Stadium Accessibility

Companion to our PSL travel-load analysis, which uses the same stadium coordinate table.

Chatsworth's nearest Betway Premiership ground is 1.8 km away. Motherwell's is 232 km away. Across 26 major South African townships the median distance to the nearest top-flight stadium is 19.5 km — but the range runs from a walk to a full day's journey.

This page reports two measured things and does not go beyond them: how far each township is from the nearest Premiership ground, and how far each ground is from the nearest railway station. Both are computed from published coordinates, and both are published in full.

Distance From Township to Nearest Premiership Ground

Median 19.5 km, mean 28.8 km.

Three Findings Worth Reporting

1. Durban is the best-served football city in the country, by a wide margin. Five of the sixteen Premiership clubs play in the eThekwini area, and the effect on access is dramatic: Chatsworth is 1.8 km from a top-flight ground, Umlazi 2.1 km, and both — along with KwaMashu and Ntuzuma — have three Premiership stadiums within 30 km. No other metro comes close.

Soweto is the other standout, for a different reason: it contains two Premiership grounds. Orlando Stadium sits 3.4 km from the centre of the township and FNB Stadium 9.3 km, which is why the Soweto derby is a 5.9 km trip for the away team.

2. Cape Town's townships now have no Premiership club at all. This is the single largest structural change in the 2026/27 division, and it shows up starkly in the distance column.

Khayelitsha, Mitchells Plain, Gugulethu and Langa — four of the largest townships in the country — have Danie Craven Stadium in Stellenbosch as their nearest Premiership ground, at 22.1, 26.6, 27.9 and 31.7 km respectively. Langa has no Premiership ground within 30 km. And their second-nearest option is between 863 and 876 km away, in Bloemfontein.

That gap exists because Cape Town City finished second in the 2025–26 National First Division and are not in the top flight. Stellenbosch are the only Western Cape club in the division, which also makes them the most-travelled club in the league by a factor of nearly three — the same geographic fact seen from the other end.

3. Motherwell is the most isolated township in the sample, and only recently. At 232 km from the nearest Premiership ground, Motherwell in Nelson Mandela Bay is more than four times further from top-flight football than any other township here.

The reason is a venue move, not a relegation. Chippa United — the Eastern Cape's only Premiership club — now play most home matches at the Buffalo City Stadium in East London rather than the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium in Gqeberha. Motherwell is 15.2 km from the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium. On the base case used throughout our travel work, its nearest Premiership ground is 232 km away instead.

This is worth stating precisely because Chippa still use both venues: their own website says most home games are at Buffalo City with night matches at Nelson Mandela Bay. So for some fixtures Motherwell's figure is 15.2 km and for others it is 232 km, and which applies depends on the individual match. We report the base case and flag the alternative rather than averaging two very different realities into one misleading number.

Rail Access to the Grounds Themselves

The second measure: how close each ground is to a railway station, computed from mapped station positions.

Eight of the fourteen grounds sit within a kilometre of a railway station, and six of those stations are recorded as part of a named Metrorail commuter network. That is a genuine inheritance of the country's rail-oriented stadium building — several of these grounds were served by purpose-built or upgraded stations, Nasrec at FNB Stadium being the clearest example.

At the other end, the two KwaZulu-Natal newcomers' shared home in Richards Bay is 7.7 km from the nearest station and Kruger United's ground at KaNyamazane is 8.1 km, with no station of any kind within 5 km of either.

One critical caveat, and it applies to this whole table: a station on the map is not a train in service. South Africa's commuter rail network has been severely curtailed, with many Metrorail corridors suspended or running reduced services in recent years. This table measures the distance to rail infrastructure, which is a fact about the built environment. It is not a measurement of whether a supporter can actually catch a train to a match, and nobody should read it as one. Establishing which corridors are in service on a given matchday needs current operator timetables, which we have not compiled and are not going to estimate.

A second caveat on the data itself. OpenStreetMap tags a range of things as railway=station or railway=halt, and not all of them are passenger transport. Two examples we caught and handled: the nearest tagged "station" to Moses Mabhida Stadium, at 0.20 km, is Skycar — the stadium's own funicular up to the arch, which we excluded, taking the genuine Metrorail station 0.33 km away instead. And the entries nearest Mbombela Stadium are halts on a Mpumalanga freight line, which is why that row shows no recorded commuter network. Treat "not recorded" as unknown, not as absent.

What This Page Deliberately Does Not Do

The geography here traces the shape of apartheid-era spatial planning, and that is not a controversial observation — townships were built at distance from urban centres by design, and stadiums were not built in them. But we are reporting distances and infrastructure, not interpreting them, and we have kept the analysis to what the coordinates actually support.

Specifically, this page does not claim to measure:

• Travel time or cost. Great-circle distance is not a journey. A 20 km trip by minibus taxi across Cape Town and a 20 km trip in Durban are not the same experience, and neither is captured here.
• Whether public transport actually runs. See the caveat above. Station proximity is infrastructure, not service.
• Who attends matches. Nothing here measures attendance, ticket demand or supporter distribution.
• Population exposure. We have not weighted townships by population, because reconciling current population figures across 26 places to a consistent standard was beyond what we could verify. Every township is one row, regardless of size.

FAQ

Which South African township is closest to a Premiership stadium? Chatsworth in eThekwini, at 1.8 km from Chatsworth Stadium, home of Durban City. Umlazi is next at 2.1 km from King Zwelithini Stadium, followed by Kayamandi at 3.0 km from the Danie Craven Stadium and Soweto at 3.4 km from Orlando Stadium.

Which is furthest? Motherwell in Nelson Mandela Bay, at 232 km — because the Eastern Cape's only Premiership club, Chippa United, now play most home games in East London rather than Gqeberha. Motherwell is 15.2 km from the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium, which Chippa still use for some fixtures.

Do Cape Town's townships have a Premiership club nearby? Not in 2026/27. Cape Town has no club in the division, so the nearest top-flight ground for Khayelitsha, Mitchells Plain, Gugulethu and Langa is the Danie Craven Stadium in Stellenbosch, between 22 and 32 km away. Langa has none within 30 km, and the second-nearest ground for all four is over 860 km away in Bloemfontein.

How many Premiership stadiums are near a railway station? Eight of the fourteen grounds are within a kilometre of a mapped railway station, and six of those stations belong to a named Metrorail network. But a station's existence does not mean a passenger service currently runs to it — South Africa's commuter rail network has been heavily curtailed, and this page does not measure which lines are operating.

Which city has the best football access? Durban, clearly. Five of the sixteen clubs play in the eThekwini area, so Chatsworth, Umlazi, KwaMashu and Ntuzuma each have three Premiership grounds within 30 km — more than anywhere else in the country.

Are these road distances? No. They are great-circle distances between coordinates — the straight line across the earth's surface. Real journeys are longer, typically by 10–25% on South African roads, and travel time depends on the mode and the route rather than the distance.

Download the data

Every figure on this page is in the files below, so you can check the arithmetic yourself. Released under CC BY 4.0 — free to reuse, including commercially, with attribution.

• Township distance to the nearest Premiership stadium — CSV, 26 rows
  Columns: township, municipality, province, latitude, longitude, km_to_nearest_premiership_stadium, nearest_stadium, nearest_club, km_to_second_nearest, second_nearest_stadium, stadiums_within_30km
• Stadium proximity to the nearest railway station — CSV, 14 rows
  Columns: stadium, club, km_to_nearest_station, nearest_station, station_type, nearest_station_network, km_to_nearest_named_network_station, nearest_named_network_station, commuter_network, stations_within_5km