The Sports Stadiums With The Most Health Code Violations, Ranked

Stadium food is notorious for not being the best quality and costing a lot more than you’d normally pay. That may not be venues’ only concerns with their fare, as a new investigative report is now revealing potential food safety concerns behind sporting event eats as well.

The full report, performed by ESPN’s Outside The Lines, pulled over 16,000 food safety inspection reports from the 111 stadiums across North America. They looked at the number of high-level violations, or those that presented clear food poisoning concerns, at each vendor in the stadium. Venues were then ranked based on the percentage of outlets that had these issues with their food safety.

Out of all of the stadiums, Spectrum Center (home of the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets) scored the worst, with 92% of the vendors being issued high-level violation notifications. They were followed by the now-closed Palace of Auburn Hills (Detroit Pistons, NBA) at 86.11%, and the American Airlines Center (Dallas Stars, NHL and Dallas Mavericks, NBA) at 83.08%.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, Oracle Arena (Golden State Warriors, NBA) was the cleanest, with only 1.12% of vendors reporting high-level violations. They were followed by State Farm Arena (Atlanta Hawks, NBA) and NRG Stadium (Houston Texans, NFL) at 4.15% and 4.44%, respectively.

In total, 28% of stadiums in North America had health violations at over half of their vendors, but 73 (65.7%) performed as well or better than the community surrounding them in terms of food safety.

You can view the full rankings, and search for where your favorite teams and their respective stadiums ended up, at the infographic ESPN created detailing the full report.