Here’s a look at some of the venues for sport in London, including a look ahead to the 2012 Olympic venues and other popular spectator sports in and around the city of London.

Londoners have a ravenous appetite for sports, football in particular. London boasts six teams playing in the Premiership and ten other teams in lower divisions of professional football.
The most successful or at least the most popular teams are Chelsea, champions of the English Premier League, and Arsenal.

The Arsenal museum near the current stadium tells of munitions workers who had to take up a collection to purchase the club’s first football in 1886. The timeline runs through 2002 when Arsenal won the FA cup and the Premier League, with the entire history of the club sandwiched in between.

Arsenal is in the process of building a new stadium in Ash Burton Grove that will cost nearly three quarters of a billion U.S. dollars. Chelsea completed renovations to their 42,000 seat stadium in 2001, costing an estimated two hundred million dollars. The new stadium will offer some 4,000 more seats than old Arsenal Stadium. The record attendance of an Arsenal game was in 1935 when 73,000 fans saw Arsenal play to a 0-0 tie with Sunderland FC. The old stadium is a listed building because of its Art Deco style.

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