Audi Field

Audi Field sits in Buzzard Point, in a corner of the city that had no stadium — and, for most of its history, not much else — before this one arrived. D.C. United spent years playing out of an ageing football-only ground across town before the move, and the club's identity is stitched into the new site as directly as the naming rights: for a stretch before the Audi deal closed, the building went up under the placeholder names D.C. United Stadium and Washington, D.C. Stadium, a reminder that the tenant came before the sponsor.

The construction bill told its own story. What was pitched as a $300 million project ended up costing $450 million, the kind of overrun that tends to follow any build squeezed onto reclaimed industrial land rather than open ground. Populous took the lead on design, working alongside the local firm Marshall Moya Design, with Turner Construction handling the build itself.

At 20,000 seats it is a compact ground by the standards of the league's newer stadiums, and the split of the capacity gives some sense of the atmosphere it was built for: 1,500 supporters' section seats, 500 pitch-level seats that put spectators almost on top of the touchline, 1,500 club seats and 31 suites. There is no running track, no upper tier set back from the field — just a bowl built specifically for football, on natural grass, in a part of Washington that had never had a reason to draw a crowd before July 2018.