Riyadh Air Metropolitano

Football arrived here twenty-three years after athletics did. Atlético de Madrid's move from the Vicente Calderón forced a rebuild rather than a demolition: Cruz y Ortiz Arquitectos kept the original athletics bowl as the skeleton and wrapped a football stadium around it between 2011 and 2017, at a cost of 310 million euros.

The ground reopened for football on 16 September 2017, Atlético beating Málaga 1-0, and has changed its sponsor name three times since: Wanda Metropolitano, Cívitas Metropolitano, and, from October 2024, Riyadh Air Metropolitano. Two years after reopening it hosted an all-English Champions League final, Tottenham against Liverpool in 2019.

Capacity now stands at 70,460, and the record crowd was set on 29 September 2024 for the Madrid derby against Real Madrid — 70,112. The pitch is a hybrid surface, GrassMaster PlayMaster, laid in November 2018 and relaid in November 2024, the kind of maintenance detail that matters more to groundstaff than to supporters but explains why the playing surface has held up under a schedule that now stretches well beyond league football — the venue books stadium concerts, Metallica among them, on the weeks Atlético are away.