Molineux Stadium

The ground takes its name from Benjamin Molineux, a successful Wolverhampton merchant and a distant relative of the now extinct Earls of Sefton, who in 1744 bought the land on which he built Molineux House, later converted into the Molineux Hotel. The estate was bought in 1860 by O.E. McGregor, who turned it into a pleasure park open to the public. Molineux Grounds, as it was then titled, offered an ice rink, a cycling track, a boating lake and, most crucially, an area given over to football.

In 1889 the grounds were sold to the Northampton Brewery, which rented their use to Wolverhampton Wanderers; the club had until then played at Dudley Road. After the site was renovated, Molineux became the first stadium used exclusively as the ground of a football team, and the first built for the use of a Football League club. It opened on 2 September 1889, and the first league game staged there followed on 7 September, a 2–0 win over Notts County watched by a crowd of 4,000. On 7 March 1891 the ground hosted the first of its six England internationals, a 6–1 win over Ireland.

England returned on 14 February 1903 and beat Ireland again, this time 4–0. Wolves bought the freehold in 1923 for £5,607 and soon set about building a major grandstand on the Waterloo Road side, designed by Archibald Leitch. A new stand followed on the Molineux Street side in 1932, and a roof was added to the South Bank two years later. The ground now had four stands, the arrangement that would form Molineux for the next half century, and the South Bank terraces were one of the largest goal stands in Britain.

In the days before seating regulations the ground could hold more than 60,000 spectators. England lost 2–1 to Wales there on 5 February 1936, and on 11 February 1939 a Football League First Division match against Liverpool drew 61,315, which remains the record attendance at Molineux.

In 1953 the club became one of the first in Britain to install floodlights, at a cost of around £10,000. The first floodlit game was played on 30 September 1953, a 3–1 Wolves win over South Africa refereed by Mr F Read of Willenhall. The lights opened the way to a series of midweek friendlies against teams from across the globe. In the days before the European Cup and the other international club competitions, those games carried real prestige, drew huge crowds and interest, and were often televised by the BBC. A taller set of floodlights was installed in 1957 at a cost of £25,000, as the ground prepared to host its first European Cup games.

Through the 1940s and 1950s the average attendance for a season regularly exceeded 40,000, coinciding with the club's peak on the field. England beat Denmark 5–2 at Molineux in a 1958 World Cup qualifier on 5 December 1956. In 1958 plans were unveiled to rebuild the ground into a 70,000-capacity stadium during the early 1960s, but the local council rejected them. No major change was made at Molineux for another twenty years.

Molineux staged the first UEFA Cup final in 1972. The Molineux Street Stand, by then all-seater, failed to meet the standards of the 1975 Safety of Sports Grounds Act, and the club built a replacement behind it on land where housing had been demolished. Designed by the architects Atherden and Rutter, the new stand held 9,348, carried 42 executive boxes and was fitted with red seats rather than the club's traditional colours. Once it was complete the old stand in front of it was demolished, leaving the new one some 100 feet from the touchline. Named after the club's then president and opened on 25 August 1979 at the start of a First Division game against Ipswich Town, the John Ireland Stand was intended as the first phase of a complete reconstruction that would have given Molineux a 40,000 capacity by 1984 and made it the first completely rebuilt stadium in postwar league football. No other phase was ever built.

Plans unveiled in 1981 for further work costing more than £4 million, taking in five-a-side pitches, indoor and outdoor tennis courts and an eight-lane running track, were soon scrapped as debts rose. The John Ireland Stand had cost £2.5 million and had been one of the most expensive developments at any football ground in the United Kingdom; its cost plunged Wolves deep into debt, and the club narrowly avoided liquidation in 1982, when it was taken over by a group fronted by the former player Derek Dougan.

By the time Wolves slid into the Football League Fourth Division in 1986, only the John Ireland Stand and the South Bank terrace were still in use. Safety laws brought in after the Bradford City stadium fire had forced the closure of the North Bank and of the Waterloo Road Stand, which had become very dilapidated, and attendances had fallen with the club's decline on the field. There was no money either for repairs or to move the pitch, and the stadium fell into ruin. In August 1986 Wolverhampton Council bought the ground and the surrounding land for £1,120,000, saving the club from folding, while Gallagher Estates, working with the Asda superstore chain, agreed to pay off the outstanding debt on condition that building and planning permission was granted for a superstore. The stadium stayed in use, but the disused sections were never reopened.

Sir Jack Hayward's takeover of club and stadium in 1990 paved the way for redevelopment, prompted further by the legislation that followed the Taylor Report and outlawed terraces at Premier League and Division One grounds from the 1993–94 season. The North Bank terrace was demolished in October 1991 and the new Stan Cullis Stand was completed in August 1992; the Waterloo Road Stand came down next, with the Billy Wright Stand opening in August 1993; and the final phase, the Jack Harris Stand, opened in December 1993 on the site of the South Bank terrace. The renovated ground was officially opened on 7 December 1993 with a friendly against Honvéd, the Hungarian side that had been beaten in one of Molineux's most famous original floodlit friendlies. It was then one of the biggest and most modern stadia in England, though it has since been eclipsed by other ground developments.

In 2003 the John Ireland Stand was renamed after Steve Bull, the club's record goalscorer, and 900 temporary seats were put into the south-west corner as the Graham Hughes Stand, lifting the capacity until their removal in the summer of 2006; the seating returned when the club came back to the top flight in 2009. On 24 June 2003 Bon Jovi played to 34,000 people at Molineux, which made the ground Wolverhampton's biggest live concert venue. Two more England internationals were staged there in 2022, a goalless Nations League draw with Italy and a 4–0 defeat by Hungary, and the ground has also held four England under-21 internationals, in 1996, 2008, 2014 and 2018, along with European Youth Championship qualifying matches in 2005.

An extensive redevelopment programme was announced in May 2010, with a full planning application submitted that September and granted three months later. The first phase was confirmed in February 2011 and began on 23 May 2011 with the demolition of the 5,500-seat Stan Cullis Stand, replaced at an estimated £18 million by the contractors Buckingham Group with a two-tier stand seating 7,798 and carrying a megastore, museum, café and hospitality facilities. Its lower tier opened to supporters in September 2011 and the full stand on 11 August 2012, for the club's first fixture of the 2012–13 season, setting the official capacity at 31,700. The second phase, a rebuilding of the Steve Bull Stand, was postponed, and in January 2013 the owner Steve Morgan stated that the club would prioritise its academy facilities. Relegation from the top flight in 2012 also saw the south-west corner dismantled, and it was not restored until promotion six years later. In August 2015 the Jack Harris Stand was renamed after Sir Jack Hayward, Steve Morgan's predecessor as owner, who had died earlier that year. The record attendance in the ground's present configuration is 31,746, set against Liverpool on 23 January 2020. The stands seat roughly 31,500, with a temporary seating area lifting the official capacity to 32,050, and the stadium is owned and operated by Wolverhampton Wanderers, whose home it has been since its opening.