Van Donge & De Roo Stadion

Excelsior Rotterdam have played at this ground since the club was founded, so the stadium and the team share a birth year, and neither has known any other home. That kind of continuity is rare in Dutch football, where clubs shift grounds as budgets and ambitions change; here the address on Honingerdijk has stayed fixed since 1902.

The name has moved around it more than the building has. Sponsors have put their mark on it twice — first as Stadion Stad Rotterdam Verzekeringen, then, from 2017, as Van Donge & De Roo Stadion — while the older, plainer identity, Stadion Woudestein, has since been restored.

The pitch tells its own small story of catching up with the league. Artificial turf went down in 2014, a practical fix for a compact ground with limited room for a groundskeeping operation. Last summer that was pulled out and replaced with a hybrid surface built to Eredivisie standard, the kind of upgrade a club needs once it settles into the top flight rather than shuttling between divisions.

At 4,500, capacity places it among the smallest grounds to have hosted top-division football in the Netherlands, closer in scale to an amateur club's home than to Excelsior's neighbours across the city. What holds it together is less the size of the crowd than the length of the tenancy.