Estádio da Gávea

The number that matters here is not the six thousand on the card but the twenty-five thousand this ground once held, before Estádio da Gávea gave up professional football altogether. Squeezed onto Avenida Borges de Medeiros in Lagoa, the stadium carries the name of José Bastos Padilha, the Flamengo president who pushed for its construction, and the first goal scored on its pitch belonged to a Vasco da Gama player, Nininho.

The ground grew once, in 1944, when new stands lifted capacity toward that twenty-five-thousand mark, and grew again briefly in 1994 with a tubular stand put up for matches against lower-division sides before it came down. Then, after 27 April 1997, professional football simply stopped being played there, and the capacity settled back down near where it started. What remains is smaller and quieter, natural turf still cut to full pitch dimensions, sitting inside what functions as Flamengo's social headquarters.

Work between 2023 and 2024 rebuilt the stands, not for the first team but so crowds could come back for the club's youth and women's fixtures — a stadium repurposed rather than retired.