Northern Ireland

Called the National Stadium at Windsor Park, the home of Northern Ireland’s football team is known to most simply as ‘Windsor Park’. Work building the ground began in 1903, with the venue not opening until two years later. It’s named after the area in Belfast in which it is built, becoming the home of Linfield Football Club as soon as it opened. It’s not clear when exactly Northern Ireland began playing their games at the stadium, with the issue complicated further by the partition of Ireland that occurred in 1920. What we do know, and will go into more detail about later, is that the stadium in its initial form was best described as ‘basic’. The ground that exists today took its basis from the one that was designed by Archibald Leitch in the 1930s. It has undergone two major renovations, the first occurring in 1996 and the second in 2015. We’ll focus on Northern Ireland mainly here, given that Linfield have an average attendance of around three thousand and you’d therefore be able to get tickets to see them play at Windsor Park without much trouble.