Sportanlage Erlenstraße

Two grounds share a name and nothing else. Then, on 2 September 2020, the city reopened it after a 2.45-million-euro rebuild: new artificial turf with floodlights, running lanes, a beach handball pitch, a gymnastics lawn, refitted changing rooms. Mayor Daniel Schranz and the city sports federation's president, Manfred Gregorus, cut the ribbon together.

The Bremen ground, in the Neustadt district, tells an older story. BTS Neustadt traces its football lineage back to 1859, through the Bremer Turngemeinde tradition, even though the club itself only took shape in 1972 after a merger. The pitch there has stayed natural grass; plans for artificial turf surfaced but had not replaced it by the time these records were checked. Cup football has reached Erlenstraße in Bremen too — on 4 October 2015, BTS Neustadt hosted SAV Vegesack in the third round of the Lotto-Pokal.

Between the two, capacity runs close — 2,000 in Oberhausen against 2,500 in Bremen — and both fields sit under the same street name in cities that otherwise share nothing about them. What separates them is less the number of seats than what each has been asked to hold: a rebuilt multi-sport facility in one case, a lineage stretching back to the nineteenth century in the other.