Arena AufSchalke Gelsenkirchen Germany - Football Ground

Arena AufSchalke, Gelsenkirchen, Germany

Capacity: Open

Weather Report

Arena AufSchalke History

The Arena AufSchalke, currently known as the Veltins-Arena for sponsorship reasons, is a football stadium with a retractable roof and pitch in Gelsenkirchen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It opened on August 13, 2001, as the new home ground of FC Schalke 04. The stadium has a capacity of 62,271 for league matches (standing and seated) and 54,740 for international matches (seated only). It hosted four matches during UEFA Euro 2024. The naming rights to the stadium were sold to the German brewery Veltins in July 2005. In the late 1990s, plans emerged to build a new stadium for Schalke 04 to replace the old Parkstadion. Following Schalke 04's 1996–97 UEFA Cup victory and in anticipation of the club's 100th anniversary in 2004, the contract to build the new stadium was awarded to the German construction firm HBM in 1998. The Veltins-Arena is located on club-owned land called "Berger Feld," near the old Parkstadion. Due to the presence of two mine shafts beneath the site, the main axis of the stadium was rotated to ensure structural integrity. The arena features a two-tiered layout with foundations made of cast concrete and packed slag from steel smelting.