Written from the trenches of Auckland real estate by Amit Sharma — Bayleys agent, 10+ years marketing experience.
New Zealand has 153 rugby clubs on the open map, and 1,357 gyms and fitness centres. That ratio is roughly nine to one, in the country that treats rugby as a founding institution. It is the first thing that jumped out when I finished compiling the data, and it reframed the whole project for me: the places New Zealanders actually train are, overwhelmingly, not clubs in the traditional sense at all.
The site is called Sideline. It maps 2,670 clubs and venues across 16 regions and 192 towns and suburbs, compiled entirely from OpenStreetMap, copyright OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence. The snapshot is dated 2026-07-29. Nothing in it is scraped from a commercial directory and no club paid to appear, which is the whole reason it was worth building. Almost every other list of gyms in this country is an advertising product, and an advertising product tells you who bought placement, not where people go.
The category breakdown is the headline. Gyms and fitness centres: 1,357. Rugby clubs: 153. Running and athletics: 141. Football clubs: 123. Cricket clubs: 119. Netball and basketball: 51. Yoga and pilates studios: 45. Boxing gyms: 16. MMA and martial arts: 16. Other clubs and centres: 763. So the individual, membership-based, turn-up-when-you-like gym is not one option among many. It is more than half the map on its own.
The second thing worth sitting with is football against rugby. 123 football clubs to 153 rugby clubs is much closer than the national conversation implies. Rugby still leads on the count, but not by the margin the cultural weighting would suggest, and football is doing it with a fraction of the institutional airtime. If you only knew New Zealand from its media, you would guess that gap was several times wider.
Running and athletics at 141 is the quiet surprise. It sits third overall and ahead of football, which is unusual for a category that most people think of as something you do alone with a pair of shoes. What that number is really capturing is clubs and organised venues, which suggests running has a far more structured community layer than its solo reputation implies.
Geographically, the concentration is severe and entirely predictable until you see the actual figures. Auckland holds 928 of the 2,670 venues. Canterbury has 401, Wellington 299, Bay of Plenty 211 and Otago 201. Those five regions account for the clear majority of everything on the map, and the remaining eleven regions divide what is left. On gyms specifically the skew is sharper still: Auckland alone has 534 of the 1,357, close to forty percent of the national total, while Southland and Gisborne have eight each.
That eight-versus-534 comparison is the number I keep coming back to, because it is not really a story about fitness. It is a story about density. Commercial gyms need a catchment. Below a certain population within a certain drive time, the model does not work, and what fills the gap is the thing the data also shows: the traditional club. Rugby, cricket and netball are distributed far more evenly across the country than gyms are, because they were never built on catchment economics in the first place. In a small town, the club is the infrastructure.
At town level the pattern holds. Auckland leads with 127 venues under the town label, then Christchurch with 78, Wellington with 73, Hamilton with 68 and Rotorua with 43. Rotorua in fifth is the one that does not follow population rank, which is what you would expect from a place with an unusually strong outdoor and sporting identity relative to its size.
Then there is the finding I did not go looking for and found the most interesting of all: of 2,670 venues, 641 have a website. That is under a quarter. More than three quarters of the places New Zealanders train have no web presence recorded at all beyond a point on a map with a name attached. As someone who works in marketing, I found that genuinely striking. It means the majority of this sector is discoverable only by local knowledge, a Facebook page, or a sign on a fence. It also means that any directory built by asking businesses to list themselves will systematically miss most of them, which is precisely why the open-data approach produces a different picture from the commercial ones.
That is also the right place to be honest about the limits. OpenStreetMap is volunteer-maintained, so coverage follows contributor attention. Dense, well-mapped urban areas are more complete than remote ones, a venue that closed last month may still be present, and one that opened last month may not be. The counts should be read as a strong, unbiased sample rather than a legal register. What makes it trustworthy is not that it is perfect, it is that nothing in it was influenced by who was willing to pay, so the errors are random rather than commercial.
One design choice is worth mentioning because it turned out to say something. The map on the site has no basemap under it. Every dot is a single club plotted at its own recorded coordinates, and the outline of New Zealand emerges purely from where people train. You do not need the coastline drawn, because the venues draw it themselves. The main centres burn bright, the arterial routes between them light up, and the empty interior stays empty. It is a population map that happens to be made entirely of gyms and clubrooms.
If you want to look up your own town or sport, the whole thing is browsable as the directory of 2,670 New Zealand gyms, studios and sports clubs, organised by region, by town and by category, with the OpenStreetMap attribution and snapshot date on every page. It is free and there is nothing to sign up for.
I build these open-data reference sites fairly regularly, and a few of the others are collected on my tools page. This one took a weekend and taught me more about New Zealand than a year of reading about it: that the gym has quietly become the default, that rugby and football are closer than anyone says, and that most of the country's sporting life is still happening almost entirely offline.