After a long journey, chances are all you want to do is get to your hotel room for a good night’s sleep. But what if your work involved traveling all over the world to perform in front of masses of fans? What if the success of your team, your career and your reputation depended solely on how well you perform in that very place?



For professional sports stars, this is very much a reality. That set us thinking: just how far do they travel? Does all that time spent traveling affect their athletic performance? Which teams go farthest for their sport? The below chart is a bit of an eye opener.

As you can see, they sure do rack up the miles, don’t they? But what does this all mean?

Well, your fingers might have been crossed for an excuse, but it turns out that the teams who spend the most time traveling don’t tend to perform any worse than the rest. At the end of the day, it’s part and parcel of the job.

How about within each sport? Which teams travel more than their league rivals? Which get away with a minimum mileage? Find out below:

Inspired? Why not book a flight to San Francisco for the next Giants game, or catch a plane to Boston to see the Celtics?

In order to calculate the distance travelled by each team, as well as the average across each sport, Icelandair used the following data sources:



