I know a few on here have probably been to a few stadiums around the World and I am interested to see what places people have been.
I have always loved Italian football, I grew up in a period in the UK during the 1990s when Serie A, Italian football in general etc was a huge thing with Football Italia on our television screens (Channel 4) back in the day.
As such I have always wanted to go and visit stadiums around Italy, and until April this year I had never been to Italy. Now having been twice I managed to persuade the other half to go and have a look at a few a couple of weeks ago. Sadly I couldn’t get any pics inside the stadiums as they were locked up, but I did manage to see the Stadio Marcantonio Bentegodi (Hellas Verona), Stadio Pier Luigi Penzo (Venezia) and the Stadio Romeo Menti (LR Vicenza) whilst out there.
Even more pleasing now as Venezia are moving to a new stadium on the main land for 2027/28, and the Verona stadium is potentially being knocked down in March 2027 if it gets selected as a host City for Italy co hosting Euro 2032.
Chris pwns the rest of us on the Sevilla front. I’ve got 7 countries I think, so maybe I’ve got you beat there but otherwise you have cooler photos.
Someday I’ll post them, but mine are Rabat and Casablanca, Morocco
Parc des Princes, Paris
Akron, Guadalajara, Mexico and visited outside of Pumas and Estadio Azteca
La Casa Blanca, Quito and Estadio Olímpico, Riobamba, Ecuador
Ferencvaros stadium, Budapest, Hungary
Emirates Stadium, London, UK
Lots of stadiums across the US.
Honestly my favorite of all of them, such an experience. Even better, I sat with the visiting QPR fans, laughed when the Fulham halftime included NFL cheerleaders (?) and the has a blast when QPR won 0-2 or 1-2 I can’t remember.
My first ever football match after getting hooked because of the World Cup. (Hosting it definitely made it more personal.) I bought tickets for the rest of the season in the supporters section shortly after. I’ve always been a hockey guy and this was my first time in the stadium for sports. (The Canucks play at the arena across the street: Rogers Arena.) This was the Vancouver Whitecaps versus LA FC. Both Son and Müller scored. Attendance for this match was about 42k as they opened up the upper deck; usual attendance is about 22k.
Big stadium for me being used to hockey. Congrats on the Cup win, chief.
The atmosphere for the Whitecaps is nuts thanks to the supporters section. Such a stark contrast to hockey environments, especially since they’ve become sterile and corporate in the lower bowl over the last 25 years. It’s no longer a sport for the working class but thank God for football; five matches for a club at the top of the conference versus one game in the nosebleeds for a tanking team.
Looks like you were in the good seats. When I visited that stadium with Sevilla we were right up in the gods. The players looked like ants.
Did you travel to and from the stadium via the u bahn trains? Everything ran like clock work getting thousands of fans back into town when I used it. German efficiency at its best.
National stadium Almaty, Kazakhstan, They had a guy with a falcon pre-kickoff. Last league game of the season. Freee entry (!) Being an authoritarian state, police and soldiers had a heavy presence. Don’t think there were any away fans (tbf, distances are huge)
AEK Athens. The process of getting tickets for Greek league games is ridiculously hard, to stop hooliganism. Lamela played and a guy called Almeyda managed them. They were 2-0 up and lost 2-3.
RFS. (Riga Football School.) One of Latvia’s big two. They qualified for the Europe League group stage 2 seasons ago and held their own, beating Ajax 1-0.
I lived there for a year (2013.) Very different. A real crossing point of cultures.
Slavic (lots of Russians and Ukrainians) due to them being a former USSR republic,
Locals were Turkic (the language is very close to Turkish).
Secular Muslim (lots from nearby Central Asian republics and Tatars)
2% Korean (Stalin moved groups he considered “politically unreliable” there pre-WW2
Fair bit of Chinese investment in its infancy then, way more now I hear.
Genuinely great experience and very far from the “Borat” stereotype (which rightly annoys them, but, like Dracula in the case of Romania, has at least boosted them, though for the wrong reasons.)
I had the chance to meet some Kazakh students during a European summer school trip in 2014 in college.
It was very interesting to see someone who looks eastern Asian, speaks Russian and is Muslim. Quite a weird combination but they were nice folks and liked to play football (though we beat them in the summer school tournament).
Yep! Work. I was also in Panama half a year. Saw the Panama Haiti qualifier in 2016 as part of Panama’s first successful WC qualifying, I was looking for the stadium pic to include, but then I realised, I was between phones then, had an old video camera I was using and didn’t take that to the game as i worried about the entry stuff. Kazakhstan is definitely the sort of travel I recommend if you’re into something different.
The Kazakhs are really great people, very hospitable, top class food, dirt cheap. Amazing mix of landscapes, mountains, valleys, canyons. steppe. I speak low level Russian and at that point the locals preferred it, though I hear the government is pushing Kazakh more now. The football system has improved since I was there with Kairat and others passing the qualifying stages, but does suffer from the distances, Almaty to Atyrau (south-east to north-east) is Seville-Berlin distance and away fans are rare as even the national airlines cost way more than the European low-cost ones.
