Maracanã (Estádio Jornalista Mário Filho)

Few stadiums carry the weight of a single afternoon the way this one does. Brazil needed only a draw against Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup final, and with close to 200,000 people packed into the stands, Uruguay won 2-1. The result is remembered simply as the Maracanaço, and the official crowd of 199,854 still stands as the largest ever recorded at a football match.

The ground has spent decades shrinking from that number. Standing terraces known as the geral kept capacity enormous through the 1960s; a renovation for the 2000 Club World Cup brought the first plastic seats and executive boxes; work ahead of the 2007 Pan American Games tore out the old terraces for numbered seating and cut capacity to somewhere between 45,000 and 55,000; and the rebuild for the 2014 World Cup added a roof, reshaped the bowl into an oval arena and settled the current figure at 78,838.

Pelé scored his 1,000th career goal here, on 19 November 1969. Flamengo and Fluminense are the regular tenants now, with the Brazil national team returning for major occasions, though Vasco da Gama and Botafogo have both called it home at times. It hosted the World Cup final again in 2014, the football finals of the 2016 Olympics, and Copa América and Copa Libertadores finals since. The pitch is a hybrid surface, natural Celebration Bermuda grass reinforced with synthetic fibre.