Dubai Sports City Football Academy

Most of what happens at the Dubai Sports City Football Academy happens without a crowd. The stands hold five thousand, but the record attendance for a match here isn't written down anywhere. This is a training base first: floodlit grass outside, an artificial surface under the roof of the indoor Dome.

It sits off the E311, in the Al Hebiah 4 district, inside a development that only took its first residents in 2008. No plot number is on record — the location is given by the motorway. The academy came with the district: by the end of that year the Manchester United Soccer Schools operation on the site was reported as up and running.

What fills the calendar is youth football. The Dubai Intercontinental Football Cup brought more than 300 players from fourteen countries here for its under-13 edition in February 2018; the Dubai Schools Football Cup has run since 2014. Between those, professional clubs use the pitches in January — West Ham United came in 2014, Swansea City and Anzhi Makhachkala at other points — when the weather in Europe makes training at home impractical.

Dream Theater played there in October 2017, a month after the 2 Nation Music festival with Atif Aslam and Badshah. Oktoberfest returns to it each year.

Ownership runs through Dubai Sports City LLC, part of Union Properties. The original push behind the district came from businessmen Abdulrahim Al Zarooni, Abdulrahman Bukhatir and Abdulrahman Falaknaz, with Middle East Development.