Mas Monumental

When Mas Monumental went up in 1938, money ran short before the fourth stand could be finished, and Buenos Aires knew the place for years as "La Herradura" — the horseshoe — a stadium with three sides and a gap where the fourth should stand.

The gap closed in 1958, and the way it closed says something about the club that owns the ground: the fourth stand, named for Omar Sívori, was paid for by his own transfer to Juventus, a record fee at the time turned directly into concrete.

Ahead of the 1978 World Cup hosted in Argentina, the stadium went through a rebuild that stretched its stands and lifted capacity toward the numbers it would carry for decades after.

The site itself sits on reclaimed river land, and the pitch paid for it: the ground beneath the old natural turf never quite settled, and the surface needed constant repair. That problem, at least, has an ending — a reconstruction running from 2020 to 2023 stripped out the athletics track that had ringed the pitch since the stadium's early years, replaced the turf with a hybrid GrassMaster surface, and used the reclaimed space for new seating. The stadium reopened in February 2023 as the largest in South America, still carrying the name of Antonio Vespucio Liberti, the club president who bought the land in the first place, now folded into a sponsor's title on the marquee.