The oldest football ground still in active use anywhere in the world was built in 1804.
It sits in Sheffield, it holds fewer than 2,000 spectators, and it has been hosting matches on the same patch of land for more than two centuries.
That ground is just one of many across the United Kingdom that were standing long before football had fully decided what it was.
Several are still hosting professional matches today. Their histories are strange, rich, and worth knowing.
10. Anfield
Built: 1884 | Liverpool, England | Current capacity: 61,276
Anfield is one of the most recognisable football grounds on earth, but it did not begin as a Liverpool stadium. It began as an Everton one.
The ground was built in 1884 as Everton's home, and the club used it until a dispute with their landlord prompted a move across Stanley Park to Goodison Park in 1892. The two grounds are separated by approximately half a mile, which makes the split one of the closer ground-share breakups in football history.
Liverpool moved into the vacated Anfield and have occupied it ever since. More than 130 years of history have accumulated there: title races, European nights, famous victories, and the occasional moment supporters would prefer to forget.
The 7-0 victory over Manchester United in 2023 and the 4-0 comeback against Barcelona in 2019 sit more comfortably in the collective memory.
9. Turf Moor
Built: 1883 | Burnley, Lancashire, England | Current capacity: 21,944
Turf Moor has been Burnley's home ground since 1883, making it one of the longest-serving home grounds in English professional football.
The land itself has a longer history still. Historians note that the area was originally common ground where local residents cut turf for fuel, which is where the name derives. Cricket, rugby, and horse racing all took place there before football arrived and eventually claimed the site entirely.
The ground retains the qualities that make traditional English football venues distinct: compact stands positioned close to the pitch, a noise level that reflects genuine proximity between crowd and players, and a physical environment that carries the weight of its own age.
Burnley have risen and fallen and risen again through its many decades, and Turf Moor has been the constant backdrop throughout.
8. Cappielow Park
Built: 1879 | Greenock, Scotland | Current capacity: 11,589
Cappielow Park is the oldest football ground in active use in Scotland.
Greenock Morton have called it home since 1879, and the ground has retained the character of a proper old-school Scottish venue: steep terracing, an industrial skyline beyond the stands, and an atmosphere generated by supporters who have been watching football in the same spot for generations.
The ground has witnessed some considerable drama across its history. A title-deciding match between Morton and Celtic in 1922 ended in a riot, which gives some indication of the passions the venue has contained over the years.
While larger clubs have constructed or relocated to modern facilities, Cappielow Park has remained essentially true to its origins, which is either a limitation or a virtue depending on your perspective.
7. Deepdale
Built: 1878 | Preston, Lancashire, England | Current capacity: 23,404
Football has been played at Deepdale since 1878, predating Preston North End's status as one of the Football League's founding members.
The ground was already established when Preston completed their legendary 1888-89 season without losing a single match in either the league or the cup, a feat that has never been replicated.
Deepdale's history extends beyond football. In 1913, suffragette activists carried out a bombing at the ground, making it the site of one of the more unusual incidents in English football's physical history.
Between 2001 and 2010, it housed the National Football Museum, which attracted more than 100,000 visitors annually and displayed artefacts including the ball used in the 1966 World Cup final.
6. Rodney Parade
Built: 1877 | Newport, Wales | Current capacity: 7,850
Rodney Parade began life as a rugby ground in 1877, and for most of its history that remained its primary purpose.
It acquired a particular distinction in 1879, however, when floodlights were installed, making it the first sports venue in the world capable of hosting matches after dark. For a period of several years, it was the only such ground anywhere.
Football arrived more recently. In 2012, Les Scadding, a lottery winner who had previously worked as a mechanic, became chairman of Newport County and moved the club to Rodney Parade.
The ground now serves Newport County alongside rugby clubs Dragons RFC and Newport RFC, a multi-sport arrangement that gives it a character shaped by two different sporting traditions operating in the same space.
5. Stamford Bridge
Built: 1877 | London, England | Current capacity: 40,022
Stamford Bridge is older than the club that occupies it by nearly three decades. The ground opened in 1877, initially intended as an athletics venue. Chelsea were not founded until 1905.
The stadium's history encompasses considerably more than football. It has hosted All Blacks rugby, international baseball between the New York Giants and Chicago White Sox in 1912, a Women's Olympiad in 1924, motorcycle speedway racing in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and cricket involving the West Indies as recently as 1980.
Greyhound racing was also staged there for several decades, making it one of the more popular venues of its kind in the country during that period.
Chelsea's own story within the ground ranges from Champions League triumphs to the kind of defeats that supporters prefer not to revisit. The ground has accommodated both with equal indifference.
4. Field Mill
Built: 1850 | Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, England | Current capacity: 10,022
Football has been played at Field Mill, now known as the One Call Stadium, since 1861. Mansfield Town have used it as their home ground since 1919.
The ground has been updated over time but retains the intimacy of a classic lower-league venue. The stands sit close enough to the pitch that conversations between players are audible to those nearby, which gives matchdays a texture that larger, more modern stadiums rarely replicate.
The name carries its own story. In the early nineteenth century, a textile mill operated on adjacent land, owned by a family named Greenhalgh.
One of those family members, Harwood Greenhalgh, represented England in their first-ever international football match, connecting the ground's neighbourhood to a significant moment in the sport's early history.
3. Bramall Lane
Built: 1855 | Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England | Current capacity: 32,050
Bramall Lane opened in 1855 as a cricket ground and began hosting football matches in 1862. Sheffield United have been its tenants since 1889, making the ground one of the longest-running club-stadium relationships in English football.
The ground has seen Sheffield United travel repeatedly between the Premier League and the Championship in recent years, bringing visits from the sport's biggest clubs to a venue that predates the Football League itself.
During a Premier League season around 2019 and 2020, home supporters watched their side defeat Chelsea, Tottenham, and Arsenal at Bramall Lane within the same campaign.
The ground's record attendance sits considerably higher than its current capacity allows. In an FA Cup match against Leeds United in 1936, 68,287 supporters packed into the ground, a figure that reflects an era when terracing rather than seating dictated how many people a ground could hold.
2. Racecourse Ground
Built: 1807 | Wrexham, Wales | Current capacity: 12,600
The Racecourse Ground did not begin as a football stadium.
Built in 1807 as a horse racing venue, it served that purpose until 1864, when it was converted for football. Thirteen years after that conversion, it hosted the Wales national team's first home international fixture, a distinction that makes it the oldest ground in the world to have staged an international football match.
The ground gained a new wave of global attention following the acquisition of Wrexham AFC by American actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, whose involvement brought a level of international visibility to the club and its home that would have seemed implausible a decade earlier.
1. Sandygate
Built: 1804 | Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England | Current capacity: 1,665
Guinness World Records recognises Sandygate as the oldest football ground on earth.
Built in 1804 in the suburbs of Sheffield, it holds 1,665 spectators, including 250 seated, and has been hosting sport on the same ground for more than two centuries.
It did not begin as a football ground. Cricket was played here first, and the ground predates the formal codification of football by several decades.
When football eventually displaced cricket as the primary use, Sandygate became home to Hallam FC, one of the oldest football clubs in existence. It has remained so ever since.
There is no grandeur to Sandygate. There is no modern facility or architectural ambition. What it offers is something rarer: the experience of watching football on the exact piece of land where sport has been played continuously since the early nineteenth century.
The Oldest Grounds Outside the UK
Given that the United Kingdom is where football was invented and first organised, it is unsurprising that its oldest grounds predate those found elsewhere. Some notable examples from beyond the British Isles include the following.
Arena Civica in Milan, built in 1807 in the presence of Napoleon Bonaparte, was originally a horse racing venue designed to resemble ancient Roman arenas.
It is now home to Inter Milan's women's team. Carlisle Grounds in Bray, Ireland, dating to 1861, began as a cricket ground before becoming the home of Bray Wanderers.
The Mohun Bagan Ground in Kolkata, India, has served as a football venue since 1872. The Estadio Gran Parque Central in Montevideo, built in 1900, is the oldest stadium in the Americas and hosted the opening match of the first FIFA World Cup in 1930.
The oldest stadium in Africa is Cairo's El-Tetsh Stadium, constructed in 1917, which now serves primarily as a training ground for Al Ahly.
In Australia, nineteenth-century cricket grounds have occasionally been used for football, but dedicated football stadiums of comparable age do not exist in the same way.
Why These Grounds Matter
The grounds on this list are not simply old buildings that happen to still be standing. They are the physical continuity between football's earliest days and the game as it exists now. The same soil that received boots more than a century ago receives them still.
Football has changed beyond recognition since Sandygate first hosted a match in the early nineteenth century.
The Laws of the Game have been rewritten repeatedly, the commercial scale of the sport has transformed entirely, and the players who walk out at Anfield or Bramall Lane are separated from their Victorian predecessors by almost every measurable variable.
The grounds remain. That persistence is, in its own quiet way, worth something.