The Knowledge has turned its attention to the sometimes overlooked world of Google reviews for football grounds. The question came from Will Unwin, who noted that Hull City’s MKM Stadium carries a 4.3-star rating and wondered which ground has the highest and lowest Google rating. Pete Tomlin answered with a survey of every home ground in the Football League, recording both the rating and the number of votes for each one. The scores ranged from 4.0 to 4.7, with ties broken by the higher number of votes.
The results showed a clear pattern: bigger and more successful clubs tend to have the higher ratings, and the nine highest-rated grounds are all Premier League clubs. Anfield, home of Liverpool, came out on top with a rating of 4.7 from 54,546 votes. Only two other clubs reached 4.7: Tottenham Hotspur with 26,545 votes and Nottingham Forest’s City Ground with 2,245 votes.
Just behind on 4.6 were Old Trafford (Manchester United, 54,535 votes), the Emirates Stadium (Arsenal, 34,778), the City of Manchester Stadium (Manchester City, 32,246), Stamford Bridge (Chelsea, 25,434), St James’ Park (Newcastle United, 12,116) and Elland Road (Leeds United, 10,066).
Outside the Premier League, the highest-ranked Championship ground was Wolverhampton Wanderers’ Molineux in 11th place with 4.6 from 7,408 votes. League One fared slightly better, with Leicester City’s King Power Stadium in 10th place on 4.6 from 7,573 votes. League Two’s best was Exeter City’s St James’ Park, ranked 31st with 4.5 from 246 votes. The lowest-rated Premier League ground was Hull City’s MKM Stadium on 4.3, while QPR’s Loftus Road was the lowest Championship ground in 85th place with 4.1 from 3,458 votes. Only two grounds in the Football League were rated 4.0: Oxford United’s Kassam Stadium with 2,506 votes and Stevenage’s SPORTA Arena with 350 votes, which placed it 92nd. The column cited slightly different review counts for Hull’s MKM Stadium in the question and the answer, giving 3,655 and 3,676 respectively.
Another reader, Stephen Hogg, asked whether Serie A’s lack of a 0-0 draw this season was approaching a record. Chris Roe, using just over 30 years of Italian league data, said the wait was equal to the longest in that sample: the 2015-16 season, when the first goalless draw arrived in the fifth round of matches between Napoli and Carpi. In the Premier League, the wait lasted until the fifth round of matches on 17 September 2023, when Bournemouth drew with Chelsea. The longest top-flight wait came in the second ever season, 1889-90, when the first goalless draw arrived in the 17th round. That was beaten in tier two in 1894-95, when the first of only two goalless draws came on 23 March 1895 between Arsenal and Crewe Alexandra, Crewe’s 25th match of the season and Arsenal’s 26th. The Scottish third tier in 2013-14 equalled that wait, with its first goalless draw coming in the 25th round between Airdrie United and East Fife on 22 February 2014.
The Knowledge also returned to the question of when fans first started wearing replica kits. The previous answer had pointed to Leeds United in 1973, with the caveat that earlier examples existed of unofficial merchandise or strips that were not exact replicas of what players wore. Readers responded with pre-1973 examples. Janette and Brian Kidd remembered having an Umbro Brazil strip in 1970 and a Celtic one before that. The official Brazil kit was not sold commercially during the 1970 World Cup, so the Umbro garment likely differed slightly from the one issued to players. Brazil’s 1970 team actually wore two different shirts from two different companies during the tournament: Athleta, a Brazilian supplier, and an almost-identical Umbro kit. The noticeable differences were the manufacturer’s tag in the collar and a slight variation in the numbering. Pelé, Jairzinho and their teammates wore the Athleta shirt in the first half and switched to Umbro in the second, except in the final, when they wore Umbro from start to finish.
Other readers offered their own early kit memories. Andy Wainwright had a full children’s Nottingham Forest replica kit around 1970, which he said predates the Leeds example. Simon Crompton sent pictures of an Umbro Manchester United child’s kit from circa 1967, complete with grass stains, though it may not have had official branding. John Morrow noted that Alan Hull appeared on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1971 wearing a Newcastle shirt. One reader bought a replica Chelsea 1965 shirt from Frank Blunstone’s sports shop in Lavender Hill, Battersea, that same year. Keith Foster’s first Liverpool kit came in 1969 from John Bennett’s on the Old Kent Road, which stocked all the top teams’ kits home and away, probably unofficial. In the 1969 film Kes, Brian Glover wears his “Bobby Charlton kit” and one of the children has a Burnley shirt on, while Frank Close recalled packing Manchester United kit into boxes as potential Christmas presents in 1959. David Crowe shared a Michael Parkinson anecdote about a Barnsley supporter in the 1950s who turned up to matches with a full kit under his outdoor clothes, hoping Barnsley would one day be a man short and call on him from the crowd.
In the Knowledge archive, a 2014 question from Roland Tye asked which English top-flight champions had the smallest ground at the time they won the league. Blackburn’s Ewood Park, with a capacity of just over 31,000 when they won in 1995, was the smallest in the Premier League era. Highbury, which could fit 38,419 when Arsenal last won the league in 2004, was next, with a 2026 update noting that Leicester had a capacity of 32,259 when they won in 2016. Before that, the picture is less clear. The best postwar guess was Portman Road, home of the 1961-62 champions Ipswich, with a capacity of around 29,000.
The column also put out several new requests for readers. They include whether two national leaders have ever attended a club match in the UK outside European finals, after Andy Burnham and Mark Carney were at Everton v Wolves in the Carabao Cup; the highest scoreline ever created by a player whose squad number matched the resulting score, after Antoine Semenyo wore No 42 for Manchester City and scored his second goal against Sunderland to make it 4-2; the earliest point in a season a top-flight team has been confirmed as having a trophy-less season, with Manchester United and Tottenham cited as examples after their European and League Cup exits; and whether opposing goalkeepers with the same surname had started against each other before Oxford United’s and Cambridge United’s both being called Eastwood.