Arminia Ii

The Bezirkssportanlage Rußheide holds 12,000. Arminia Bielefeld's reserve team has used it as its base through a history that has stopped and started more than once: re-established as a competitive side in 1964, run down and dissolved in March 2018 for financial and sporting reasons, then brought back in March 2025 as an under-21 team. It now competes in the Oberliga Westfalen, the fifth tier, a division it has already topped twice before, in 2004 and 2014, along with a Verbandsliga Westfalen title in 2002 and four Landesliga Westfalen championships between 1984 and 2000.

The team's real purpose sits upstream of results. Stefan Ortega passed through the academy between 2007 and 2011 before moving on to spells at 1860 Munich and Manchester City, the kind of path the reserve side exists to produce. René Müller now oversees that pipeline as academy director, while other players, among them Marcel Hartel and Niklas Dorsch, arrived as seniors from academies elsewhere and used the second team as a step up rather than a starting point.

Black, white and blue remain the club's colours across both sides of the operation, and the derby against Preußen Münster belongs to the first team rather than this one. What the second team offers instead is continuity: a route from the Rußheide pitches into a first-team squad that went up to the 2. Bundesliga in 2024–25 and reached the DFB-Pokal final the same season.

Twelve thousand is what the ground holds on the days it needs to.