Arsenal Stadium (Tula)

The stadium in Tula has changed its name more times than most Russian arenas manage in a century — Tula Luzhniki at its founding, then Trud, then, from 1968, the unwieldy Central Stadium named after the 50th Anniversary of the Komsomol, before Arsenal settled on the ground in the mid-1990s.

That came later, in two waves. Between 1995 and 1998 the club brought the venue up to UEFA standard: a canopy went up over the South stand, new floodlight masts and a Hungarian scoreboard arrived in 1998, and the dressing rooms were rebuilt to European specification. A second reconstruction in 2014, tied to Arsenal's promotion to the Premier League, swapped bench seating for individual plastic seats and trimmed capacity from 20,048 to the current 19,241 in the process. The pitch itself, heated by Swiss-built Motomatic equipment and irrigated year-round, was relaid completely in 2016.

The ground's biggest night arrived on 25 July 2019, when Arsenal hosted Baku's Neftçi in the club's first European fixture, a Europa League tie lost 0-1. Domestically, the record crowd came on 4 August 2018, when 17,650 turned out for a 3-3 draw with Zenit St Petersburg in the second round of the 2018-19 Premier League season. The arena also has a habit of stepping outside football: in December 2024 it hosted the KHL junior league's first-ever open-air match, an MHL fixture between SKA-1946 and the Mikhailov Academy that was overshadowed by a brawl on the ice, and in March 2025 the band The Hatters played a solo concert there.

Not every chapter has gone smoothly. In March 2017 a breakdown in the entry system left part of the crowd locked out before a match against Ural, and in 2024 the Russian Football Union barred the ground from hosting a Cup tie against Lokomotiv over compliance failures.