Bucheon Stadium

Bucheon has waited out one departure and built a club back from the ground up on the same pitch. The stadium in Wonmi-gu opened in March 2001; five years later the tenants were gone. The ground stayed, owned by the city, and in 2008 it took in Bucheon FC 1995. That second tenancy has now run far longer than the first.

What it is, in municipal terms, is the main stadium of the Bucheon Sports Complex, built by the city and run for it by the Bucheon City Corporation. That shows in how it presents itself: no naming-rights deal has ever been struck, no sponsor's name has been bolted on, and in a league where grounds change titles with contracts, it has been Bucheon Stadium since the day it opened. It also has no site of its own — what there is to know sits on a city hall page among the other municipal sports facilities.

The pitch is natural grass. The capacity is modest by K League standards, and the effect is a ground where the crowd sits close to the touchline rather than across a running track's worth of empty concrete — the supporters who rebuilt the club after 2005 fill a bowl sized roughly to what they bring. On Sosa-ro, in the middle of a dense city between Seoul and Incheon, that is the arrangement: a council-owned multi-purpose stadium that a fan-founded club has made its own by staying in it.