The Valley

Charlton Athletic had a nomadic existence in its early years, using several grounds between its formation in 1905 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The Valley dates from 1919, when the club was moderately successful and looking for a new home. Fred Barned, its honorary chairman, found an abandoned sand and chalk pit in Charlton but had not the funds to develop it properly. An army of volunteer supporters dug out a flat area for the pitch at the bottom of the pit and used the spoil to build up makeshift stands. The ground's name most likely comes from that original valley-like appearance.

The club played its first game there before any seats, or even terraces, had been installed: a roped-off pitch, with the crowd standing or sitting on the adjoining earthworks. That construction by the supporters themselves began an unusually intense bond between them and the site, one that persists. For six months during the 1923–24 season the club played at The Mount stadium in Catford, as part of a proposed merger with Catford Southend that fell through and returned Charlton to The Valley.

For many years The Valley was one of the largest Football League grounds in Britain. Its record league attendance is 68,160, against Arsenal in the First Division on 17 October 1936, and its record attendance 75,031, against Aston Villa in the fifth round of the FA Cup on 12 February 1938. Its highest seasonal average, 40,216, came in 1948–49, making Charlton one of only thirteen clubs in English football to average more than 40,000 across a season. The south stand, the oldest part of the ground and dating from the early 1980s, is named after Jimmy Seed, the manager with whom Charlton won the 1947 FA Cup.

Charlton were relegated from the First Division in 1957 and did not return until 1986, and that long absence from the top flight blocked much-needed renovation as funds dried up and attendances fell. In 1967 Len Silver, the promoter at Hackney, applied to open Charlton as a British League speedway club, with a track around the perimeter of the pitch; the application was enthusiastically supported at first but was ruled out on grounds of noise nuisance. The club was relegated to the Third Division in 1972 for the first time in the post-war era. On 31 May 1976 The Who played a concert the ground's records list as the loudest rock concert ever, 126 decibels measured 32 metres from the speakers.

By the early 1980s the club's debts had brought it close to going out of business, and its lowest seasonal average at the ground, 5,104, came in 1984–85. A consortium of supporters acquired the club in 1984, but The Valley itself stayed with the former owner, and the club could not finance the improvements needed to meet new safety requirements. Shortly after the start of the 1985–86 season Charlton left the ground altogether, agreeing to share Crystal Palace's Selhurst Park in the first official groundsharing arrangement in the Football League for 36 years.

In 1988 ownership of the club and of the ground were united again, and in a grass-roots effort that harked back to the original construction, thousands of supporters volunteered to clean the venue, burning the debris in a huge bonfire on the pitch. The great terraces, by then, were no longer regarded as either desirable or safe. Supporters proposed rebuilding the stadium completely so the club could return at the start of the 1990s, but Greenwich Council overwhelmingly refused the plans.

In response, supporters formed their own local political party, the Valley Party, and ran candidates for every Greenwich Council seat but two, sparing the two councillors who had voted for the new stadium. The party took almost 15,000 votes at the 1990 Greenwich Council election and succeeded in pressuring the council into approving the plans.

Construction of the new Valley began in 1991, and the club moved on from Selhurst Park to West Ham's Upton Park. The hope had been to return before Christmas that year, but the reopening was delayed repeatedly and came only in December 1992; Charlton marked it on 5 December 1992 with a 1–0 win over Portsmouth. The east stand followed during the 1993–94 season and was completed in 1994, the first development since the return; it replaced the massive east terrace, closed and prohibited from use since the mid-1980s, after the Bradford City stadium fire.

The upper tier of the west stand was added in 1998, after Charlton's first promotion to the Premier League; the west stand is the main stand at the ground, holding the club's offices, the directors' box and the changing rooms. The upper tier of the north stand, built during the 2001–02 season as an extension of the Covered End and still known by that name, was part of the work that took capacity to 26,500 after promotion to the Premier League in 2000. The north, east and west sides were almost entirely rebuilt in this way, and by December 2001 the ground held more than 27,000, in the second season of a Premier League stay that ran for seven.

The club had ambitions to take capacity beyond 40,000 by expanding the east side and rebuilding the south side completely, but those plans were abandoned after relegation from the Premier League in 2007. The all-seater record of 27,111 was reached six times in Premier League matches between 17 September 2005 and 21 April 2007, against Chelsea twice, Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool, West Ham United and Sheffield United.

The Valley staged the 2004 edition of the Unity Cup from 29 May to 2 June, contested by Nigeria, Jamaica and Ireland and won by Nigeria. On 21 May 2017 it held a charity match in which the YouTube group Sidemen lost 2–0 to a side of other YouTube personalities, the YouTube AllStars; the game, the first of three the Sidemen have played there, raised £210,000 split between the NSPCC and the Charlton Athletic Community Trust. On 9 April 2021 the club announced that the east stand would be renamed the Alan Curbishley Stand from the start of the 2021–22 season, in honour of the former player and manager, who held the job from 1991 to 2006, and to mark thirty years since his appointment.

Roland Duchâtelet, the club's former owner, kept ownership of The Valley when he sold the football club in 2020. His successor as owner of the club, Thomas Sandgaard, negotiated a lease letting Charlton use the stadium until January 2035, and that lease was extended to June 2040 by the club's owners, Global Football Partners.

In March 2024 Charlton announced that a safe standing area would be built over the summer; it went into the back eight rows of the Covered End Upper ahead of the 2024–25 season, with a capacity of 1,064, and the club has provisional permission for a second area in the Covered End Lower. Working with the Charlton Athletic Supporters Trust, the club also introduced one of the first youth-specific sections in the country. A hybrid pitch was announced the same year, paid for by a six-figure investment from the owners and a £750,000 grant from the Premier League Stadium Fund, and laying began that May; as part of that investment Charlton Athletic Women's Football Club began playing all its home matches at The Valley. The women's record crowd of 3,979 came against Leicester City on 23 May 2026 in a Women's Super League 2 promotion play-off, and the 2026 Unity Cup was played at the ground from 26 to 30 May, featuring Nigeria, Jamaica, Zimbabwe and India, with Nigeria champions once again.