Metallurg Stadium

The address gives it away before anything else does: Ulitsa Stroiteley — Builders' Street — the stadium went up alongside the Kuibyshev metallurgical plant itself, opened on 10 August 1957 with earthworks piled from the same excavations that dug the factory's shop foundations. Factory workers and Komsomol volunteers built the terraces by hand, and the first capacity, 8,000 on wooden benches, reflected that improvised start.

From spring 1976 the earth banks were rebuilt in concrete and steel, stand by stand — East first, then West and North — reaching 38,000 by 1981. What followed after 1997 ran the other way: wooden benches gave way to plastic seating through to 2005, and capacity fell in stages to today's 30,251. Metallurg switched its main pitch from grass to an artificial surface in September–October 2018, a cost-cutting move; the reserve pitch still carries natural turf.

For decades this was Krylia Sovetov's home ground, from the 1970s until 2018, when the club moved to the newly built Samara Arena for the World Cup. 44,000 packed in on 5 April 1997 to watch Krylia Sovetov lose 1:3 to Alania Vladikavkaz, a crowd well above the stated capacity of the day. The stadium never hosted a World Cup fixture — that fell to its newer neighbour — but it kept working, taking Krylia Sovetov's FNL fixtures during the 2021 renovation of Samara Arena and remaining base for the women's team, the youth side Krylia Sovetov-2 and the club's academy. t.A.T.u. played here twice, in 2001 and 2006.