Bloomfield Road

The ground took its name two years after football arrived on it. Before 1899 the land off the Blackpool seafront was known as Gamble's Field ; from 1901 it has been Bloomfield Road , and it has stayed that way — no sponsor's name has ever been attached to it.

The first match played there was cup football: on 28 October 1899, South Shore hosted Newton Heath in the FA Cup. The crowd figure that still stands above every other came more than half a century later, on 17 September 1955, when 38,098 people packed in to watch Blackpool against Wolves. The rebuilding that ran from 2002 to 2010 turned Bloomfield Road into an all-seater, and the official capacity of 17,338 sits above the 16,500 the club actually puts on sale.

The pitch is natural grass and gets renewed on a cycle rather than left to survive the seasons; the most recent relaying was carried out in May 2024, in the gap between campaigns.

Everything to do with it, from ticketing to access, runs through blackpoolfc.co.uk. For a stadium that has been on the same patch of Blackpool since the last year of the nineteenth century, the administrative footprint is that small.