Barasat Stadium / Rabindra Sarobar Stadium

For two seasons in the second half of the 2010s the ground at Champadali took in football that belonged elsewhere. With Salt Lake Stadium unavailable, both East Bengal and Mohun Bagan Super Giant played I-League fixtures in Barasat across 2016–17 and 2017–18, which is why a district stadium north of Kolkata holds results like East Bengal's 5-1 win over Shillong Lajong and Mohun Bagan's 5-0 against Churchill Brothers, both in December 2017.

It had waited a long time for that. The Barasat Municipality laid the foundation stone on 23 March 1974, but the ground was not finished, and not dedicated to the public, until 1 June 2002, when Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee opened it. The municipality still owns the site; day-to-day control passed to the Indian Football Association around 2013.

That rebuild, carried out between 2011 and 2013 with AIFF and FIFA money under the Win in India with India programme, is what made the visiting tenancy workable: artificial turf, four floodlight towers, air-conditioned changing rooms, rooms for match officials, a press box and medical rooms. FIFA graded the new surface two-star in May 2013.

The complex was never laid out for football alone. A swimming pool, a tennis court and a residential hostel stand within the grounds, a short walk from Barasat railway station and Pioneer Pond. Neither an I-League nor an ISL side is based here now; the regular football is the Calcutta Football League.