Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

Seven thousand dollars bought Edmonton a stadium in 1938, and the ground is still working nearly ninety years later. Clarke Stadium at 11000 Stadium Road NW was the prize of a decade-long campaign by Joseph A. Clarke, the pugnacious mayor who talked the federal government - Prime Minister Mackenzie King was a personal friend - into deeding the city a tract of east-central land for public sports fields, then pushed a stadium through council. The original build seated 2,040 on bleachers with dressing rooms and parking; floodlights followed in 1939, and the Edmonton Eskimos' first night game under them returned the city 16 percent of an 800-dollar gate. The stadium grew into the city's football heart, expanding to roughly 20,000 spartan seats across two grandstands as the Eskimos - now the Elks - made it their home from 1949 to 1978, an era when a quarter bought a Knothole Gang ticket and the club built the dynasty that defined Canadian football. The 1978 Commonwealth Games changed everything next door: the city raised Commonwealth Stadium on the adjacent land, the football club moved the few hundred metres over, and old Clarke was eventually demolished in 2000 and rebuilt in 2001 as a modest 1,200-seat community ground with artificial turf. Soccer gave it a third life. After hosting the Drillers, Brickmen and Aviators across earlier decades, Clarke became FC Edmonton's home in the North American Soccer League from 2012; the Fath brothers added seating to 5,000 in 2013, soccer-specific turf arrived in 2014, and a 2019 renovation for the Canadian Premier League's first season brought permanent stands behind both goals and 5,148 seats, since grown to about 6,000. The Edmonton Wildcats and Huskies of junior football share the calendar. Sitting almost dead-centre in the city beside Stadium station on the Capital Line LRT, in the shadow of the 56,000-seat giant it made necessary, Clarke Stadium remains what Fighting Joe Clarke intended - Edmonton's public field, in continuous service since the Depression.