San Mamés Stadium

Athletic Club spent most of its history at the old San Mamés, a ground built in 1913 and remodelled several times, the last big rebuilding coming in 1982 for that year's World Cup. During the 1990s the club began to consider a replacement, because the old ground was becoming obsolete and its safety and access arrangements were no longer adequate, while UEFA's requirements grew stricter with each round, among them the removal of standing terraces and better access for disabled spectators.

Bilbao was rebuilding itself in the same decade and was looking for a project for Abandoibarra on the bank of the estuary. Santiago Calatrava proposed a new football ground there and produced a preliminary design, but the city council did not want a stadium in that district. Norman Foster then proposed the site of the old trade fair, with a 55,000-capacity ground and a shopping centre and offices beneath the stands; that came to nothing on architectural grounds. In the early 2000s the club president Javier Uria began to treat the trade fair site seriously and put the idea to the compromisario members at the annual general assembly, who approved it.

From 2004 the board under Fernando Lamikiz took the project forward. The chosen site was the old trade fair ground, occupied until 2003 and redundant once the Bilbao Exhibition Centre was built. On 7 April 2006 Bilbao city council presented the institutional agreement amending the plan for the Basurto-San Mamés area to reserve space for the ground, and on 28 November it completed the special urban renewal plan, which allowed a stadium of between 50,000 and 55,000 seats covering a footprint of 29,634 square metres against the old ground's 21,500. It was agreed that the new stadium would be built without closing the existing one, and that it would share the old fair site with a new campus for the University of the Basque Country. Demolition of the trade fair began on 28 December 2006 and ran to October 2007, slowed by the careful separation of materials for recycling.

On 19 January 2007 the company San Mamés Barria was founded by Athletic Club, the savings bank Bilbao Bizkaia Kutxa and the Biscay provincial council, which were to own the new ground: the club and the provincial council would provide the land and part of the cost, the bank the remainder and the financing arrangements. The basic design was presented on 7 March 2007. César Azcárate, the architect at ACXT-Idom, described an outer skin of glass scales held on a metal net, permanently lit in the manner of the Allianz Arena in Munich, red and white on match days and flashing from spotlights on the facade whenever Athletic scored. That stadium was to hold 56,000 in three tiers with a smaller fourth carrying more than a hundred VIP boxes. An extraordinary general assembly on 23 March 2007 approved the build, with seventy per cent of the compromisario members in favour.

From 2008 the economic crisis held the project up and then forced a complete redesign to bring the cost down. The revised scheme presented in 2009 had lost the third tier and the glass-scale facade, and the capacity came down to 53,000. Members were unhappy at how far the design had moved from the one put to the assembly, but the board, by then under Fernando García Macua, carried on. The first stone was laid at noon on 26 May 2010 in front of the Lehendakari of the Basque Country, Patxi López, the mayor of Bilbao, Iñaki Azkuna, the president of the Spanish football federation, Ángel María Villar, and García Macua himself. A piece of turf and a brick from the facade of the old ground were carried across to the site by a human chain that took in Iribar, Larrazábal, Iturraspe and Muniain along with members of the youth system, the women's team, the reserve team, and the club's oldest and youngest registered supporters. Ground works began on 25 June 2010; after a pause of several months the first construction phase started in March 2011 and finished in the summer of 2013 as scheduled.

The stadium cost 211 million euros, of which 52.6 per cent came from public institutions: 50 million from the Basque Government, 11 million from Bilbao city council and 50 million including land from the Biscay provincial council, alongside 50 million including land from Athletic and 50 million from BBK and Kutxabank. The public money came on the condition that the building would include facilities for general use, such as a sports centre. The European Commission was believed to be looking at the arrangement, but in late 2013 the competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, an Athletic supporter from Bilbao, confirmed that no case was being pursued.

The ground was raised in two stages. The two side stands and one end were built first, on the trade fair site next to the working stadium, and once Athletic could move in the old San Mamés was demolished through 2013, which let it reach its hundredth year before it came down. The final end was then built where the old main stand had stood. Athletic's first home fixture of the 2013–14 season, a 2–0 win over Osasuna, had to be played at Anoeta in Donostia-San Sebastián, the home of their rivals Real Sociedad, because the new ground was not ready.

San Mamés opened on the night of Monday 16 September 2013, at 22:00, 102 days after the last game at the old stadium, with the fourth-round league fixture against Celta Vigo refereed by Jesús Gil Manzano. The capacity of the unfinished ground was 35,686 and the crowd was 33,000. President Josu Urrutia came out with the captains of every team at the club, led by Carlos Gurpegi and Iraia Iturregi; the youngest of them laid a piece of turf from the old ground in the centre circle, an aurresku was danced at the mouth of the dressing-room tunnel, and Urrutia laid flowers at the bust of Rafael Moreno, Pichichi.

Athletic won 3–2. The first goal scored at the new San Mamés went to Celta's Charles Dias, who struck right-footed from the edge of the area in the fourteenth minute and beat the goalkeeper Iago Herrerín low; Mikel San José equalised a few minutes later, and Andoni Iraola and Beñat Etxebarria put the home side ahead before Santi Mina pulled one back. Atlético Madrid became the first visiting side to win there, taking a Copa del Rey tie 2–1 on 29 January 2014, and the first league defeat came on 16 February 2014 against Espanyol. The stadium was first used at full capacity for a Champions League play-off against Napoli on 27 August 2014, watched by 49,017, which Athletic won 3–1 to reach the group stage. The tradition by which captains visiting the ground for the first time lay flowers at the Pichichi bust, which stood in the old stadium near the directors' box, was carried over in 2013 to a place at the entrance to the players' tunnel.

On 19 September 2014 San Mamés was chosen as one of the thirteen venues for UEFA Euro 2020, with three group matches and a round of 16 tie allotted to it. Spain were to have played all their group games in Bilbao, which would have been the national team's first appearance in the Basque Country in more than fifty years, the old San Mamés having staged six of its matches between 1921 and 1967. The tournament was postponed by the coronavirus pandemic and the fixtures were then moved to La Cartuja in Seville, the Basque Government's health requirements having made it impossible to guarantee that spectators could be present. The Basque institutions behind the bid, the city council, the provincial council and the Basque Government, threatened to take UEFA to court over the unilateral cancellation. After several weeks of negotiation UEFA agreed to return the 1.3 million euros spent on organising the tournament and, on 16 July 2021, its executive committee awarded the stadium the 2024 Women's Champions League final and the 2025 Europa League final in recognition of what the bid had cost. Tottenham Hotspur beat Manchester United 1–0 in that Europa League final, the only goal scored by Brennan Johnson.

Supporters had complained since the opening that the roof left many seats exposed to Bilbao's rain. On 14 December 2015 the president, Josu Urrutia, confirmed that the answer would be an extension of the roof, and on 28 January 2016 he announced that Athletic would meet the whole cost itself. The work went to Inbisa Construcción at 12.6 million euros and began on 16 May 2016, the day after the last league match of the season; the completed extension had its first outing on 20 November 2016 in a 1–0 league win over Villarreal. It was estimated to improve the protection against wet weather by about seventy per cent, and the loss of sunlight on the pitch is made up by internal lighting modules that keep the turf growing. Azcárate appeared before the Biscay assembly on 29 December 2016 to explain why the extension had been needed, by which point the total was put at close to 13 million euros. On 21 November 2017 the extension won an international Structural Award in the long-span structures category.

On 5 November 2015 San Mamés was named the best new sports building in the world at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore, and in 2017 it was voted best stadium in the world at the World Football Summit in Madrid. Guns N' Roses played there on 30 May 2017, the first musical event at the ground, and that booking was why the stadium could not take the 2017 Copa del Rey final between Alavés and Barcelona three days earlier, a game it had a real prospect of hosting; the final went to the Vicente Calderón in Madrid for the fourteenth time, shortly before that ground was replaced.

The 2018 finals of the European Rugby Challenge Cup and Champions Cup were played there on 11 and 12 May, and Leinster's meeting with Racing 92 set the stadium's single-match attendance record of 52,282; both finals are due back on 22 and 23 May 2026. Muse, Berri Txarrak and Crystal Fighters headlined an MTV World Stage concert there on 3 November 2018 during the MTV Europe Music Awards in Bilbao. On 30 January 2019 a Copa de la Reina quarter-final between Athletic and Atlético Madrid drew 48,121 spectators, a Spanish record for a women's football match, which stood until 17 March that year, when Atlético and Barcelona drew 60,739 to the Wanda Metropolitano. The neutralised start of stage 13 of the 2019 Vuelta a España on 6 September took the riders on a lap of the pitch.

Athletic opened a club museum at the stadium in August 2017, more than four years after the old ground closed; among its exhibits is a stuffed lion, the club's nickname, won from the president of Alavés in 1984 after he lost a bet with the Athletic directors that the club could not follow its 1982–83 league title with another. Rail seats for safe standing went into part of the north stand in 2019 and were extended across the whole lower tier at that end as a singing section in 2022. For the club's 125th anniversary in 2023 the exact line of the old pitch's goal lines was marked out in the open ground outside, and a statue of José Ángel Iribar, who holds the club's appearance record, was unveiled there on 16 December 2023. The municipal sports centre built into the basements as the Basque Government's condition for joining San Mamés Barria opened on 19 July 2019 with more than 4,800 square metres of space and two swimming pools, although the government dropped the athletics track planned for the same level.

The stadium is owned by the San Mamés Barria partners, Athletic Club, the Basque Government, the Biscay provincial council, Bilbao Bizkaia Kutxa and Bilbao city council, and is operated by the club. It holds 53,331 seats, which makes it the seventh-largest stadium in Spain and the largest in the Basque Country, and Azcárate has said a further 2,000 places could be added. It carries UEFA's category 4 rating, the highest awarded.