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2013-14 UEFA Champions League Group Stage – fixtures, results, tables (soccerway.com).
From TheGuardian.com/football, from 29 Aug. 2013, by Jamie Jackson,
‘Champions League group stage draw 2013-14
• Arsenal drawn with Dortmund, Napoli and Marseille
• Celtic pitted against Barcelona, Milan and Ajax‘.
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This is the 22nd iteration of the UEFA Champions League Group Stage (ie, since 1992-93). Title-holders are of course Bayern Munich, the Bavarian giants who defeated their biggest rival, Borussia Dortmund, in the thrilling 2012-13 UEFA Champions League Final in London at Wembley on 25 May, by a score of 2-1. It was the first all German final in the competition (ie, since 1955-56).
On the map itself, in the center of the map page, the locations of the clubs which have qualified for this year’s CL Group Stage are shown on a large map of Europe. Surrounding the large map are enlarged inset maps of each of the 19 countries which have teams involved in this season’s group stage. The club crests on the inset maps are sized to reflect each club’s average attendance – the larger the crest, the higher that club’s average attendance is. Average attendance is from each club’s home matches in their domestic league last season (2012-13). I got the figures from European-Football-Statistics.co.uk/attendances.
Listed on the left-hand side are 2012-13 average attendance figures (from domestic home league matches), then each club’s stadium capacity (for 12/13 league matches), then each club’s percent-capacity. For this year’s UEFA CL map, I have dispensed with percent-change in attendance. I decided the space was better used for listing each club’s stadium capacity, and each club’s percent-capacity for 12/13. Percent Capacity = Avg. Attendance divided by Stadium Capacity.
Here are all the clubs in the 2013-14 Champions League Group Stage that filled their stadium last season by over 90.0 percent-capacity…
-100.0: Bayern Munich, at 71,000 per game in the 2012-13 Bundesliga, and the 6th-consecutive season that the current Champions League title-holders’ percent-capacity figure has been at exactly 100.0%, at their space-age Allianz Arena in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.
-99.8: Borussia Dortmund, at a world’s-best 80,520 per game at Westfalenstadion [aka Signal-Iduna Park] in Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany in the 2012-13 Bundesliga.
-99.6: Manchester United, at 75,530 per game at Old Trafford in Trafford, Greater Manchester, England in the 2012-13 Premier League.
-99.5: Arsenal, at 60,079 per game at Emirates Stadium in North London, England in the 2012-13 Premier League.
-99.1: Schalke 04, at 61,171 per game at Veltins-Arena in Gelsenkirchen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany in the 2012-13 Bundesliga.
-99.0: Chelsea, at 41,462 per game at Stamford Bridge in West London, England in the 2012-13 Premier League.
-99.0: Manchester City, at 46,974 per game at the City of Manchester Stadium [aka the Etihad Arena] in Manchester, England in the 2012-13 Premier League.
-95.8: Ajax, at 50,490 per game at Amsterdam Arena in Amsterdam, Nord Holland, Netherlands in the 2012-13 Eredivisie.
-93.5: Juventus, at 38,600 per game at Juventus Stadium in Turin, Piedmont, Italy in the 2012-13 Serie A.
-93.0: Bayer Leverkusen, at 28,120 per game at BayArena in Leverkusen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany in the 2012-13 Bundesliga.
-91.1: Paris Saint-Germain, at 43,239 per game at Parc des Princes in the 16th arrondissement in SW Paris, France in the 2012-13 Ligue 1.
Stadium capacities for league matches will inevitably be a bit less than the full capacity (ie, total number of seats+standing-room terracing, if allowed) in a given stadium – for safety reasons to separate rival fans. For UEFA matches it will very often be less than that as well (ie, more rival-fans-separation). In the last 4 or 5 years, Wikipedia has been pretty good about keeping track of stadium capacities – they can often vary from year to year. But there are errors, such as at the en.wikipedia.org page on the 2012-13 Belgian Pro League, where it fails to include the Anderlecht venue’s standing capacity – the club’s Constance Vanden Stock Stadium has 21,000 seats (that’s what its capacity is listed as {here), but that fails to account for the 5.3 K to 6.9 K of available standing-terrace capacity there (like it is listed at the de.wikipedia.org page on the stadium, here). Soccerway.com is also good on reporting the stadium capacity statistic. Actually, Soccerway.com is pretty much alone among major association football media outlets (that I know of) in that they go that extra mile and list stadium capacities AND they do the math, listing percent-capacities [at each league's table, at the top, far right of the table]. But sometimes a club is playing in multiple venues (like CSKA Moscow is currently/ see note at bottom of attendance data list on the map page), or sometimes a club has had renovations or rebuilds at their venue which changes, sometimes drastically, their stadium capacity and their actual crowd sizes (like with respect to Marseille the past 2 seasons in Ligue 1/ again, see note on the map page below attendance data). So venue-capacity and thus percent-capacity is a tough one to stay abreast of. I arrived at the venue capacity figures on the map page by referring to the en.wikipedia.org page, and sometimes to the de.wikipedia.org page, and a few times the ru.wikipedia.org page… then to the Soccerway.com capacity figure from last season. If there was a discrepancy, I delved further until I got to the bottom of why there were different venue capacity figures listed. So if there are errors in any of the 32 clubs’ 2012-13 home domestic league capacity figures here, I apologize. But no source out there (that I know of) has definitive numbers for all this. Ligue 1 site is by far the best at reporting venue-capacities and percent-capacities, and thanks to the excellent Ligue 1 official site I had already known about the rebuild (for Euro 2016) of Olympique Marseille’s venue – Stade Vélodrome – and its ongoing capacity shifts (as well as at Saint-Étienne’s venue), and was able to reflect that here and previously in my 13/14 Ligue 1 map and attendance chart {here}. {Here is the Ligue 1 site’s section on attendance – Ligue1.com/attendance}. Merci, Ligue Un!
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Thanks to the 80+ folks who commented on my 2012-13 UEFA CL Group Stage map last year when it was uploaded by niallgg at Redddit.com {here, http://en.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/znqa7/201213_champions_league_group_stage_attendance_map/}. Special thanks to the person who suggested that percent-capacity listings would be useful (user name: oldaccount), and to the person who actually took the initiative of listing all the stadium capacities and percent-capacities of clubs in the Group Stage last year (user name: therealmorris). For a couple years now, I have been including percent-capacities in most of my maps of European leagues, and including them here in the Champions League was a detail that was long overdue.
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Thanks to Roke at commons.wikimedia.org, ‘BlankMap-Europe-v4.png‘.
Thanks to european-football-statistics.co.uk, for attendance figures.
Thanks to the contributors to the pages at en.wikipedia.org (as well as UEFA CL pages at de.wikipedia.org and ru.wikipedia.org), ‘2013–14 UEFA Champions League‘.
Thanks to Soccerway.com for stadium capacity information.
