Italy's Jorginho was born even further south than Dykes, in Imbituba, Brazil. Six players in this year's tournament were actually born in Brazil (now representing Italy, Portugal, Russia and Ukraine).

Finland's Annsi Jaakkola was born the furthest north of all the players in EUFA 2020. He was born in Kemi, in Lapland, Finland. England may be the country with the most players in this year's tournament. Not only were all the England players born in England (except Raheem Sterling, who was born in Jamacia) but it is also the birthplace of a number of Welsh players and one player representing Scotland.

What is the Longest Tiny Loop?

During lock-down many of us have become very bored walking, cycling and jogging around the same local streets over & over & over again. In order to avoid the Groundhog Day tedium of walking the same route day after day you could join the Long Tiny Loop challenge.

Long Tiny Loop is an international fitness challenge to find "the longest possible non-self-intersecting loop within the smallest possible region, without revisiting any streets or intersections". The explanation for Long Tiny Loop is a little complicated but I can assure you that once you explore the maps at the top of the competition leaderboard you will quickly understand the concept. Basically you need to create a long but compact route which doesn't require you having to travel over the same ground more than once.

Scores for Long Tiny Loop are based on the ratio of the length of a route to the total diameter of the area in which you traveled. To enter a route into the competition you will need a Strava account. However you can explore the interactive maps of the routes which other people have entered without an account. At the time of writing the leading route is a 107km route around the streets of Brooklyn. A route which has a 3.6km diameter and which doesn't once require a person to travel over a path already used.

Small Multiple Maps with OSM

I decided to make a birthday card today for a friend who is a big fan of motor sports and whose birthday happens to fall this year on the same day as the Spanish Grand Prix. I'm not overly pleased with the result (I'm no designer) but the process could be quite useful for creating small multiple posters. For example a poster showing the plans of all the Grand Prix circuits.

1. taginfo

OpenStreetMap is often the best source for geographical data. I didn't already know the tag used for motor racing circuits on OpenStreetMap. I therefore used taginfo to discover the correct tag (highway=raceway). As well as letting you find the tags used for geographic entities on OpenStreetMap taginfo also includes a link to query a tag on Overpass Turbo.

2. Overpass Turbo

If you click on the Overpass Turbo link on taginfo it will take you to Overpass Turbo with the correct query already written for you. In this case the query is:

[out:json][timeout:25];
// gather results
(
  // query part for: “highway=raceway”
  node["highway"="raceway"]({{bbox}});
  way["highway"="raceway"]({{bbox}});
  relation["highway"="raceway"]({{bbox}});
);
// print results
out body;
>;
out skel qt;

Go to the location of any motor racing circuit in the world in Overpass Turbo and run this query and you can download the GeoJSON data for the circuit.

3. GeoJSON.io

The data I downloaded of the Spanish Grand Prix circuit from Overpass Turbo included a number of other polylines which aren't related to the actual circuit used in the Grand Prix. I therefore needed to clean-up the data using GeoJSON.io. 

Opening the GeoJSON data in GeoJSON.io allows you to delete any polylines which you don't need. If you click on a line or polygon in GeoJSON.io you can just select the 'delete' option to remove the feature. I did this to remove all the track lines not associated with the Spanish Grand Prix track. I then saved the edited data as another GeoJSON file. 

4. Mapbox Studio

I uploaded my saved GeoJSON file of the Spanish Grand Prix track into Mapbox Studio. In Mapbox Studio you can view and style your geographical data. This allowed me to increase the size of the circuit line from 1px to 5px. In Mapbox Studio I was also able to hide all the other map layers to leave just my Spanish Grand Prix track on a white background (which I then copied and pasted into Photoshop).

 

This is how I created my Spanish Grand Prix birthday card. Now to complete a small multiple poster of all the 2021 Formula 1 Grand Prix circuits I just need to do this another 22 times to get the data of all 23 Grand Prix circuits in this year's season of races.

Runnabilty Scores

Over the last few years a number of organizations have developed methodologies for ranking the 'walkability' of streets. Interactive maps of these walkability rankings tend to color streets based on how pleasant they are to walk, based on factors such as the amount of motorized road traffic and the levels of 'greenery'.

Scholars at the Simon Fraser University argue that walkability scores are not particular helpful for runners. In their paper 'Creation of a Rough Runnability Index' they maintain that runners have different goals than walkers and that there has been little attention into how the built environment facilitates running. For example city streets which disrupt momentum by requiring lots of starting and stopping may not be a major deterrent for walkers but will deter runners keen on maintaining speed and momentum.

Aateka Shashank, Nadine Schuurman, Russell Copley and Scott Lear have therefore devised three new runnabilty indices which rank streets based on how conducive they are to runners. They have then used these indices to map the runnability of the city of Surrey in British Columbia, Canada. 

The Rough Runnability Indices interactive map colors the sidewalks of Surrey to show how suitable they are for running. The darker the colour of a sidewalk the lower the runnability score. The lighter the colour of a street then the higher the runnability score. You can select to view any of the three different runnability indices ('Runnability Index Safety', 'Runnability Index PM' and 'Runnability Index Generic') from the map sidebar.

You can learn more about the methodologies used to rank the runnability of sidewalks in each of the three developed indices in the paper Creation of a rough runnability index using an affordance-based framework. 

If you are interested in how 'walkable' or 'bikeable' a city is then you might like Walk Score, which ranks US cities based on how conducive they are for walking and / or cycling.

The Distance to Your Nearest MiLB Team

This season there are 120 Minor League Baseball (MiLB) teams. That is 43 less teams than last year. One consequence of this reduction in the number of teams is that a lot of baseball fans will now have to travel a lot further to attend a Minor League Baseball game.

In Where it's harder to watch a Minor League Baseball game in 2021 Axios has mapped out the distance from every county in America to the nearest Minor League Baseball team.The map shows the location of all 120 Minor League Baseball teams and also the locations of the 43 teams which have been removed from the league since last season. The map also includes a visualization of the distance from each county to the nearest MiLB team.

The biggest losers this season are baseball fans in Montana. Not only did Montana lose three Minor League Baseball teams this season but the state is now also one of the furthest states from any remaining MiLB team. If you live in Montana then you will need to travel at least 260 miles to visit your nearest MiLB game. Things aren't much better for fans in the other Mountain States of Wyoming, Colorado, and Idaho. Fans living in these states also face very long journeys if they wish to attend a MiLB game.

All of this talk of traveling to games could be academic. Last season's MiLB season was canceled as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. If this year's season does go ahead it is likely to be delayed and if fans are able to attend games then it is more than likely that the number of fans allowed at each game will be severely restricted.

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.

Fitness Route Planner

Thanks to London's new lock-down rules I can now only realistically leave my house for essential shopping or for exercise. To help pass the time, and in an attempt to lose a little weight, I have set myself a goal of walking 10 kilometres a day. To help me achieve this aim I want a route planner which can generate random 10k routes and which, when possible, will pick the most scenic routes.

The new Trail Router interactive map has therefore arrived just in time to support my new exercise regime. The map can help me plot new 10k routes every day which start and finish at my front door. To generate a new route with Trail Router you just need to enter a location into the map and pick the 'round trip' option. You can then enter the distance that you wish to walk, run, or cycle and Trail Router will map a route of your chosen length, which starts and finishes at your selected location.

One feature of the route finder which should appeal to cyclists, joggers and walkers is that the application tries to find scenic and car-free routes. The Trail Router routing algorithm prioritizes routes which go through parks, forests or by water, and avoids busy roads wherever possible. This means that you should be able to generate pleasant routes, away from the pollution and noise of street traffic. 

If you find that Trail Router has generated a route which you don't want or you have already completed you can use the way-point markers to change the route. Trail Router adds numbered markers to each generated route. You can drag these markers around the map to avoid certain locations or to force the router to create a route via a selected location. 

The Trail Router settings allow you to adjust the routing algorithm to preference more or less green areas and to preference more or less flat terrain. It also has options which allow you to avoid 'potentially unsafe roads' and 'avoid unlit streets'.

Sports Super-Spreaders

As competitive sport emerges from lock-down the question of allowing fans into stadium now needs to be addressed. Many sports have begun playing games and matches behind closed doors and in Europe their have been a few experiments with allowing a limited number of fans to attend some games.

Obviously the big worry is that when packing lots of people together in a stadium it is very difficult to conform to social distancing. In February the Spanish soccer team Valencia traveled to Italy to play a Champions League match against Atalanta. 2,500 Valencia fans also traveled to Italy for the game. Some of those fans then brought coronavirus back to Spain. Several weeks after the game the match was determined to have been a 'super-spreading event'.

In order to highlight the risks of fans spreading Covid-19 ESPN has looked at anonymized cellphone tracking data from three American football games to visualize how far fans disperse after attending a game. In Mapping College Football and Covid Risk ESPN looked at the cell-phone records of fans attending college football games to see how and where they traveled after the games had finished. For each game the data used represents less than 12% of all those who attended. The mapped visualizations therefore show the geograhical extent of returning fans even if their numbers are strictly limited.

Six hours after the 2019 game between the Nebraska Cornhuskers and the Ohio State Buckeyes in Lincoln, Nebraska fans had dispersed to more than 30 counties. 18 hours after kickoff fans had traveled as far as Denver and Chicago. The ESPN investigation also visualizes the spread of football fans after the 2019 matches between Stanford & USC and Ole Miss & Alabama. These visualization really highlight how sports fans could easily become super-spreaders of a virus, carrying it far and wide. It goes a long way to show why sports bodies and sports teams must plan meticulously how they will ensure social distancing inside stadium before they once again allow fans to attend sporting events.

The ESPN mapped visualizations were created using Mapbox's Scrollytelling Template. This template is designed to help you create your own 'scrollytelling' map stories. This Mapbox scrollytelling demo map introduces the scrollytelling map format and shows you what you can achieve by using the Mapbox scrollytelling template.

How Much of Your Town is Parking Lot?

A few years ago the housing charity Shelter claimed that just as much land was covered by golf courses in the UK as was used by housing. The claim wasn't meant as an attack on golfing but was made to illustrate the point that there was easily enough land for more housing to be built in the UK.

But was Shelter correct? Do golf courses use as much land as housing in the UK?

The Golfulator might have the answer. Draw around an area of Great Britain or Ireland on the Golfulator interactive map and it will tell you how much land in that area is used for golf and how much is used for housing.

My relative limited use of the map suggests that golf in the UK does not use as much land as housing. Even in St Andrews, 'the home of golf', there is a fairly even split between golf and housing. With so many local golf course St Andrews has to have one of the highest golf to housing ratios in the UK. Therefore in most areas of the UK housing is going to take up a higher percentage of land than golf. However the ratio will obviously depend on where you draw the map.



The Golfulator map uses data from OpenStreetMap on the location and areas of UK housing and golf courses. The Golfulator is on GitHhub. If you want you could therefore adapt the map for your own purposes - for example to find out how much land in Los Angeles is devoted to parking lots.

Although you don't have to do that. Because it has already been done. If you want to know how much of LA is dedicated to parking then you can use the Parkulator. Draw around your town on the Parkulator interactive map and you can find out what percentage of your town is defined as dedicated to car parking on OpenStreetMap.

Central Los Angeles is around 4% parking. That is enough space for nearly 19,000 more homes.

How Clean is My River?

Because of the lockdown swimming pools across the UK are all closed. Which means that this summer the only place to cool-down with a refreshing dip is in a river or the sea. Unfortunately many, many rivers in the UK really aren't clean enough to swim in safely.

Last week The Guardian revealed how water companies routinely discharge untreated sewage into UK rivers. Water companies are allowed to discharge untreated human waste only in 'exceptional' circumstances - for example during extreme rainfall. However The Guardian has revealed that last year UK water companies discharged raw sewage into rivers for more than 1.5m hours.

There is no public monitoring of the health of rivers in the UK, so it is therefore difficult to know which rivers are safe to swim in. Therefore the Rivers Trust has created an interactive map, Is My River Fit To Play In, which shows where water companies are discharging sewage into rivers. The map shows all the locations on rivers where water companies (and other entities) are discharging untreated sewage. The Rivers Trust advises that you should not swim downstream from any of these locations, especially after it has been raining.

The Rivers Trust map only shows where sewage is known to enter rivers. The map does not show where agricultural pollutants enter rivers or where discharges from household appliances or hidden septic tanks enter rivers.

Running Pretty

Cycling, walking and jogging seem to be more popular than ever. At the moment, however, most of us are limited to exercising in areas which are close to our homes. If you want to find new nearby routes for your daily exercise then you could try Trail Router.

Trail Router is a routing engine which is designed to help you find new running routes, preferably routes which avoid busy roads. The Trail Router algorithm looks for routes that go through parks, forests or near water, and that avoid busy roads wherever possible. Trail Router can also be asked to find you routes which avoid steep hills.

Share your location with Trail Router and tell it how far you want to walk, run or cycle and it will suggest a route which avoids busy roads. If the suggested route is too long or too short you can just click on the forward or back arrows to instantly view a longer or shorter route. If you open the settings menu you can adjust your options, these include to avoid repetition, avoid hills, avoid unlit streets and to prefer green areas.

I often find that routing engines which promise to find me interesting routes don't work very well. They often seem to ignore the tow paths, cycle paths, and wooded trails near me that I use to avoid roads. However when I ask Trail Router to find routes near my home it seems to generate routes which I would use and these routes do actually seem to avoid the busiest roads.

The Global Sports Atlas

Zeit's Small Sport Atlas uses OpenStreetMap data to explore where different sports are played around the world. Sports pitches, courts and fields are tagged on OpenStreetMap to show which sports are played on them. This means that OpenStreetMap data can provide a rough guide to where different sports are played in which countries across the globe.

Looking at which countries play different sports can be a fascinating task. Cricket for example is a game which is almost exclusively played in countries that were once subject to British imperialism. The game is huge in India, Australia and South Africa. However at the same time it has never had much impact in the USA or Canada. Soccer on the other hand has spread from Britain to almost all corners of the globe. However association football is perhaps least popular in countries which were once part of the British Empire, including the USA, Canada, India and Australia.

In Europe handball is popular across much of northern Europe. Handball however has failed to take off in the rest of the world and for some reason has never made any impact in English speaking countries. Of the American sports of baseball and American football only baseball has really managed to gain any traction outside of the United States. Baseball is popular in much of central America and in Japan. American football on the other hand is popular almost nowhere outside of the United States, although there are a few American football fields in central Europe.



The Zeit article only maps out where a handful of sports are played around the world. You can explore the geographical distribution of other sports (for example basketball) on taginfo. You should be able to work out how to view maps for different sports for yourself but here are the links to taginfo's maps for the location of basketball courts, tennis courts and rugby.



The geography of golf raises some interesting socioeconomic questions. Being able to dedicate more than 100 acres of land to just one past-time can be an expensive business. The game of golf does then tend to be reserved largely for the idle rich. It shouldn't be that surprising then to discover that a map of the world's golf courses resembles a map of countries with the highest  GDPs.

Mapping the English Premier League

Sky Sports has mapped the birthplaces of all 557 football players registered to clubs in the English Premier League. According to Transfermarkt 368 of those 557 players were born overseas,

In Where were Premier League players born? Sky has plotted the birthplace of every single player in the EPL. If you click on the markers on the map you can learn more about the individual players, such as which position they play and their number of Premier League appearances and goals. You can also filter the map to show only players for individual clubs by clicking on the club logos above the map.

The map reveals that Europe is by far the biggest catchment area for EPL teams. However a lot of players also come from South America and Africa. There are few players in the EPL who originate from Asia, North America or Oceania. I can't help wondering if the map might therefore be a reasonable guide as to where in the world children grow-up playing football.

Sky's map is in truth a pretty poor attempt at visualizing the data on EPL players. If you want to know how many players come from individual countries then you need to zoom-in on the map and count the players yourself. This can be difficult, especially when two or more players were born in the same city or when players were born very close to country borders. Would it have been that difficult to provide a table view with the map?

Berlin: The Divided City

They may have torn down the wall but Berlin remains a city painfully divided - by football. In the eastern red half of the city live the faithful supporters of FC Union Berlin. In the opposite, western blue half of the city reside the fans of Hertha BSC.

Last season FC Union Berlin secured their first ever promotion into the Bundesliga. The result is that this season Berlin will have two football teams playing in the Bundesliga and support for the two teams is split fairly evenly across the city. You can see how support for the two Berlin Bundesliga teams divides the city on a new interactive map.

The Berliner Morgenpost's Fußballkarte map shows which of the two Berlin football clubs have the most members in each postcode area. If you mouse-over a postcode area on the map you can view the actual number of members in the area for both teams. In truth, as the more established Bundesliga club, Hertha BSC (36,930) has more paid-up members than FC Union Berlin (29,043).

If you live in Hamburg then you have no need to feel left out. Hamburger Fußballkarte is an interactive map that visualizes where HSV and St. Pauli have the most fans in the city of Hamburg. German football fans might also like the Berliner Morgenpost's Fußballkarte (Beta) map. This map shows the geographical support for most of Germany's top football teams across the whole country. The map was created back in 2014 so the data might be a little out of date.

The Map of Football Fandom

The Most Popular NFL Teams shows the most popular NFL team and player in every county of the United States. The most popular team in each county is based on the number of seats sold for each team on VividSeats and the most popular player is based on social media data gathered by social publishing platform opendorse.

Each county on the map is colored to show the most popular team. You can hover over a county on the map to view the most supported team and the most popular player in the county. The quick links at the bottom of the map allow you to zoom-in on the territorial borders between different teams based on their county support.


This is just the latest football fandom interactive map that I have seen. If you are a fan of football then you might like to compare VividSeats map to a similar map created by SeatGeek in 2018. The NFL Shoppers on SeatGeek interactive map also shows the most popular NFL team in every U.S. county. Popularity for an NFL team is determined on this map by the number of customers for game tickets on the SeatGeek ticketing website.


In 2014 Facebook also released a NFL American fandom map. The Facebook map showed the most 'liked' NFL team in each county of the USA. The Atlantic has a large image of the map in its Geography of NFL Fandom article. On the Facebook map every county is colored to show the NFL team which had the most likes on the social network (in 2014).

The Map of Baseball Fandom

The Atlanta Braves are supported in more areas of the country than any other Major League Baseball team. According to SeatGeek they are the favorite MLB team in 515 different counties and dominate the map across nearly the whole of the Southeastern United States.

SeatGeek has created an interactive map which shows the most popular Major League Baseball team in every U.S. county. To create their map SeatGeek looked at which seats were being bought for which teams in every county in the country. The resulting Where Do MLB Fans Live map shows the most supported baseball teams across the whole of the United States.


The New York Times has also mapped where the fans of America's baseball teams live. The NYT however used data from Facebook to determine which baseball teams are the most supported in each country. Using the location data of Facebook users, who have declared support for a baseball team in their profiles, the New York Times created this Map of the Baseball Nation.

Zoom in on the map and you can select counties on the map to view the top three teams (and the percentage of fans for each) supported in the clicked county. You can also search the map by zip-code or address to find out who are the most supported baseball teams in your county.


This isn't the first map of sports fandom that SeatGeek has created. Back in August of last year the NFL Shoppers on SeatGeek interactive map revealed the most popular NFL team in every U.S. county. Popularity for an NFL team is determined on this map by the number of customers for game tickets on the SeatGeek ticketing website for every NFL football team.

Who Won the Super Bowl of Google Search?

Browsing Twitter yesterday, during the game, I had the impression that most viewers wanted neither side to win Super Bowl 2019. It turns out that I was wrong and there was a distinct east-west split in support for the two Super Bowl teams.

Simon Rogers has used Google Search data to visualize the top team searched for, between the L.A. Rams and the New England Patriots, in every U.S. county. For some reason the Super Bowl 2019 Patriots vs Rams in Search map shows that the Patriots were the most searched team all along the East Coast. The L.A. Rams however were the most searched team all along the West Coast. Shocking!


If that map wasn't shocking enough for you then you might want to check out Google Trends' Super Bowl Foods Map. This is one of those dubious maps which ignores the most searched for foods in every state in order to have a unique entry for every state.

Obviously we can't have a map where the favorite recipe in every single state is nachos. So lets just ignore what most people are actually searching for and pretend that people are preparing lentil soup to eat with their beers while watching the game. Shocking & Pointless!