Arcul de Triumf Stadium

Bucharest's rugby stadium wears its age differently from the football arenas around it: it opened in March 1914 as the Stadionul Tineretului, the Youth Stadium, and the first thing played on its pitch was a rugby match between Sporting and Tennis Club on that same opening day, decades before the sport had any dedicated home elsewhere in the city.

The name it carries now came later. A 2007 renovation stripped the ground back to something closer to a modern venue and, with the rebuild, gave it back its older identity as the Arcul de Triumf — a name borrowed from the monument nearby rather than invented for the occasion. What survived the century in between is harder to trace in the record, but the throughline from 1913, when the site was first laid out, to the stadium standing on Bulevardul Mărăști today is unbroken.

It remains, above all, a rugby ground in a football city, which sets it apart from the largely interchangeable multi-purpose bowls elsewhere in Bucharest.