English Premier League map - 2008-09 season

Yes it's that time of year, the start of the 2008-09 English Premier League. In his usual fashion Bill Turianski gives us a visual overview of what we'll be seeing - a map of England overlaid with the 20 club logos sized proportional to attendance and located according to, well, their location. A list of each club's average attendance last season is also included plus some visual profiles of each club on the right hand side - kit, logo, last season's finish, titles and much more. Immerse yourself in the glorious details of obsessive fandom.

A few quick observations on the map. Wow, the Premier League is concentrated in just a few areas. We've got five clubs in the Greater London area plus another eight in what could be loosely called the greater northwest (not sure if Stoke quite fit the Northwest tag). That's two-thirds of the league from just two main areas. Add to that a pair of Birmingham clubs, four from the Northeast (including debutantes Hull City) and Portsmouth representing the South Coast. Yorkshire are completely absent - no Leeds, no Sheffield clubs - as is Derbyshire, the East Midlands, East Anglia, the Southwest....

Attendance in the English Premier League continues to be impressive. Eleven clubs averaged over 30,000 fans a game and eight at 40,000 or higher. More impressive still considering the tremendous prices some clubs charge for tickets especially considering the relative pennies that were being charged just a coule decades ago. And crowds were generally much smaller then!

Bill Turianski runs the website Bill's Sports Maps - which features many, many maps, profiles of teams and a whole lot more.