Birkenau

What Birkenau has is a written record of its own slow growth.

The ground was put into service in 1956. The clubhouse came in 1970. A second playing field followed in 1971. Between 1972 and 1974 the main pitch was rebuilt and floodlights went up over the training field. It needed somewhere to work in the dark on weekday evenings more than it needed to stage anything under lights on a Saturday.

Then a long gap, and in 2019 a new clubhouse opened under a scheme the club called Birkenau 2025 — a name that dates the ambition rather than the building.

FC Rebstein play here, in the 2. Liga of the Eastern Switzerland football association, which is amateur football and has been for the whole of the ground's life. The pitch is natural grass, as it has always been. The address is Bahnhofstrasse, which in a town of this size in the canton of St Gallen means the ground sits where people already pass through rather than out on the edge of it.