Shohada-ye Mes Shahr-e Babak Stadium

Seventeen years passed between the first foundation work at Shohada-ye Mes Shahr-e Babak and the day the ground actually opened its gates, in Azar of 1403 — November 2024. Construction had stalled more than once along the way, held back by sanctions and the money problems that come with them, and a target opening date once pencilled in for early 2021 came and went without a ball kicked. What finally arrived in Shahr-e Babak was a 15,000-seat home for Mes Shahr-e Babak F.C., named, as so many grounds in Iran are, for the martyrs — Shohada means exactly that.

The site itself runs to more than twenty hectares, and rather than settling on one surface the club built for two: a pitch of natural grass alongside an artificial one, with training areas laid in both, so the venue can host football and other sport without the two competing for the same turf. That flexibility, more than anything else recorded about the place, is what separates it from a standard single-pitch provincial ground.

Kerman province had waited a long time for a stadium of this scale in a city the size of Shahr-e Babak, and the copper connection in the name — Mes means copper — ties the club and its new home to the mining industry that shapes the town's economy. Beyond the pitches and the seating count, little else about the build has been made public: no address down to the street, no record of the architects or the contractors who finally saw the seventeen-year job through.