Minerul Stadium

Lupeni sits in the Jiu Valley, one of Romania's old coal basins, and the club that plays at Minerul carries the district's trade in its name — the same choice made a few miles down the road at Petroșani and Vulcan. The stadium's exact opening date has never surfaced in any record worth citing, but the ground's history runs back at least to 1920, when the local club was founded as Jiul Lupeni.

What is documented is the rebuilding: after years of decline, the ground was reconstructed and reopened in the 2010s, a rare piece of good news for a valley that lost most of its mines and, with them, the sponsorship money that once kept works clubs like this one competitive. Minerul means "the miner," and in Lupeni that is not a metaphor — it names the industry the town was built on.

The pitch is natural grass, laid within a fairly modest 5,000-capacity bowl on Strada Stadionului. Attendance records for football here are thin; the only crowd figure on file, around 15,000, belongs to a concert rather than a match, which says something about how the ground gets used outside the football calendar.