Best Bars with Live Sport

New York's most dedicated soccer bar, on East 11th Street, where the allegiances run from Premier League to Serie A to the MLS and the fixtures calendar covers almost every time zone on earth. For early morning Premier League kick-offs Nevada Smith's opens at 6am, serves full breakfast, and fills with a crowd that takes their sport seriously enough to get out of bed in darkness. The atmosphere during a title run is as good as any sports bar we have been to anywhere.

Order: Guinness on draft and the full English breakfast for early kick-offs

A dedicated NFL bar that has screens arranged so that you can watch four simultaneous games from every seat in the house. The draft beer selection is significantly better than its competition and includes rotating craft options alongside the standard lager lineup. Standings hosts official NFL team supporter groups on game days — the New York Giants fans in one corner, the Eagles fans pointedly elsewhere — which gives the room the kind of concentrated partisanship that sports bars at their best should have.

Order: Whatever East Coast IPA is on the rotating craft tap

The best place in Chicago to watch rugby, Six Nations, and GAA sport, in a Gold Coast Irish pub that takes its sporting calendar as seriously as its Guinness pour. Fadó opens at 7am for early European kick-offs and has the screens, the sound, and the bartenders who understand that a sports bar at 8am needs different energy management than one at 8pm. The Guinness consistently rates among the best in the city.

Order: Guinness — the two-part pour here is reliably excellent

A small Soho pub that has been one of London's best sport-watching venues for years without expanding beyond its two-room footprint. The screens are positioned so that every seat has a line of sight, the Guinness is the best in Soho by a margin, and the crowd during international rugby weekends creates an atmosphere that larger purpose-built sports bars spend significant money trying to replicate. Small, focused, and consistently excellent.

Order: Guinness and a Jäger Bomb if Ireland are winning — the bartenders know the deal

A Temple Bar sports pub that manages to be genuinely good despite its central tourist location — a feat that requires active effort and good management, and The Field has both. For All-Ireland GAA championship matches it becomes one of the most atmospherically charged rooms in the city. The Guinness is excellent, the staff understand sport beyond whatever is on tonight, and the back room has the kind of acoustic quality that makes a big match feel significant.

Order: Guinness, no ice, served with a minute to settle

Boston's Fenway neighbourhood is the most sports-concentrated square mile in American sport, and The Goal Post is the bar within it that treats the beer list with the same seriousness as the screen arrangement. The draft list rotates through twenty New England craft beers, the food is a cut above bar standard, and the crowd during a Red Sox playoff run generates the kind of collective investment that makes watching sport in a bar worthwhile. Book in advance for anything involving the Sox in October.

Order: Harpoon IPA on draft — the Boston choice for a Boston game

The Surry Hills pub that manages the NRL-AFL divide in Sydney with admirable neutrality — screens for both codes, a beer garden that fills with crowds from both rugby codes on game days, and a roster of bartenders who have absorbed enough sporting knowledge through osmosis to hold their own in any conversation. The Clock does not specialise in one sport and is better for it. The best Australian craft beer list in a pub within walking distance of the CBD.

Order: Stone and Wood Pacific Ale — the Sydney choice for a Sydney game

The most reliably good bar in Denver's LoDo neighbourhood for watching Broncos games, where the fifty-odd screens are arranged for maximum sightlines and the beer list runs to forty-plus Colorado craft options. On game days the capacity reaches several hundred people without losing the feeling of a bar rather than a stadium concession stand, which is the core achievement of any successful sports bar. The nachos are properly good.

Order: Odell Brewing IPA on draft — Colorado's best craft beer in Denver's best sports bar

The largest sports screen in the world — seven stories tall, 4K, and wrapping 360 degrees around the venue — with a bar that serves the full casino cocktail operation alongside a draft beer list that runs to forty taps. The Stadium Bar is technically beyond the category of sports bar entirely: it is a sports watching venue that happens to have drinks. But the scale creates a collective energy that no conventional sports bar can match, and during NFL playoff weekends it is one of the genuinely great spectacle experiences in any city.

Order: Whatever frozen cocktail keeps you cool during a double-header