Kuban Stadium

The concrete that went into the terraces at Zheleznodorozhnaya Street in 1960 replaced open ground, and the tenants there in May 1961, when the first match was played, still went by Spartak. Kuban Stadium then belonged to that club for the better part of six decades, right through to 2018, and stood in for FC Krasnodar too, hosting the newer side's home games for seven years before its own ground was ready.

A second tenant showed up under a different code: the rugby club Bogatyri played here in 2020 and 2021, and by then the arena had already outgrown two versions of itself. The upper tiers went up in 1980, pushing capacity toward 50,000, a scale the current 35,200-seat version doesn't try to match after the plan for a 40,000-seat World Cup rebuild was dropped and a renovation of the west stand went ahead instead.

The record crowd came from Europe, not from a derby — 32,275 turned out on a Krasnodar night in 2013 to watch the hosts beat Feyenoord 1-0 in the Europa League. CSKA Moscow, playing away from their own stadium in 2005, used the ground both as a temporary home and, that same year, as the place to show off the UEFA Cup after beating Benfica and Partizan. The stadium's most remembered night, though, had nothing to do with football: Kino played to a sold-out crowd here in May 1989, with Viktor Tsoi on stage.