Football Park
stadium in Adelaide, South Australia
Football Park is an Australian rules football oval and former large-scale stadium located in the Adelaide suburb of West Lakes. It opened in 1974 to provide a playing and administrative home for the South Australian National Football League (SANFL), the leading football organisation in South Australia.
The SANFL held its finals and grand finals at Football Park for nearly 40 years. From 1991 until 2013, the stadium (known under naming rights as AAMI Stadium from 2002) was the home ground of Adelaide and Port Adelaide in the Australian Football League (AFL).
After Adelaide Oval was redeveloped, AFL and SANFL matches moved to the newly redeveloped oval and the stadium grandstands were subsequently demolished. The playing surface was retained and remains used by the Adelaide Football Club and SANFL, with the area known as the Footy Park Precinct.
History
Ground was broken for Football Park in 1971, giving the SANFL its own venue after years of playing out of the Adelaide Oval, which was controlled by the South Australian Cricket Association (SACA). Due to ongoing conflicts with the SACA, the SANFL had wanted to leave Adelaide Oval and move into their own home stadium for a number of years, finally settling on the undeveloped swampland at West Lakes in 1970 (the same year as the similarly designed, but larger VFL Park opened in Melbourne).
The stadium hosted its first football game on 4 May 1974, a SANFL match between Central District and North Adelaide. The first goal was kicked by North Adelaide's Barry Hearl, but Central District won the game defeating North Adelaide by 30 points.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Football Park” is stadium in Adelaide, South Australia. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Football, Park and stadium, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2735925. Authority coordinates are -34.880, 138.496. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1974, 1991, 2013 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Football Park” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.