NFL Stadiums

Every NFL stadium

Thirty stadiums for thirty-two teams — the Giants and Jets share MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, and the Rams and Chargers share SoFi in Inglewood — which means the full NFL tour is a 30-venue project. It's a harder list than baseball's because there are only eight or nine home games a year at each, half of them on the same Sunday afternoon, and because several stadiums are in places you'd never otherwise go in December: Green Bay, Buffalo, Cleveland, Kansas City.

The old cathedrals are the draw. Lambeau Field has been the Packers' home since 1957 and is the one stadium on the list that's a pilgrimage regardless of who's playing. Arrowhead in Kansas City and Soldier Field in Chicago are the other survivors of an earlier era; most of the rest have been rebuilt since 2000. The new ones are spectacles in their own right — SoFi's oval video board, Allegiant's black dome in Las Vegas, the retractable roof and Halo Board at Mercedes-Benz in Atlanta.

Doing the tour

Most people chip away at it over a decade of road trips and work travel, but the dedicated do it in a season: seventeen weeks, thirty stadiums, a lot of Thursday and Monday night games to make the schedule work. The map groups stadiums only by name, but zooming into the Northeast corridor shows how many you can string together — Philadelphia, New Jersey, Baltimore, Washington, and Foxborough are all within a day's drive of each other.

Codes follow the team, so when a franchise moves to a new building your tick carries over, and stadium names are updated as sponsors change (which they do, constantly). Click a stadium badge or its pin to mark it visited, again for want-to-go. Baseball's 30 ballparks are the classic companion list.

Which ones to see first

If the goal is experiences rather than ticks, the short list is Lambeau on a cold Sunday, Arrowhead for the noise, Seattle's Lumen Field for the same reason, and Highmark Stadium in Buffalo for the tailgating — though the Bills' new stadium next door will replace it, and your tick will move with the team. The domes in New Orleans and Las Vegas and the roofed bowls in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Los Angeles are a different kind of day, more event than game. A lot of the tour is September heat and December cold, so the dedicated plan the South for early season and the North for the mild stretch in October.