Sparta Stadion Het Kasteel

Sparta Stadion Het Kasteel the fortress-like corner towers and turreted stands were built to look the part when the ground first opened in Spangen in 1916, and the club has kept the silhouette through every rebuild since. Few grounds in Dutch football carry a design this deliberate — most stadiums built in the same era were replaced outright rather than restored around their original shape.

The pitch itself has had a more restless history than the walls around it. Artificial turf went down in 2014, a switch that put Het Kasteel at odds with the rest of the Eredivisie's older grounds, and it stayed that way until 2022, when Sparta Rotterdam returned the surface to natural grass.

Capacity sits at 11,026, modest by the standards of the clubs Sparta shares a table with, which makes the compact bowl feel full even on ordinary league nights. The ground has carried other names along the way — ENECO-stadion during a sponsorship spell around the turn of the millennium — before reverting to the one Rotterdam actually uses.

It stands in Spartapark-West, on the western edge of the city, still on the same patch of ground the club settled on more than a century ago.