VEB Arena

The ground that VEB Arena replaced tells its own story: the old CSKA stadium on this plot in Moscow's Khoroshyovsky district dated to 1961 and held barely 10,000, and when the club rebuilt on the same site, capacity nearly tripled. It opened as Arena CSKA on 23 August 2016, with the first competitive fixture — a 3-0 win over Terek — following that September, and carried the name only a year before a sponsorship deal with Vnesheconombank turned it into VEB Arena.

The pitch is not an ordinary lawn. It runs on GrassMaster, natural turf stitched through with synthetic fibres to hold up through a Moscow season that swings between frost and thaw.

European nights have brought Tottenham, Manchester United, Arsenal and Benfica through the gates, and cup football has its own rules here — the ground's continental attendance record, 29,284, was set not for a derby but for a Europa League tie against Arsenal in April 2018. The overall record, 29,361, came five months later for CSKA against Spartak.

Not every capacity night has stayed inside the lines. After CSKA played Zenit in November 2021, flares went off among the home support, and police detained around 400 fans as they left the stadium.