Urlaubsguru-Waldstadion (Aplerbecker Waldstadion)

Aplerbeck is a district on Dortmund's eastern edge, and its stadium answers to a name few outside the neighbourhood would recognise: the Urlaubsguru-Waldstadion, a sponsor's label attached in 2020 to a ground that spent nearly a century known simply as the Waldstadion — the forest stadium. The older name still fits the setting better than the new one fits on a signboard.

It opened in 1925, giving ASC 09 Dortmund its first proper home after years without one. A hundred years is a long tenancy for a ground holding only 2,000, and it says something about Aplerbeck that the arrangement never outgrew itself — no expansion drive, no rebuild for a tournament that never came, just the same patch of grass serving the same club through the Oberliga Westfalen, five tiers below the Bundesliga sides that get all the attention twenty minutes up the road.

The pitch remains natural grass, which tracks with a stadium that has kept its character instead of chasing modernisation for its own sake. Schwerter Straße runs past the front of it, an address that places the ground firmly in the district rather than the city centre — a reminder, for anyone expecting a Dortmund stadium to mean one thing, that the name covers more than the obvious one.