Stadion Kranjčevićeva

The pitch here is not the one it started with. What was once ordinary grass has been given over to a hybrid surface, a small technical fact that says something larger: this ground has been kept in working order rather than left to age quietly, even as its future stays unsettled.

The name changed once already, and for a reason that had nothing to do with football. Built in the 1920s as the home of HŠK Concordia, the ground lost its club and its name after the war, when the Concordia was dissolved for political reasons and the site passed to a new tenant, NK Zagreb, becoming Stadion Kranjčevićeva. It carried the Universiade renovation of 1987 without much fuss, and picked up new stands and that hybrid pitch in 2018.

Its most striking afternoon had nothing to do with league football at all. On 28 May 1991, the ground hosted the first public parade of the Zbor narodne garde, Croatia's first professional military unit — a moment that sits oddly alongside the concert bills of Dire Straits and Fats Domino, and the wartime friendly between Yugoslavia and Germany in 1939 that still holds the attendance record here, 18,000 through the gates for a match Germany won 5–1.

What comes next is a rebuild, not a memory. Work began in 2025 to tear down and reconstruct the ground as a temporary home for Dinamo Zagreb and the national team while Maksimir is rebuilt elsewhere, with a target capacity above 11,000 and completion pencilled in for the end of 2026. Until then, it remains NK Lokomotiva Zagreb's ground, tucked into the city at Kranjčevićeva 4.