Stadion Branko Čavlović-Čavlek

Nobody in Karlovac calls it by the sign over the entrance. Ask about the ground and you get the old name back, Stadion 13. srpanj, a date that outlived the plaque changing over it. The rename came later, honouring Branko Čavlović, a player who came through the city's own clubs in the 1940s and wore the Croatian junior shirt before his career was cut short in 1955 — the kind of local reference a stadium name carries quietly, without needing to explain itself to visitors.

The pitch itself has stayed grass through every change around it, on Mekušansko polje, out past the built-up centre. For a ground opened in 1975, there isn't much of a paper trail on how those first decades played out — no headline match, no remembered opening night on record. What is on the books is the reconstruction, finished in the summer of 2009, and the way Karlovac chose to mark it: a friendly against Queens Park Rangers on 19 July that year, with the home side, NK Karlovac, winning 3-1. It reads less like a gala reopening and more like a club quietly checking its own ground still worked.

Twelve thousand is more capacity than a club of Karlovac's standing tends to fill on an ordinary weekend, which says something about what the ground was built to hold rather than what it usually holds now.