Which Football Stadiums Are at Risk of Flooding? The 2026 Picture

Two separate studies have counted the football stadiums at risk of flooding in England, and they disagree. Research for the Rapid Transition Alliance put 23 of the 92 league grounds in line for partial or total flooding every season by 2050. Zurich UK's own climate modelling, published three years later, put the figure at 17. Neither is wrong. They measure different things, and the gap between them is where the useful information sits, because it is a gap about flood defences rather than about water.

Between a fifth and a quarter of England's 92 professional grounds are projected to face regular flooding by 2050, depending on which study you read and what it counts.

Football grew up beside rivers and in low-lying town centres, so a large share of the game sits exactly where water wants to go. That was never a design decision. It is a historical accident, and it has become a planning problem that a good many clubs will meet for the first time when they try to redevelop. This article sets out what the two studies actually found, which grounds they name, why the numbers differ, and what the August 2026 rewrite of national planning policy now demands of anyone building or redeveloping a stadium.

How many football stadiums are at risk of flooding?

Between 17 and 23, on the two published estimates. The higher figure comes from David Goldblatt's 2020 report for the Rapid Transition Alliance, which concluded that 23 grounds face partial or total annual flooding by 2050. The lower comes from Zurich UK's 2023 climate modelling, which put 17 of 92 at high or very high risk from river and coastal flooding by the same date, rising to 22 once medium risk is included.

The Met Office puts the grassroots picture more bluntly. It estimates that around a third of grassroots pitches already lose between six weeks and two months a year to flooding and severe weather. That is not a projection. It is happening now, every winter, from the Premier League down to Sunday-morning parks football, and it is the part of the problem nobody models.

Why the two studies disagree, and why the difference matters

Because one of them says so, and the other does not: Zurich's methodology note states plainly that its analysis leaves out every defence and drainage scheme already protecting a ground.

That one line explains most of the gap between 17 and 23. It is also the most important sentence in either report, and the one everybody quoting the headline leaves out. A study that strips out defences is answering the question "where is the water", not "which grounds will get wet". Stamford Bridge and the London Stadium both sit behind the tidal Thames defences, with the Thames Barrier downstream of them. Both appear on an undefended list; neither floods in an average winter.

A ground can sit inside a mapped flood zone and still be dry every season, because flood maps show the underlying risk rather than the wall standing in front of it.

That distinction is the whole business of a flood risk assessment for a planning application. The assessment has to establish where the water would go, what stands in its way, how long that will hold, and what happens on the day it does not. Undefended national modelling is the right tool for a headline and the wrong one for a planning application. The argument cuts both ways, though. A defence built to a 1 in 100 year standard is a probability, not a promise, and plenty of assets are quietly below the standard they are assumed to meet.

Which football grounds are named, and what floods them

The exposed grounds sit on tidal estuaries, on major river floodplains, or behind coastal defences. The two studies name mostly different clubs, because they weight the sources differently and were published three years apart, so the table below sets out who appears where and what the water nearest each ground is.

Norwich City appears on both lists, which says something about the strength of the Wensum case. Most of the rest of the disagreement is a modelling argument rather than a factual one.

Look at the spread. Four of the ten sit on tidal water, four on inland rivers, and the Lincoln site sits on a drain as well as a river. Anyone who assumes stadium flooding is a coastal problem has read only half the evidence, and surface water flooding now affects more property in England than any other source. You can check where any individual ground sits on the Environment Agency's long term flood risk map, or against Unda's own flood risk map by postcode.

Why so many football grounds sit on floodplain

Because the game was built where the people and the water already were. Victorian and Edwardian clubs took whatever flat, cheap, well-connected land they could find in industrial towns, and that usually meant low ground beside a river, a canal or a railway, on the floodplain that fills first.

• Riverside and floodplain sites. Flat land beside a watercourse was cheap and central, which is why so many historic grounds sit inside Flood Zone 3.
• Town-centre location. Clubs needed to be within walking distance of terraced housing and public transport, which pushed them onto low-lying urban land.
• Reclaimed and coastal land. Several grounds, particularly newer out-of-town stadiums, sit on reclaimed estuary or dockland that is defended rather than naturally dry.
• Large impermeable footprint. A stadium, its car parks and its concourses shed rainwater fast, so surface water piles up on and around the site during intense storms.

Every one of the recognised sources of flood risk is represented somewhere in the English league, which is why a stadium assessment can never look at rivers alone.

None of that was negligence. It was the rational choice at the time, made in a climate that behaved differently and under a planning system that did not yet ask the question. The bill is arriving now, and it lands on clubs that had no say in where their ground went.

What happened at Carlisle, and what it cost

Storm Desmond overwhelmed the River Eden in December 2015 and put Brunton Park under water deep enough to wreck the pitch, the changing rooms and the ground-floor offices. Carlisle United were locked out of their own stadium for months.

Carlisle played "home" games at Preston, Blackburn and Blackpool while the clean-up went on, worked out of portacabins for the best part of nine months, and saw their insurance premiums rise afterwards. For a lower-league club, that mix of lost gate income, repair bills and higher cover is the exact shock a flood risk assessment exists to anticipate, and the reason clubs on floodplain sites increasingly treat flooding as a business continuity question rather than a maintenance one. The wider trend is not encouraging either, with UK flood insurance claims climbing year on year. Anyone assessing a ground in Cumbria will find the local picture set out on our Carlisle flood risk page.

It is not confined to one freak storm either. When Storm Bert swept in during November 2024, a swathe of Championship, League Two and National League matches were called off as pitches became, in Salford City's words, "unplayable in a short space of time".

Waterlogged pitch or flooded ground: what is the difference?

They are two different problems with two different fixes, and the phrase "flooded football pitch" gets used for both. A waterlogged pitch is the playing surface failing to drain rainwater fast enough. A flooded ground is water arriving from a river, the sea or surface run-off and inundating the whole site. One is a bad afternoon. The other is a season.

A modern professional pitch is engineered to drain vertically and can clear extraordinary amounts of rain, but no rootzone can cope with a river coming over its banks. How long a waterlogged pitch takes to dry depends entirely on its construction: a sand-based or hybrid surface with good pipe drainage can pass an inspection the same afternoon, whereas an old clay pitch may stay unplayable for days.

What the August 2026 NPPF now requires of a stadium

More than it did, and in stronger language. The National Planning Policy Framework published on 17 August 2026 moved flood risk into a dedicated Chapter 18 with nine coded policies, F1 to F9, and replaced the old permissive wording with refusal-worded policy: where the previous Framework said development "should only be allowed" if the tests were met, the new one says it "should be refused unless" they are. Our guide to the August 2026 NPPF flood risk and drainage changes maps every old paragraph to its new policy code.

Five things follow.

1. Classification comes first. A stadium is an "assembly and leisure" use, which Annex F, Table 2 places in the less vulnerable band. That keeps it compatible with Flood Zones 1, 2 and 3a but not with the functional floodplain, Zone 3b.
2. The sequential test applies under Policy F5. The area of search is now capped to the development's likely catchment, which is a meaningful change for a club arguing that its ground has to stay in its own town. Where the exception test follows, it needs a sequential and exception test report to support it.
3. Safe access and escape has to be demonstrated under Policy F7. This is the hardest test a stadium faces, because the assessment has to show that tens of thousands of people can leave safely, not one household, which usually means a flood warning and evacuation plan written for a crowd.
4. Drainage must be designed to the 2025 National Standards under Policy F8, and that now applies to all development rather than only major schemes. A stadium's roofs, stands and car parks are a large impermeable catchment in their own right, so the surface water drainage strategy does real work.
5. Climate change allowances have to be applied across the design life. Peak rainfall and peak river flow allowances raise the volume the drainage must hold, and sea level rise allowances lift the design flood level a coastal or tidal ground must sit above.

A ground assessed only against the historic record is being assessed against the wrong number, which is why modelling for a new or redeveloped stadium runs against future rainfall and sea level rather than past events.

Policy F8 carries one more change worth flagging, because it lands directly on stadium schemes: national policy now discourages enclosing existing watercourses and favours deculverting and renaturalisation. That is the first time deculverting has held national planning policy status, and it reverses the assumption a good many stadium sites were built on. The planning practice guidance on flood risk and coastal change sits underneath all of it, and our explainer on the sequential and exception tests covers how the two tests interact.

Luton and Everton: two stadiums, two answers to the same problem

Two major English stadium projects have just solved the same problem in opposite directions, and the contrast is instructive.

At Luton Town's Power Court, the River Lea ran underground straight through the footprint of the new pitch. The solution was to move it: more than 300 metres of concrete tunnel now carries the river around the edge of the site, with the diversion completed in October 2025 after what the developer described as years of work with the Environment Agency. The stadium is due to open in 2028.

Luton's river diversion was completed ten months before national policy started discouraging exactly that kind of watercourse enclosure.

That is not a criticism of the scheme, which was consented and engineered long before the August 2026 Framework existed. It is a warning about timing. A stadium takes the better part of a decade from first application to first match, and the policy under which it opens will not be the policy under which it was designed.

Everton went the other way at Bramley-Moore Dock. Rather than move water, the engineers raised the building above it: the stadium was lifted above projected future tidal levels on the Mersey while surrounding historic ground levels were kept as they were. The dock itself was infilled over its retained three-metre silt layer rather than dredged, which avoided disposing of roughly 75,000 cubic metres of material and shortened the programme. New Civil Engineer reported the design as intended to withstand flooding for the next hundred years. Local context for a Merseyside site sits on our Liverpool flood risk page.

Move the water, or rise above it. Both schemes make the same point from opposite ends. Flood risk on a stadium site is settled by levels, hydraulics and consent long before anyone draws a seating bowl. In our experience the expensive mistakes are made in that early window, when the site layout gets fixed on the assumption that drainage and levels will be sorted out later. Where the numbers matter, that means hydraulic modelling rather than a look at the published map.

How clubs and developers reduce flood risk to a ground

By working down from keeping water out of the ground altogether to living safely with the water that does arrive. There is rarely a single fix. The strongest schemes layer several measures, and they decide the order early, because retrofitting resistance into a finished concourse costs several times what designing it in would have done.

• Raise the vulnerable levels. Set pitches, plant rooms, turnstiles and electrical gear above the modelled flood level so the most damaging and expensive elements stay dry.
• Build in resistance. Use flood barriers, sealed lower concourses and non-return valves to hold water out of the structure for as long as the defences hold; the principles sit in our guide to property flood resilience.
• Design the drainage properly. Attenuate and slow surface water with a scheme sized to future storms, so the ground is not adding to the problem downstream.
• Plan for the water that gets in. Use resilient finishes that dry out and clean up quickly, and hold a warning and evacuation plan so a crowd can be moved safely.

Done well, this turns an alarming-sounding risk into a managed one, which is the whole point. The grounds that cope are not the ones that will never see water. They are the ones that have modelled where it will go and planned for it, usually with a flood risk consultant involved before the design was fixed.

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