Gangneung HIGH1 ARENA

The venue opened in 1985 as Gangneung Stadium, and it kept that name through three decades and a rebuild for the 2015 National Sports Festival, when the Korean designation quietly shifted from a word meaning "sports ground" to one meaning "sports arena" — a distinction that never crossed into English, where it stayed Gangneung Stadium regardless. The current name only arrived in June 2025, when a naming-rights deal with the High1 Resort put the venue's third identity in forty years on the door.

The rebuild that gave the stadium its present form was handled by Gyeryong Construction Industry, working to a design from Heerim Architects & Researchers. None of that history shows on the pitch itself, which is natural grass and unremarkable by design — this is a venue whose story sits almost entirely in its name plates rather than its playing surface.

There is no dedicated club or venue website carrying the arena's own account of itself; what's known comes filtered through operator and tenant pages, which perhaps fits a stadium that has spent most of its existence being renamed rather than being written about.