MHPArena

Stuttgart's first municipal stadium had been built on the Cannstatter Wasen for the health exhibition of 1914 and burnt down completely on 11 August 1914, after barely three months. Its replacement was built from 1929 to 1933 on the drill ground at Bad Cannstatt, to designs by the architects Paul Bonatz and Friedrich Eugen Scholer, and was raised as the Stuttgarter Kampfbahn for the fifteenth German gymnastics festival. A city match between selections from Stuttgart and from Nuremberg and Fürth drew 30,000 spectators on 25 June 1933, before the official opening. On 23 July 1933 the mayor of Stuttgart, Karl Strölin, brought the ground into use under the name Adolf-Hitler-Kampfbahn, and it apparently served as a model for the building of the Berlin Olympiastadion; it had the first grandstand in Germany with a cantilevered, column-free reinforced-concrete roof. It held about 40,000 at first, with 2,500 covered seats on the stand.

VfB Stuttgart made their debut in the ground with a friendly against FC Schalke 04 on 20 August 1933, and the first Stuttgart derby was played there on 21 January 1934. The first international followed on 27 January 1935, when the German side beat Switzerland 4–0. From 1935 temporary wooden stands raised the capacity to 70,000, until they had to be taken down again in 1938 on safety grounds. In 1939 the ground held the fight between Max Schmeling and Adolf Heuser before a crowd of more than 60,000, which remains a record for a boxing event in Germany. The stadium came through the Second World War largely untouched.

After the war the American occupation renamed the ground Century Stadium and later Kampfbahn, and troops used it to play baseball. On 10 October 1948 a match between the city selections of Stuttgart and Zurich was the first official international fixture played in Germany after the Second World War, and in 1949 the ground took the name Neckarstadion, after the nearby river. On 10 July 1949 the final of the German football championship between VfR Mannheim and Borussia Dortmund was played there before 92,000 spectators and passed into the record as the heat battle of Stuttgart. On 10 May 1950 VfB received Burnley, the first English club hosted by a German side after the war. The first postwar international played by Germany, against Switzerland, followed on 22 November 1950; the official attendance of 96,400 is the stadium record, though journalists estimated that more than 100,000 were present.

The opposite stand was extended between 1949 and 1951, and temporary wooden stands raised the capacity again to 97,500, which brought considerable safety problems; after repeated injuries among spectators at hopelessly overcrowded events, the Stuttgart council approved in 1951 the enlargement of the Untertürkheim and Cannstatt curves, and when that work was finished the Neckarstadion held close to 100,000. The European Cup final between Real Madrid and Stade de Reims was played there before 80,000 on 3 June 1959, and one of the two final matches of the 1962 European Cup Winners' Cup, between Atlético Madrid and Fiorentina, on 5 September 1962. The last championship final before the founding of the Bundesliga, between 1. FC Köln and Borussia Dortmund, was held in Stuttgart on 29 June 1963. To secure VfB Stuttgart's place in the new Bundesliga, which the club had already won on the field, floodlights had to be installed in the summer of 1963, and the city pressed the costly project through at short notice; the new lights were inaugurated in early August 1963 with a friendly against Partizan Belgrade.

For the 1974 World Cup the main stand was demolished and replaced by a new three-tier stand, the opposite stand was roofed, and an alphanumeric scoreboard was raised in the middle of the Untertürkheim curve. The ground now held 72,000, of which nearly 40,000 were seats. Four matches were played there during the tournament: Poland against Argentina, Argentina against Italy and Poland against Italy in the first round, and Poland against Sweden in the second-round group. The German Cup final was held in Stuttgart in 1967 and 1971 and for the last time in 1981. In 1976, after two years of preparation, the Neckarstadion staged the first open-air concert in a German football stadium, with the Rolling Stones among the bands; to prove to the city that the pitch would not suffer, reports had to be obtained from the agricultural university at Hohenheim.

In 1986 the ground became the first German stadium to receive a full-matrix colour video wall in place of the old scoreboard, which brought the capacity just under 70,000. The same year it hosted the European Athletics Championships, at which Yuriy Sedykh set a world record in the hammer; 300,000 spectators attended despite poor weather, and the city of Stuttgart received the Olympic Cup of the International Olympic Committee for the organisation. The European Cup final between PSV Eindhoven and Benfica was played there before 70,000 on 25 May 1988, and the ground took two matches of the 1988 European Championship, the group game between England and the Republic of Ireland and the semi-final between Italy and the Soviet Union. On 17 May 1989 VfB Stuttgart drew 3–3 with Napoli in the second leg of the UEFA Cup final, having lost the first leg 1–2, and on 19 December 1990 the ground staged the first home match of a united German national side after reunification. Klaus Fischer had scored here against the Swiss in 1977 the bicycle kick known as Germany's goal of the century.

Undersoil heating was installed in 1990. For the 1993 World Athletics Championships the roofs over the main and opposite stands were torn down and replaced by the membrane roof that still covers the ground, designed by Schlaich Bergermann Partner; new floodlights were installed and most of the standing places were converted to seats, which brought the capacity down to 53,700, of them 47,600 seats. The championships drew 585,000 spectators in all, the highest attendance ever reached at a World Athletics Championships, and the crowd was awarded the UNESCO fair play prize for its knowledge and enthusiasm.

With the rebuilding for the 1993 championships the stadium was renamed the Gottlieb-Daimler-Stadion by resolution of the Stuttgart council. Daimler-Benz had financed a covered walkway to the neighbouring Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle for ten million marks, and the public was told that the renaming was voluntary and that the company had attached no conditions to the money. In fact the city had concluded a secret contract with Daimler-Benz in 1992 providing for the name Gottlieb-Daimler-Stadion for an unlimited term, so that the ground could be renamed again only with the company's consent, and receiving in return about ten million marks towards developing the area. The arrangement was uncovered by the Stuttgarter Zeitung during an inquiry into EnBW, which had run a telephone survey among VfB supporters on whether the stadium should be marketed under a new name. That contract made the Gottlieb-Daimler name, indirectly, the first stadium sponsorship in the Bundesliga. The dedication honoured the inventor who had tested both the first internal combustion motorcycle and the first four-wheeled automobile in the 1880s on the road from Cannstatt to Untertürkheim, now the Mercedesstraße.

The upper tier of the main stand was demolished and rebuilt between 1999 and 2003, with forty-four boxes set between the two tiers, and in 2004 and 2005 the opposite stand received an upper tier of its own and two scoreboards hung from the roof over the ends, which raised the capacity to 55,896. Ahead of the 2006 World Cup the ground was given a green running track. Six matches were played there during the tournament: four group games, the round-of-sixteen tie between England and Ecuador, and the third-place match between Germany and Portugal. The Gottlieb-Daimler-Stadion was one of four German venues that kept their names for the tournament, the dedication to Gottlieb Daimler not being treated as advertising, while grounds such as the Allianz Arena in Munich had to remove all reference to their sponsors.

In July 2006 the president of VfB Stuttgart, Erwin Staudt, put a feasibility study for converting the ground into a football-only stadium to the city. Agreement was reached in early March 2008: the stadium passed to a property company held by the city and the club, the club putting in a silent contribution of 27 million euros, of which 20 million came from the sale of the naming rights to Daimler. The council approved the conversion on 8 May 2008 by forty-seven votes of fifty-six, with five abstentions. On 30 July 2008 the ground was renamed the Mercedes-Benz Arena at a friendly against Arsenal, and on 13 and 14 September 2008 the world athletics final became the last athletics meeting held there, the Württemberg athletics association having protested in vain against the conversion.

Preliminary work began in April 2009 and the ground was formally broken on 18 May 2009. The Untertürkheim curve was demolished between May and July 2009 and rebuilt with the Scharrena, a sports hall for about 2,000 people, beneath it, ready for the start of the 2010–11 season; the pitch was lowered by 1.30 metres by July 2009 and the two side stands each extended downwards by five rows. In the first weeks of the work eighteen undetonated bombs left from the air raids on Stuttgart during the Second World War were found on the site. The Cannstatt curve was demolished after VfB's last home match of 2009–10 and its new stand, with 8,100 standing places, was in full use from August 2011, the roof having been adapted by that July. The rebuilt ground held 60,449, and in July 2012 the cost of the conversion including the Scharrena was put at 77.81 million euros against a plan of 74.76 million.

The roof membrane, in place since 1993, had reached the end of its life after twenty-four years and was renewed in the summer break of 2017 at a cost of 9.75 million euros. In September 2017 the ground was chosen as one of ten venues for the 2024 European Championship, and from 2022 to 2024 the lower level of the main stand, which still dated from 1974, was completely rebuilt and the stand extended up to the roof supports, bringing new dressing rooms and a media centre; the capacity fell temporarily to 47,500 for the 2022–23 season. Costs planned at about 98.5 million euros rose in the course of the work, the outturn given as 130 million euros in some accounts and 139.5 million in others. The work was finished at the end of March 2024 and the capacity is 60,058 for league matches, reduced for all-seated international fixtures. On 27 June 2023 VfB Stuttgart, Porsche, the Mercedes-Benz Group and the management and IT consultancy MHP announced that Mercedes-Benz had given up the naming rights early and that MHP had secured them for an initial ten years, the ground becoming the MHPArena on 1 July 2023; under UEFA rules it was called the Stuttgart Arena for the 2024 European Championship, at which it staged four group matches and a quarter-final. On 24 May 2024 the European League of Football announced that its 2025 final would be played there, and in June 2025 a semi-final and the third-place match of the 2024–25 UEFA Nations League were staged in the ground. It is the only ground in Germany to have held finals of all three of the great European club competitions as well as matches of the 1974 and 2006 World Cups and the 1988 and 2024 European Championships. The stadium is owned by Stadion NeckarPark GmbH & Co. KG, in which the city of Stuttgart holds 60 per cent and VfB Stuttgart 40, and it remains the club's home. It was the first ground in Germany to stage 1,000 Bundesliga matches.