Strawberry Arena

Close the roof over a pitch in Solna and the grass stops growing. That has been the running problem at Strawberry Arena since it opened: natural turf froze in the damp, still air of a covered bowl and had to be lifted and relaid far more often than anyone had planned for. In 2025 the ground began testing a hybrid surface, natural grass stitched through with synthetic fibre, under the men's and women's national sides and under AIK.

The name on the outside has changed more than the building. Drawn up as Nationalarenan, sold to Swedbank, opened as Friends Arena and rebranded Strawberry in 2024, it has carried four identities and taken no structural rebuild; the construction work since 2012 has gone on around it instead, the Målbron bridge and Solna station. The price had drifted before the doors even opened — 2.8 billion kronor against early estimates of 1.9 to 2.3 billion.

Football arrived on 14 November 2012, Sweden against England. AIK moved in the year after and hold the ground's football attendance record, 50,128 against GIF Sundsvall in November 2018, which is still some way short of the 60,243 who filled it for Taylor Swift in May 2024. The two other big Stockholm clubs, Djurgården and Hammarby, stayed on the far side of the city at the Tele2 Arena. Once a year the pitch disappears under a stage for the Melodifestivalen final, the Swedish selection for Eurovision.