There are multiple approaches to this problem. Note that this is largly relevant in countries where football is extremely popular. The same approach will not work in countries where football is not the primary sport.
One hack that I like is as follows - let's take UK as an example
Start with the total population - ~60M
Assume ~50M live in rural areas (consistent with most estimates but anything 80% and above works). This is important as football stadiums are almost always in urban areas
Now for a football stadium to be feasible, there needs to a certain base population to generate revenue as most stadiums have at least 10,000 seats going up to 100,000 for large ones. Assume that there is one football stadium for every 200,000 people (this assumes 5% of the population can fill up the stadium).
At the above rate there should be ~250 stadiums in the UK - which is close to the number Wikipedia has.
You can always play around with the assumptions to get to an answer that makes sense
Hope this helps,
Udayan
There are multiple approaches to this problem. Note that this is largly relevant in countries where football is extremely popular. The same approach will not work in countries where football is not the primary sport.
One hack that I like is as follows - let's take UK as an example
Start with the total population - ~60M
Assume ~50M live in rural areas (consistent with most estimates but anything 80% and above works). This is important as football stadiums are almost always in urban areas
Now for a football stadium to be feasible, there needs to a certain base population to generate revenue as most stadiums have at least 10,000 seats going up to 100,000 for large ones. Assume that there is one football stadium for every 200,000 people (this assumes 5% of the population can fill up the stadium).
At the above rate there should be ~250 stadiums in the UK - which is close to the number Wikipedia has.
You can always play around with the assumptions to get to an answer that makes sense
Hope this helps,
Udayan