15 October Stadium

Walk past the ticket window at 15 October Stadium and the playing surface is new. The artificial turf went down in 2021.

The stands are not full, and the noise stays inside the bowl. This is the home of Club Athlétique Bizertin, a club that has been around since the late 1920s, but the ground feels like it is waiting for something to happen. It hosted matches during the African Cup of Nations in 2004, but the echoes of that tournament are faint now. The electronic scoreboard that was installed during a renovation in 2017 remains dark.

The architecture is functional. There are no sweeping curves or modern glitz, just rows of seats and concrete pillars that support the roof. The capacity is listed as 20,000, a figure that suggests a larger ambition than the town can currently support. You can see the sea in the distance beyond the perimeter, and the wind comes off the water, straight through the open sections of the stadium. It is a place that has been maintained, but not transformed. The surface is the only thing that feels modern.

Around the edges, construction hoardings and security cameras mark the boundaries of the site. It is a civic building, owned by the government, sitting quietly between the old town and the port. The years have not been kind to the concrete, but the pitch is kept in order. When the teams come out, they step onto a familiar surface, one that has seen better days but remains in use.