The map on this website enables to visualize the geography of professional football clubs on the entire planet. No matter how much you zoom in or where you move to on the map, it will show the top 30 clubs for the visible region. You can also click on any club logo to get more information about the club.
To start exploring the world and understanding how the map works, consider having a look at cities such as London or Buenos Aires. Then, feel free to fly to the Australia and to discover the clubs of Oceania.
In order to display the map, I collected a database of all professional football clubs by aggregating multiple data sources, using a method involving many steps. A brief overview of the method is provided below, and a detailed technical article is available on my blog.
A basic initial data set of football clubs was extracted from Soccerway, then completed with logos of Wikipedia club articles, and manual corrections.
To display the clubs on the map, their coordinates in latitude and longitude were computed by Google's geocoding API using the partial locations obtained from the basic initial data set.
To choose which clubs to display for each region, a global ranking of clubs was created using a mix of continental rankings (AFC, CAF, CONCACAF, CONMEBOL, UEFA). As no ranking was available for OFC, OFC teams were ranked according to their performance in the last three OFC Champions League editions with an ad-hoc score. Finally, all these continental rankings were weighted according to the distribution of FIFA World Cup spots, resulting in a fair global score.
As a football enthusiast, I always loved discovering new football clubs, reading about their history and their play. This map will hopefully enable other fans to extend their knowledge of international football, and perhaps also to get familiar again with forgotten geography lessons of middle school.
Feel free to get in touch with me using the contact info on my website.