Omladinski stadion

Every big Belgrade venue seems to carry a founding club's name and a rebuild story to go with it. The Omladinski stadion carries neither. It has stood on Mije Kovačevića, in the Karaburma district, since it opened in August 1957, and it has answered to the same modest name — the "Youth Stadium" — ever since, without a sponsor ever attaching a different one to the gates.

OFK Beograd have played there the entire time, and the ground still shows the shape of that long tenancy more than any single renovation does. It opened as a 28,000-capacity bowl of open terracing and simple stands. A reconstruction beginning in 2000 replaced much of that with 14,000 seats, but the terraces around it fell out of regular use, and the ground has never really recovered the scale it had at the start; visitors around 2012 found large sections of it worn down to a fraction of what the club could actually fill.

That contrast is still the stadium's clearest story. On 7 March 1973, 45,000 people packed in to watch OFK Beograd face Twente of the Netherlands — more than double what the ground could seat today, and a reminder of how far its capacity has drifted from what it once held.

The pitch itself is unchanged in kind, if not in company: a natural-grass field of 105 by 68 metres, with a separate artificial-turf training pitch added alongside it in 1999. OFK Beograd still call the Omladinski home, in the same corner of Karaburma where Karlo Kacl and his fellow architects at Sportprojekt first laid it out.