Rugao Olympic Sports Center Stadium

The ground in Rugao opened in 2014 with 15,000 seats, built by a local firm, Nantong No. 6 Construction Group, to a design from the Jiangsu Provincial Architectural Design Institute, and for two years it had no professional club at all. Nantong Zhiyun was founded in 2016 and has played there ever since — the only professional tenant the stadium has known.

The change came in early 2023. Zhiyun had won promotion to the Chinese Super League, and the ground did not meet the league's requirements, so more than 24 million RMB went into it: somewhere between 9,400 and 10,000 additional seats, a 405 kW floodlighting system, and work on the turf. Capacity roughly reached 25,800. That summer, 19,368 came for the visit of Meizhou Hakka — the highest confirmed crowd for a top-flight match here.

The larger number belongs to a different sort of fixture. On 17 August 2025, 26,383 filled the place for a Jiangsu Super League tie between Nantong and Lianyungang, a provincial competition rather than a national one. By then Zhiyun had been relegated at the end of the 2024 season and were back in China League One.

Football is not all of it. The stadium hosted a rock concert in May 2014, and it marks the start and finish of the Rugao Marathon.