Stadionul Rapid-Giulești

The address gives it away before anything else does: Calea Giulești, the same street where Rapid's ground stood since 1939 — the club rebuilt on its own footprint rather than moving out to the ring road, the way so many Romanian clubs have done. The old stand, Stadionul Giulești-Valentin Stănescu, came down in 2019, and what went up in its place opened on 26 March 2022, keeping the neighbourhood name — Giulești — while quietly dropping the old man's own name from the title, a decision the club only settled on the year before it opened.

There had been talk of calling it Rapid Arena outright, a clean break, but that plan got shelved. Then came the sponsor: in November 2022, Superbet bought the naming rights, so most tickets and broadcasts now refer to it as Superbet Arena-Giulești, layered on top of the Rapid-Giulește name rather than replacing it.

At just over 14,000 seats, it sits on the smaller end for a capital-city ground, built tight and steep rather than sprawling — the kind of footprint that keeps a crowd close to the pitch. The playing surface is a hybrid turf, natural grass reinforced with synthetic fibre, standard for a rebuild of this age but a genuine upgrade over whatever the old Giulești pitch had to offer by the end.

What the stadium doesn't have yet is history of its own — three years old, still standing in the shadow of a ground that lasted eight decades. Whatever gets said about Giulești as an atmosphere, as a fortress, was earned on the site before this building existed. The new one has only just started writing its own version of that.