SchücoArena

The name came before the architecture. When the ground opened on 1 May 1926 it was called the Bielefelder Alm — an Alpine meadow — because that is close to what it was: an open field with earth banks piled around it, no architect's drawing behind any of it. The Alm-Stadion label sat on the ground for decades after the banks themselves were gone.

What replaced them took twelve years. Between 1996 and 2008 the stands were rebuilt one at a time, the work handled by Stopfel Architekten (BDA), a practice based in Bielefeld itself. The stadium stayed in use throughout.

Midway through that programme the name changed again. On 13 January 2004 a sponsorship agreement with Schüco International KG, another Bielefeld company, gave the ground its present title, the SchücoArena. So the ground carries two Bielefeld names in sequence: the meadow it was built on, then the manufacturer down the road.

The playing surface is a hybrid pitch — natural grass reinforced with synthetic fibres, the standard answer in German football to a winter that would otherwise cut a bare pitch to pieces by February. It sits on Melanchthonstraße, in the residential streets north-west of the city centre rather than out by a ring road, which is where a ground of this age tends to end up: hemmed in by the town that grew around it.