Stade Vélodrome

Marseille resolved in 1928 to build a municipal ground of its own, the Stade de l'Huveaune being the property of Olympique de Marseille. A first scheme was rejected by the city council in 1930 on cost, and it took the award of the 1938 World Cup to France to revive the idea. In 1935 the Paris architect Henri Ploquin proposed an Olympic stadium with a cycling track and a sports palace beside it; budget limits left only the stadium to be built. The mayor of Marseille, Dr Georges Ribot, laid the foundation stone on 28 April 1935 on ground between the districts of Saint-Giniez and Sainte-Marguerite in the south of the city. Work ran for twenty-six months, shifted 25,000 cubic metres of earth and sank 240 piles ten metres deep for the foundations.

Léo Lagrange, under-secretary of state for sport, opened the Stade Vélodrome on 13 June 1937 before close to thirty thousand spectators in a ground laid out for 35,000. The programme honoured the track the name promised, with an athletics meeting and a cycle race: the Marseille rider Antoine Pugliesi won the Gustave-Ganay criterium and became the first winner of anything on the site. A friendly closed the day, Olympique de Marseille beating Torino of Italy 2-1, with Émile Zermani the first footballer to score there. The club moved over from the Huveaune, and on 29 August 1937, the second matchday of the French championship, its meeting with AS Cannes was the first competitive football played at the ground. The city took to it slowly. To Marseille this was the "stade de la mairie", the town hall's stadium, while for the club's supporters the real home of Olympique remained the Huveaune, which the club owned and whose terraces the supporters had themselves paid to build.

Two matches of the 1938 World Cup were played at the Vélodrome, and Italy won both. The holders beat Norway 2-1 after extra time on 5 June before 19,000, and on 16 June took the semi-final against Brazil by the same score in front of 33,000. Part of the crowd was made up of Italian antifascists who had taken refuge in the city, and they jeered a side Mussolini had described as the "soldiers of fascism" while railway workers sang the Internationale. Other sports filled the gaps: a touring American football party came through, Stade français beat a combined Lyon and Marseille side 4-0 at hockey in 1938, and lawn tennis was played on the ground in 1939. Rugby league had arrived first of all, the France team's international against Australia on 16 January 1938 drawing 24,000 to watch the visitors win.

The Second World War did not empty the stadium. It was requisitioned in turn by the French, German and then American armies, which left damage behind them, and sporting competition carried on there all the same: greyhound and motorcycle racing, pétanque contests, boxing bouts involving Marcel Cerdan, eleven-a-side handball and some Olympique de Marseille fixtures, though the club played largely back at the Huveaune. At the Liberation American troops played a game of baseball on the pitch.

After the war Olympique shared the ground with Marseille XIII, the rugby league club founded by Paul Ricard in 1946 and led by Jean Dop, which averaged crowds of 15,000. France's rugby league internationals drew 20,000 to 30,000: the team beat Wales 14-5 on 18 January 1947, met the Welsh again before 30,000 on 10 April 1949, and four of the five international crowds between 1948 and 1951 were full houses of about 32,000, rugby league being then the dominant code in the city. A match of the 1954 rugby league World Cup was staged there. The stadium took whatever else came, from the Harlem Globetrotters in 1951 to a round of the Formula One championship in 1953 and the Saturday cycling meetings run by the Marseille rider André Payan. On 14 September 1955 it held the first Challenge des champions, between Stade de Reims and Lille OSC.

The European Nations' Cup of 1960 brought the semi-final between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union to Marseille on 6 July, the Soviets winning 3-0, and three days later the hosts lost the third-place match to the Czechoslovaks 2-0. The ground could be as empty as it was full: a second-division fixture against US Forbach on 28 May 1961 drew 584 paying spectators, and another against the same club on 23 April 1965 just 434. That year Marcel Leclerc took over an Olympique de Marseille that had dropped into the second division and clashed violently with the member of parliament and mayor Gaston Defferre, taking the club out of the Vélodrome until his terms were met: a fixed annual subsidy, lower taxes and an end to the rent the club paid the city, which he called a "racket". He wrote to the mayor that "Marseille, c'est Chicago", a city known for its corruption affairs. The stadium sat unused until the council gave way in 1966, the year the club went back up, and Olympique's offices moved from the place Félix-Baret to the Vélodrome at the request of its coach Robert Domergue.

The first alterations came in 1970, when the old floodlights on the Ganay and Jean-Bouin stands were replaced by four pylons sixty metres high for evening events; at 1,200 lux the installation was reckoned the best lighting in Europe at the time. In March 1971 about 6,000 seats were added by narrowing the cycling track, putting demountable stands over it and lifting the cinder running track, which brought the ground to 55,000 counting the standing areas; those stands were taken out again for the world track cycling championships of 1972. The Vélodrome also held matches of the rugby league World Cups of 1972 and 1975, and ten stage finishes of the Tour de France up to 1967. Rugby league then faded from the terraces: the last international at the ground, France against New Zealand on 24 November 1985, was watched by 1,485 people.

Olympique went back to the Huveaune for the 1982–83 season while the Vélodrome was rebuilt for the 1984 European Championship. The pitch was entirely replaced and permanent stands were raised in front of the two bends, the cycling track that had given the ground its name disappearing during the works of that decade. The championship brought Portugal and Spain, who drew 1-1 on 17 June, and then the semi-final in which France beat Portugal 3-2 after extra time in a full house, Jean-François Domergue scoring twice and Michel Platini in the 119th minute; the 54,848 present set an attendance record for an international at the ground. Boxes were installed on the upper Jean-Bouin stand under the presidency of Bernard Tapie, and the surroundings changed with the opening of line 2 of the Marseille metro, which served the stadium from two stations, and the building of the Palais des Sports. The ground took political rallies too, Georges Marchais on 11 April 1981 and the Front national leader Jean-Marie Le Pen on 17 April 1988; the mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin afterwards refused all political use of a stadium that "must remain a place of consensus, a place for sport, culture, celebration and the unity of all communities".

With the 1998 World Cup awarded to France, a tender for a deep rebuild that would take capacity to 60,000 was launched in March 1995. The Chagnaud, Travaux du Midi and Buffi grouping won it, the architect Jean-Pierre Buffi taking the design, and the cost of 391.9 million francs was shared between the state and the local authorities. Little of the old ground survived: part of the Jean-Bouin stand, including the stadium's frontage, and the upper terraces of the Ganay. Twenty thousand cubic metres of concrete were poured on site and 32 kilometres of terracing built. The last match of the old Vélodrome, in February 1996, closed with former players among them Josip Skoblar, Jean-Pierre Papin and Mario Zatelli pressing their handprints into cement slabs now kept in the club's museum shop, while fragments of the demolished stands were sold in Olympique's shops. Banners went up in protest at a new stadium built without a roof, and a plan to close the upper tiers for a 40,000-seat league configuration was dropped, the club generally drawing more than 50,000.

The rebuilt ground held just over 60,000. The World Cup draw was made there on 4 December 1997 before 38,000 spectators and a television audience put at around a billion, the first time it had been held in an open-air venue, and France and Norway christened the new stadium on 25 February 1998, Laurent Blanc, Marcel Desailly and Zinédine Zidane scoring against Frank Strandli, Tore André Flo and Vegard Heggem. Seven World Cup matches followed. France opened their tournament on 12 June against South Africa and won 3-0 before 55,000 through Christophe Dugarry, an own goal by Pierre Issa and Thierry Henry. England beat Tunisia 2-0 on 15 June in a match without trouble inside the ground, while the centre of Marseille saw two days of fighting between xenophobic English hooligans and residents of the city. The Netherlands beat South Korea 5-0 on 20 June, Norway beat Brazil 2-1 on 23 June, Italy put Norway out 1-0 on 27 June in the first of the last-sixteen ties, and the Netherlands beat Argentina 2-1 in the quarter-final of 4 July with a goal from Dennis Bergkamp. The last of the seven, the semi-final between Brazil and the Netherlands, finished 1-1 and was settled on penalties in Brazil's favour.

Rugby union came to the Vélodrome late. The first test there, in November 2000, ended with France beating New Zealand 42-33; France then beat Australia by a point in 2001, South Africa in 2002 and England in 2003, before losing 14-24 to Argentina in 2004. Football's record crowd before the later enlargement was the 58,897 who saw Olympique beat Newcastle United 2-0 in a UEFA Cup semi-final on 6 May 2004. The 2007 Rugby World Cup brought two quarter-finals to the ground, and the Australia against England tie drew 59,120, the largest crowd the stadium had held for any sport. On 18 April 2009 Toulon moved their Top 14 home fixture against Toulouse to Marseille, where 57,039 watched a 14-6 win that counted in the club's successful fight against relegation. The stadium itself was little loved in the city, criticised for having no roof, for its flared shape and for its lack of acoustics, and nicknamed "l'Enrhumeur" by Rolland Courbis; schemes to cover and enlarge it had circulated since 2003, one from 2005 proposing 80,500 seats, and none was acted on until France's bid for the 2016 European Championship, announced early in 2009, pushed the city to move, UEFA's specification requiring a major rebuild. On 16 July 2009, as a Madonna concert was being prepared, one of the four winches lifting the stage structure failed and its sixty-tonne roof fell, crushing a crane; two people were killed, and the injured were counted as eight in some accounts and ten in others.

On 21 June 2010 the city unveiled the scheme it had chosen, to be built by Bouygues Construction through its subsidiary Arema at a cost of 267 million euros, met by the contractor alongside the city, the department of Bouches-du-Rhône, the state and the Marseille Provence Métropole urban community. SCAU architecture, in the persons of Maxime Barbier, Bernard Cabannes, Luc Delamain, François Gillard, Michel Macary and Aymeric Zublena, led the design with the Didier Rogeon agency as associate architect, and the council adopted the project on 12 July 2010. The aim was a ground meeting UEFA's highest classification, and the centrepiece was a roof of 5,500 tonnes of steelwork, reckoned the equivalent of 80 per cent of the Eiffel Tower. Work ran from March 2011 to the summer of 2014, with capacity held down to 42,000 until August 2013 and then 48,000, and the scheme took in a hotel complex, a shopping centre, a sports clinic, housing, offices and the rebuilding of the neighbouring Stade Pierre-Delort with a covered stand of 5,000 places. The stadium was inaugurated on 16 October 2014 with a capacity of 67,394, the second largest in France behind the Stade de France, and Olympique de Marseille began the season in it with a 0-2 defeat by Montpellier. The Cour des comptes afterwards put the whole cost at 551 million euros, part of it payable to Arema until 2045 for maintenance and for keeping the ground to standard.

The stands carry Marseille names: the cyclist Gustave Ganay and the distance runner Jean Bouin, who took 5,000 metres silver at the 1912 Olympic Games and was killed at the front in 1914, with the north bend named for Patrice de Peretti, the Olympique supporter who founded the Marseille Trop Puissant group and died in July 2000 at the age of 28, and the south bend for the Chevalier Roze, who cleared bodies from the streets, organised supplies and had a hospital raised during the plague of 1720. A plaque on the forecourt honours the victims of the Furiani disaster at the Bastia against Olympique cup semi-final of 5 May 1992, and in 2017 the forecourt itself was named after the club's founder, René Dufaure de Montmirail. The city of Marseille owns the ground and Olympique de Marseille has been its sole manager since December 2018, paying the city 41,500 euros a match plus 63 cents for every spectator above 25,000 and carrying the interior upkeep, the security and the hospitality boxes, which brings the average cost of a match to about 300,000 euros. In February 2021 the city of Marseille announced that the stadium was for sale, the mayor Benoît Payan giving as the reason that it cost the city too much to keep. The naming rights went to Orange under a ten-year agreement signed with Arema on 3 June 2016 and reported at 2.7 million euros a year; it ran to 2026 without renewal, the ground was called Marseille Stadium through the 2024 Olympic Games under the prohibition on corporate names at Olympic venues, and in July 2026 it took the name CEPAC Vélodrome under a seven-year deal with the Caisse d'Épargne Provence Alpes Corse.

The covered ground was ready for the 2016 European Championship, at which it held six matches including the semi-final of 7 July, where two goals from Antoine Griezmann took France past Germany 2-0; with the tournaments of 1960 and 1984 behind it, the Vélodrome became the first stadium in Europe to have staged three European Championship semi-finals. France's rugby union side played its first Six Nations match there on 23 February 2018 against Italy, the first home fixture of that tournament to be played outside the Paris region and a promise of the federation's president Bernard Laporte. From March to June 2021 the stadium served as a mass vaccination centre during the coronavirus pandemic. On 23 September 2023, during a two-day visit to Marseille, Pope Francis celebrated mass there before nearly 62,000 people and the president of the republic, Emmanuel Macron, with the South Winners raising a tifo of the pope and Notre-Dame de la Garde. That autumn the ground took two quarter-finals of the Rugby World Cup, its opening match marred when thousands were still stuck on the Jean-Bouin forecourt minutes before England played Argentina, every ticket having named a metro station that serves only half the stadium; the problem was put right for the matches that followed. With the Stade de France closed for work before the 2024 Olympic Games, Marseille took the France against Ireland Six Nations match of 2 February 2024 and the Top 14 final between Toulouse and Union Bordeaux Bègles, which set a new attendance record for the ground. It did not stand long: 66,818 watched Toulon play Toulouse on 10 May 2025, the highest figure recorded at the stadium for any sport, and a concert by Jul drew 73,158 on 24 May 2025. Olympique de Marseille's average league attendance of nearly 63,500 in 2024–25 was the highest in Ligue 1.