The 131st edition of the competition now known as the Six Nations commences tomorrow with France welcoming Wales to the Stade de France. This marks a return for the French to their traditional home ground, as they shifted base to Marseille, Lyon and Lille last year while the Stade de France was being prepared for the Olympics.
France also head into the tournament as favourites, looking to wrest the crown from Ireland who won the previous two editions. The likes of England, Wales and Scotland, meanwhile, will be looking to topple the French and the Irish.
While fans from all over the world will be tuning into Six Nations games, the in-person experience in and around a stadium has a strong appeal and we’ve aggregated the host stadium ratings, as well as their proximity to pubs and restaurants.
What’s the best stadium for a pre-match drink or meal?
A pint of ale, a glass of wine or a measure of any kind of alcohol is a pre-game tradition before kicking things off in the stadiums and we have researched the Six Nations host stadiums that are closest to a number of drinking establishments.
We collected data from google maps to see which stadiums have the highest number of drinking establishments in a 0.7 mile radius.
If you’re looking for a plethora of drinking, as well as eating options, Millennium Stadium in Cardiff is the place to be. The home of the Welsh national rugby team has 35 drinking establishments within a 0.7 mile radius, which is roughly a 15-minute walk. That is 27 more options than Aviva Stadium, which is second in terms of the number of drinking establishments in a 0.7 mile radius.
Millennium Stadium is also the place to be if you want a bite to eat before kickoff. Welsh fans are spoilt for choice with as many as 27 options nearby. The host for tomorrow’s Six Nations opener, the Stade de France, has, in comparison, 11 restaurants at walking distance.
Twickenham is the most underserved in the UK with the lowest number of both bars and restaurants in a 0.7 mile radius.
The best reviewed stadiums - an index
While Stade de France doesn’t have a cornucopia of food and beverage options around, it is the best rated when reviews from different sites are aggregated.
The home ground of les Bleus has an average rating of 4.5 on Google, 4.3 on FourSquare and 4.0 on TripAdvisor. As per our methodology, it topped the Six Nations Stadium Index with a score of 72.99.
Italy’s home ground, Stadio Olimpico came in second with a score of 55.65 but it should be noted that the stadium is also home to AS Roma and Lazio of the Serie A, as well as the Italian national football team. Being home to such iconic teams does skew the result in its favour when compared to rugby specific stadiums.
Murrayfield Stadium came in dead last with an index score of 14.91. While the average reviews for the stadium are strong, the overall number is very low when compared to the others and that is where Murrayfield Stadium’s position drops in the index.
Methodology Six Nations Stadium Index
- Data Collection
The data for the Six Nations Stadium Index was collected from multiple publicly available sources to ensure a comprehensive evaluation of each stadium. The following platforms were used to gather ratings and reviews:
Google Maps, FourSquare and TripAdvisor
- Data Preprocessing
The raw data was cleaned and preprocessed to ensure consistency and usability for analysis. Ratings were normalized to a scale of 0 to 1 to ensure comparability across platforms. For example, a Google Maps rating of 4.6 out of 5 was normalized to 0.92.
Reviews were normalized based on the maximum number of reviews in the dataset. For example, if the maximum number of Google Maps reviews was 43,329, a stadium with 17,514 reviews would have a normalized review score of 0.404.
Weighting:
Weights are calculated for each platform (Google Maps, Foursquare and TripAdvisor) based on the proportion of reviews each platform contributes to the total reviews for each stadium.
- Index Calculation
The Six Nations Stadium Index was calculated using a weighted scoring method that combines normalized ratings and reviews from the four platforms.. The scores from all platforms were summed to create a combined score for each stadium. For example:
Combined Score = Google Maps Score + Foursquare Score + TripAdvisor Score
The combined score was scaled to a range of 0 to 100 to create the final index. For example:
Index = Combined Score × 100
Final index is average index from all weight combination for every stadium
