Dean Court

In 1910 Boscombe were given a piece of land by the town's Cooper-Dean family, and the ground took its name from them. The site was an old gravel pit, and it was not built in time for the start of the 1910–11 season; the club played at the adjacent King's Park until moving into Dean Court that December. Even then the club facilities were unready, and players had to change in a nearby hotel. Early developments at the ground included a 300-seat stand.

In 1923 the club were elected to Division Three South of the Football League and changed their name to Bournemouth & Boscombe Athletic. The first Football League match at Dean Court was played on 1 September 1923, when 7,000 watched a 0–0 draw with Swindon Town. Further ground improvements followed the purchase of fittings from the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, which allowed the construction of a 3,700-seat stand. A covered terrace was added at the southern end of the ground in 1936.

The club's record League attendance was set on 14 April 1948, when 25,495 watched a 1–0 defeat to QPR. The overall record came on 2 March 1957, when 28,799 spectators saw an FA Cup match against Manchester United, and a roof was added to the western stand shortly afterwards. The club also bought more land behind the northern end of the ground, intending to enlarge the stand there and build a leisure centre, but ran out of money during construction and abandoned the scheme in 1984; the half-built structure was demolished and housing went up on that part of the site. The lowest Football League attendance at the ground was recorded on 4 March 1986, when only 1,873 saw a 2–2 draw with Lincoln City.

The ground was completely rebuilt in 2001, with the pitch rotated ninety degrees from its original position and the playing area moved away from the adjacent housing. Because the work was not finished in time for the start of the 2001–02 season, Bournemouth played their first eight games at the Avenue Stadium in Dorchester. Dean Court reopened with a game against Wrexham on 10 November and gained its first sponsored name, becoming the Fitness First Stadium. It had been rebuilt as a three-sided ground with a capacity of 9,600, and seats were placed on the undeveloped south end in the autumn of 2005. On 24 February 2004 Bournemouth's James Hayter scored the Football League's fastest-ever hat-trick there, three goals in 2 minutes and 20 seconds during a 6–0 victory over Wrexham.

In December 2005 the club sold the stadium in a sale-and-leaseback deal with the London property company Structadene, which became the club's landlord. A temporary south stand was built in 2010–11 and removed during the 2011–12 season after attendances fell. The naming rights were sold to the Seward Motor Group in July 2011, and following Seward entering administration in February 2012 the ground was renamed the Goldsands Stadium on a two-year deal. Promotion to the Championship brought a 2,400-seat stand on the undeveloped end in the summer of 2013, named that July after the former club striker Ted MacDougall. Elton John had played a concert at the ground in 2006, and in 2013 both the England women's and under-16 sides played there.

In August 2014 the chairman Jeff Mostyn revealed that the club were looking at redeveloping the stadium rather than moving to Matchams. Its capacity of 11,464 was considered small even for a League One club, and until Luton Town's promotion in 2023 it was the smallest in the Premier League's history; the club explored a new permanent stand and filled-in corners to bring seating to around 14,000. The naming rights changed once more in July 2015, when the ground became the Vitality Stadium. In May 2016 the board decided against adding capacity for the following Premier League season, blaming "ongoing negotiations with the club's landlord to purchase the stadium", having previously said that "demand for tickets far outweighs our current capacity". In December 2016 the club announced it would look for a new site because of the ongoing issues over ownership of the ground, and in July 2017 confirmed it was seeking to build near the existing site in Kings Park.

Storm Eunice damaged the stadium in February 2022 and caused the postponement of an EFL Championship game against Nottingham Forest scheduled for 18 February. On 27 May 2023 Chris Billam-Smith, the hometown underdog, defeated Lawrence Okolie there for the WBO cruiserweight championship; local authorities granted a special licence to expand capacity beyond the standard 11,300 seats, and the sold-out crowd of 15,000 was the largest non-football audience in the ground's history. In April 2025 the chairman Bill Foley announced that Bournemouth had agreed to buy the stadium back from Structadene, its owner since 2005, and would redevelop it over the next two and a half years to around 20,000 seats, with the potential to go higher to 23,000, without needing to close the ground. Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council granted access to land at Kings Park in December 2025, and in May 2026 the plans were marked to be approved, with work beginning in July 2026.