The short answer
The highest stadium with documented organised football is Estadio Daniel Alcides Carrión in Cerro de Pasco, Peru. It is usually quoted at 4,378–4,380 m. Two terrain models read at the centre of its pitch put it a little lower, at about 4,337 m (14,229 ft). It is no showpiece, Copa Perú and regional league games, and in 2023 the chosen finish of a high-altitude marathon, but it tops every list we checked, and nothing in our research came close.
If you mean the highest stadium that hosts international football, it is El Alto’s Estadio Municipal (Villa Ingenio), about 4,090 m, where Bolivia played its home qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup and did not lose.
Eleven of the 13 stadiums in our table are in the Andes. The other two are in central Mexico, and the higher of them is not the Azteca. It is Toluca’s Nemesio Díez.
How high, side by side
Each cyan bar is our reading at the pitch. Each amber tick is a figure someone has published. Where ticks sit to the right of the bar, the published number is higher than the ground.
The 13 highest football stadiums, ranked
Ranked by our terrain reading, not by whichever published figure is biggest. Click a published figure to see where it came from; the line under each name is the most recent football there we could document.
*Share of sea-level air pressure in NASA’s standard atmosphere at our reading. Not live weather. Our reading is the mean of Copernicus GLO-90 and SRTM 30 m surface models at the mapped pitch centre; it is not a surveyed pitch height. “Models disagree” means the two are more than 20 m apart.
Four numbers that don’t hold up
Many “highest stadium” lists repeat each other’s numbers, and a few have drifted upward along the way. Nobody publishes a surveyed pitch height for these grounds, so we went back to the ground itself.
El Alto’s sign says 4,150 m
Lettering beside the pitch reads “4150 MTS ALT. SE JUEGA DONDE SE VIVE”, you play where you live, and Reuters used the same number. Both terrain models put the pitch at 4,084–4,095 m, around 60 m lower. The 4,090 m figure Olympics.com gives fits the ground. The sign is still a fine piece of psychology.
Hernando Siles at 3,637 m
La Paz’s national stadium is quoted anywhere from 3,577 to 3,637 m. Our reading is 3,592 m. The lower figures are close; the 3,637 m one is about 45 m too high, roughly the height of a 15-storey building.
Oruro at 3,800 m
CONMEBOL’s own match report put Estadio Jesús Bermúdez at 3,800 m. We read 3,719 m. That one number is the difference between Oruro looking higher than Juliaca and Puno, and actually sitting about 100 m below them.
Cerro de Pasco at 4,380 m
The top of the list is safe either way; nothing else comes within 200 m, but the usual 4,378–4,380 m is about 40 m above both terrain readings. Treat “about 4,340 m” as the honest version.
One caution the other way: at the Azteca the two models disagree by 36 m (2,245 vs 2,281 m). The pitch is ringed by one of the biggest bowls of stands in football, and surface models can pick up structure around a small open area. We don’t treat our Azteca reading as better than the published 2,200 m. More on that in our Azteca altitude guide.
Why Bolivia left La Paz for somewhere higher
For decades La Paz was one of the most dreaded away trips in South American qualifying. In 2024 Bolivia went about 500 m higher still, moving its home games up the hill to El Alto. Federation president Fernando Costa’s stated reason at the time was better grass than the Hernando Siles, the altitude came free.
It worked. Bolivia played six qualifiers there and lost none: 4 wins, 2 draws, 10 goals for and 2 against, ending with a 1–0 win over Brazil on 9 September 2025 that sent them to the intercontinental playoff.
| Date | Opponent | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 5 Sept 2024 | Venezuela | 4–0 |
| 10 Oct 2024 | Colombia | 1–0 |
| 19 Nov 2024 | Paraguay | 2–2 |
| 25 Mar 2025 | Uruguay | 0–0 |
| 10 Jun 2025 | Chile | 2–0 |
| 9 Sept 2025 | Brazil | 1–0 |
Then came the playoff final, played in Monterrey at a few hundred metres above sea level. Iraq won 2–1 on 31 March 2026 and took the last World Cup place. The federation plans to stay at El Alto for the 2030 cycle.
Six home games is a tiny sample, directional at best. It is a good story, not proof of how much the altitude was worth.
What 4,000 metres does to a football
At El Alto the air is about 66% as dense as at sea level. Two of the forces acting on a ball in flight, drag, which slows it down, and the Magnus force, which makes a spinning ball bend, both scale with that density.
- It holds its pace. With roughly a third less drag, a long shot or cross loses less of its speed on the way.
- It bends less. For the same strike and spin, the sideways push on the ball is also about a third lower. A free kick hit to curl around a wall at sea level curls noticeably less up there.
- It dips less. Topspin and knuckle effects are aerodynamic too, so they weaken in the same way.
These are physics illustrations from the standard atmosphere, not measurements at these grounds. Real air density on match day also depends on temperature and humidity, and a cold Andean evening makes the air a little denser than the standard model.
And what it does to the players
The air at El Alto is still about 21% oxygen. What changes is the pressure: at about 60% of sea level, each breath pushes oxygen into the blood with roughly 60% of the force. A single sprint barely notices. Repeating sprints, and recovering between them, is where it bites.
The best-known numbers come from Patrick McSharry’s 2007 BMJ analysis of 1,460 South American internationals. Each 1,000 m of altitude difference between the two teams was associated with about half a goal of goal difference. His model gave a home side 3,695 m above its visitors, his Bolivia v Brazil example, about an 83% chance of winning, against 54% for two teams from the same altitude. Those are historical estimates, not a forecast for any match today.
The ban fight below also produced the sport’s main medical reference: Peter Bärtsch, Bengt Saltin and Jiri Dvorak’s 2008 consensus statement on playing football at different altitude.
The year FIFA tried to ban it
27 May 2007
FIFA says no international matches may be played above 2,500 m. Blatter calls it a question of health and fairness. Reuters
27 June 2007
The limit is raised to 3,000 m and narrowed to World Cup qualifiers. La Paz is still above it; the next day Bolivia’s federation says FIFA has granted La Paz an exception. AP via CBC; Reuters
15 December 2007
A new version: no FIFA-competition match above 2,750 m without acclimatisation. FIFA (archived)
27 May 2008
FIFA provisionally suspends the restriction. “Let us reopen the discussion,” Blatter says. World Soccer
Under the original 2,500 m line, 12 of the 13 stadiums in our table would have been off-limits for internationals. Only the Azteca would have survived.
Where America’s high-altitude venues fit
Denver gets talked about as thin-air football, and for the NFL it is. On a world list it barely registers: Empower Field at Mile High is about 1,609 m, 2,481 m below El Alto. Wyoming’s War Memorial Stadium, the highest in college football, is at roughly the Azteca’s height.
- War Memorial Stadium (Wyoming) - about 2,200 m (7,218 ft)
- Empower Field at Mile High (Denver) - about 1,609 m (5,279 ft)
- Coors Field (Denver) - about 1,580 m (5,184 ft)
The US figures are the published references used on our own guides, not re-measured here.
Left off the list, and why
Lhasa, China. Lhasa hosted Chinese amateur championship football at around 3,650 m in 2017, but the professional club’s home games were moved to Sichuan in 2019. No documented senior football there since 2019, and we could not confirm that the mapped stadium is the ground used in 2017.
Chail, India. Himachal Pradesh’s tourism corporation calls Chail’s ground the world’s highest cricket pitch, usually quoted at about 2,444 m. It is a school playing field rather than a stadium, and we have not measured it, so it sits outside this football ranking.
Frequently asked
What is the highest stadium in the world?
Among stadiums with documented organised football, Estadio Daniel Alcides Carrión in Cerro de Pasco, Peru is the highest. It is usually listed at 4,378–4,380 m; our terrain check at the pitch puts it at about 4,337 m (14,229 ft).
What is the highest stadium used for international football?
Estadio Municipal de El Alto (Villa Ingenio) in Bolivia, at about 4,090 m by our terrain check. Bolivia played its home 2026 World Cup qualifiers there from September 2024.
How high is El Alto’s stadium: 4,090 m or 4,150 m?
Both figures are published. Two independent terrain models at the centre of the pitch read 4,084 m and 4,095 m, which supports the 4,090 m figure. The 4,150 m painted beside the pitch is about 60 m higher than either model.
How thin is the air at the world’s highest stadiums?
Using NASA’s standard-atmosphere equations, air pressure at El Alto is about 60% of sea level and air density about 66%. Oxygen is still about 21% of the air; it is the pressure pushing it into the lungs that falls.
Is Estadio Azteca one of the highest stadiums in the world?
It is high, roughly 2,200–2,260 m depending on the source, but 12 football stadiums on our list sit higher, including Toluca’s Estadio Nemesio Díez about 55 km away.
Did FIFA ban high-altitude football?
It tried. In May 2007 FIFA announced a 2,500 m limit for international matches, raised it to 3,000 m a month later, reworded it to 2,750 m without acclimatisation in December 2007, and provisionally suspended it in May 2008.
How we measured
- Each stadium was matched to its OpenStreetMap object by hand, then we took the centre of the mapped football pitch inside it, not the city centre, and not the stadium’s address.
- At that point we read two independent surface models: Copernicus GLO-90 via Open-Meteo and SRTM 30 m via OpenTopoData. Our figure is their mean. Across the 13 ranked grounds they agree to within 14 m, except the Azteca.
- Surface models have grid cells tens of metres wide and can include nearby structures. A sunken or raised pitch can differ from the reading by several metres. None of this is a surveyed pitch height, but it is one consistent method for every ground, which a list built from mixed press figures is not.
- Air pressure and density come from NASA’s standard-atmosphere equations, the same calculation used across our altitude guides.
- Published figures are listed with their source and date. We have not changed or “corrected” them; we show them next to our reading.
This is a sourced venue guide, not a statistical study of results at altitude,.