Windsor Park

Windsor Park takes its name from the district of south Belfast in which it stands. The ground dates from 1903 and was first opened in 1905 with a match between Linfield and Glentoran. In 1922 the final of the Ulster Schools' Cup, a rugby union competition, was held there.

The first major development of the ground came in the 1930s, to a design by the Scottish architect Archibald Leitch. The ground then had one main seated stand, the Grandstand, later known as the South Stand, with "reserved" terracing in front of it, and a large open terrace behind the western goal called the Spion Kop. A long covered "unreserved" terrace ran along the north side, with another covered terrace behind the eastern goal at the Railway End. In that format the ground's peak capacity was 60,000.

The seated Railway Stand was built at the Railway End in the early 1960s, and in the early 1970s a social club and viewing lounge was constructed in the corner between it and the Grandstand. In the 1980s the unreserved terrace was demolished and replaced by a two-tier North Stand seating 7,000. In the late 1990s the Kop terrace went the same way, replaced by a 5,000-seat Kop Stand. From 2004 to 2008 that stand was known as the Alex Russell Stand, in honour of Linfield's former goalkeeper and coach, a one-time Northern Ireland international, before reverting to its old name.

The ground held a group stage match of the 2000 Rugby League World Cup, and in 2005 it staged the final of the UEFA European Under-19 Championship.

With Windsor Park in increasingly poor condition, various proposals for replacing it were mooted. One was a multi-purpose stadium for football, rugby union and Gaelic games on the site of the former Maze prison; another was a national stadium built as part of a major leisure development at Sydenham in east Belfast. The Maze proposal was strongly protested by essentially all of the Northern Ireland match-going support, with supporters clubs arranging petitions, organised displays of opposition at matches and counter-proposals in a bid to block any move there. In September 2009 the Irish Football Association announced that its preferred option was to stay at a redeveloped Windsor Park. In 2011 the Northern Ireland Executive allocated £138m to a programme of stadium redevelopment across Northern Ireland, of which £28m was set aside to turn Windsor Park into a 20,000-capacity all-seater ground. The details released in 2012 described an 18,000 all-seater, built in phases originally intended to begin in the summer of 2013, with the Railway and South Stands to be demolished and replaced by new stands partially enclosing the ground, the North and West Stands renovated, and conferencing facilities and an association headquarters added.

Planning permission was granted in February 2013, the project costed at around £29.2 million of which £25.2 million was to come from government funding. Two months later Crusaders lodged an application for leave to seek judicial review of that funding, arguing that it breached European Union competition law and amounted to state aid to Linfield. At a hearing on 22 May 2013 the request was granted, the judge ruling that Crusaders had an arguable case that the redevelopment could be classified as state aid towards Linfield; the competition law aspect of the challenge was thrown out. In July 2013 Crusaders agreed to a possible settlement brought forward by the review; its details were not made public, though the club said it had the "potential to benefit the entirety of the football family". In September the sports minister Carál Ní Chuilín said she remained committed to the redevelopment going ahead as scheduled, having previously said she would not sign off the funding until the association resolved the "governance issues" surrounding David Martin's return to the role of deputy president. In December 2013, three months after work had originally been due to start, she signed off £31 million and the scheme was given the green light. Work finally got under way in May 2014.

In March 2015, after a Euro 2016 qualifying game against Finland, large cracks were found in the West Stand, the one part of the ground scheduled for renovation rather than replacement. The area around it had to be sealed off, and the 2015 Irish Cup final was moved to The Oval. The preliminary structural report delivered to the Irish Football Association recommended that the damaged stand be demolished. Accepting it, the association confirmed that the West Stand would come down in time to ensure the safety of the ground for Northern Ireland's qualifier against Romania on 10 June, and said the redevelopment would be accelerated so that the stadium could meet its planned capacity of 10,000 for that game. Plans for a new West Stand, paid for by the insurance on the old one, were approved in November 2015, the replacement intended to be ready for Northern Ireland's World Cup qualifier against San Marino in October 2016.

The UEFA Executive Committee, meeting in Ljubljana on 24 September 2019, selected Windsor Park to host the 2021 UEFA Super Cup. The match was played on 11 August 2021 between Chelsea, winners of the 2020–21 UEFA Champions League, and Villarreal, winners of the 2020–21 UEFA Europa League, and was settled by a penalty shoot-out in Chelsea's favour. The final of the UEFA European Under-19 Championship returned to the ground in 2024. In the 2023–24 league season Linfield drew an average home attendance of 3,126, the highest in the Northern Ireland league; the Northern Ireland national team drew an average of 17,504 across the 2023 calendar year.

On 7 May 2025 the Clearer Group, a Larne-based drink manufacturer, bought the naming rights and the ground became the Clearer Twist National Stadium at Windsor Park. Linfield own the land the stadium is built on, while the Irish Football Association own and operate the stadium itself and pay Linfield an annual rent for the use of the land on behalf of the national team. The Irish Cup final is usually played there.