Riverside Stadium

Middlesbrough played nowhere near the river for most of the club's history. The Riverside sits on the old Middlehaven docklands, and the move there in 1995 came because Ayresome Park had run out of room — hemmed in by terraced streets with nowhere left to expand. Taylor Woodrow built the replacement, with Arup handling the structural side, and the ground opened on 26 August 1995 with a 2-0 win over Chelsea, Craig Hignett scoring the first goal in front of 28,286 people.

It started at 30,000 seats. Three years later a £5 million job filled in the corners and pushed capacity to 35,100. The number has since come back down: a further £5 million refit ahead of the 2016-17 Premier League return added press facilities and TV studios, and the stadium now holds 33,746.

The naming history reads like a record of who was sponsoring what. It opened as the Cellnet Riverside Stadium, became the BT Cellnet Riverside Stadium in 1999, and has carried no sponsor name at all since 2002 — just Riverside Stadium. For one match in 2019, against Norwich City, it went by Captain James Cook Stadium.

The pitch is natural grass, on Dockside Road in the Middlehaven district — a name that, like the ground itself, points back to the docks the stadium replaced.