De Meer Stadion & Johan Cruyff Arena

Ajax began planning a new ground in 1974, when a stadium shared with FC Amsterdam in the Bijlmermeer was dropped on cost. De Meer was far too small for most of Ajax's games, and since the late 1960s the club had moved its most important matches to the Olympisch Stadion. Amsterdam's bid for the 1992 Summer Olympics produced a 1986 design for a stadium with a pitch and an athletics track at Strandvliet in Amsterdam Zuidoost; the Games went to Barcelona that October and those plans were abandoned.

The Stichting Amsterdam Sportstad, founded in 1987, drew up a 55,000-seat all-seated scheme, and a 1990 design merged the earlier plans under a fixed roof; the track was then dropped, the capacity cut to 50,000 and the roof made retractable. Objections from neighbouring municipalities and private parties were dismissed by the Raad van State in the early 1990s, the city authorised the scheme in 1992 together with a Transferium for drivers changing to public transport, and the building permit followed in 1993.

The first pile went in on 26 November 1993, and the work by Ballast Nedam and Royal BAM Group took almost three years, reaching its highest point on 24 February 1995 when the roof structure was raised. Rob Schuurman designed the arena with co-architect Sjoerd Soeters of PPHP after a ten-year design phase, and for a project of that size it was delivered within budget, at the equivalent of €140 million in the guilders of the day. The two roof halves, together weighing 520 tonnes, close in eighteen minutes. Pairing that roof with grass caused trouble at once: the turf would not grow in the shade and was replaced 45 times in the first ten years.

Queen Beatrix opened the stadium on 14 August 1996 by letting a curtain fall to reveal De Zee (The Sea), a painting of 80 by 126 metres carrying two-dimensional ships for the Eredivisie clubs, while Trijntje Oosterhuis sang the hymn De Zee, written for the ceremony by John Ewbank. An eight-day torch relay of 375 runners crossed 1,400 km of the Netherlands, Johan Cruyff carrying the first leg out of De Meer and Frank Rijkaard the last into the new ground. The inaugural friendly against Milan was lost 0-3, Dejan Savićević scoring the first goal there; Kiki Musampa got the first Ajax goal on 21 August 1996, against NAC.

Real Madrid beat Juventus 1-0 in the 1998 Champions League final here on a Predrag Mijatović goal, and Chelsea beat Benfica 2-1 in the 2013 Europa League final. Euro 2000, co-hosted with Belgium, brought three group games, a quarter-final and a semi-final; Euro 2020, postponed to 2021 by the COVID-19 pandemic, brought three group games and a round-of-16 tie played to smaller crowds. The Amsterdam Admirals of NFL Europe played over 50 matches here between 1997 and 2007, when the NFL ended its European competition. Ajax's women's team began playing here regularly in 2023, and their 2023-24 Champions League quarter-final against Chelsea drew 35,991, a record for a women's football match in the Netherlands.

The farewell ceremony for André Hazes was held here on 27 September 2004. De Toppers have given an annual concert run since 2005 and, with more than fifty sold-out shows, have performed here more often than any other act.

Calls to name the stadium after Cruyff went up before it opened, but the city government of the day commemorated only the dead in that way. He died in March 2016, and on 25 April 2017, the day he would have turned 70, a letter of intent was signed under pressure from mayor Eberhard van der Laan to complete the change within six months. A date of 25 October 2017 was announced that August, then abandoned: compensation for lost income had to be settled, shares transferred from the municipality to Ajax, and the family consulted. A sponsor had been due to pay €20 million of a €50 million Euro 2020 refit agreed in 2015 in exchange for its name on the ground; the Cruyff name would forfeit that €20 million unless a compromise linked the two.

Frank Rijkaard and the children of Van der Laan, who had died in the interval, presented the name Johan Cruijff ArenA and a new logo on 25 April 2018, and it took effect with the 2018-19 season; the family chose the Dutch spelling Cruijff "to stay close to the Dutch Johan". The ground holds 56,120 for football, the largest football stadium in the Netherlands, and up to 71,000 for a centre-stage concert. It is one of two Dutch grounds rated Category 4 by UEFA, with Rotterdam's Feijenoord Stadion, and the Ajax Museum sits inside it.