Max Aicher Stadion

Salzburg has two Austria clubs and, in effect, two homes: the giant Red Bull Arena across town, and this ground in Maxglan, where the reborn SV Austria Salzburg plays after supporters rebuilt the club from scratch. The stadium itself did not go anywhere — it simply changed hands when the team returned to it in 2007, carrying the weight of that split with it rather than any weight of its own history.

The naming history tells its own story of a small club finding its feet: it has been known as the Sportzentrum ASKÖ Salzburg West, then the MyPhone Austria Stadion, before settling on Max-Aicher-Stadion. None of the changes came with much fanfare, and none needed to — this was never a stadium built to impress, just one built to have somewhere to play.

With room for 1,566 spectators, it belongs to a different scale of football entirely from the Bundesliga side across the city, and that gap is the point of the place. Matches here run on natural grass at Eichetstraße, in a corner of Salzburg most visiting fans only find because they are looking for it. There is no reconstruction story to tell, no championship it was built for — just a ground that opened in 1999 and has quietly hosted whoever needed it since, first Salzburg West and now Austria Salzburg's own supporters, standing close enough to the pitch to be heard.