Letzigrund

Zurich pulled down its old ground in 2006 and put up something almost nobody in Swiss football gets: a stadium built with someone else's exit strategy in mind. Letzigrund opened on 30 August 2007 already knowing it would host Euro 2008 within a year, and the seating tells that story — 26,104 for a Super League Saturday, but the bowl expands to 30,930 once the temporary stands go up for a continental tournament, and further still, past 50,000, when it switches over for a concert. Few clubs anywhere play inside a ground built to that kind of variable geometry.

The site itself has been an athletics address since long before the current bowl existed, and it still is — the European Athletics Championships settled here in 2014, and the ground carries a piece of sprinting history from further back: Armin Hary ran 10.0 seconds for the 100 metres on this spot in 1960. Underfoot, the grass runs on undersoil heating, which keeps the pitch playable through the kind of Zurich winter that would otherwise force a postponement.

Both FC Zürich and Grasshopper Club call it home, an arrangement that has not always kept things calm — a derby here was abandoned in 2011 after crowd disorder spilled onto the pitch. Off the football calendar, the stadium has drawn some of the biggest names in touring music: the Rolling Stones, Guns N' Roses, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen. In 2025 it returned to the European stage again, staging matches at the Women's Euro, a tournament it welcomed less than two decades after doing the same for the men.