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

Canada's largest open-air stadium was built for eleven days of Commonwealth Games and has anchored Edmonton sport for nearly half a century since. Commonwealth Stadium at 11000 Stadium Road NW in the McCauley neighbourhood, minutes from downtown, opened officially on 15 July 1978 after three years of construction, a 42,500-seat bowl completed on time and on budget for the 1978 Commonwealth Games, whose athletics events and ceremonies it hosted that August as 46 nations competed and Canada delivered its best-ever games. The Edmonton Eskimos - now the Elks - moved in from adjacent Clarke Stadium the same year and promptly won five straight Grey Cups. The bowl grew with its ambitions: a 1983 expansion for the Summer Universiade pushed capacity to 60,081, and the 2012-13 renovation that replaced every original red seat with wider green-and-gold ones settled it at 56,302 - still the second-largest stadium in the country. For decades it was famously the CFL's only natural-grass field, until FieldTurf arrived in 2010, and its guest list runs from five Grey Cup championship games to the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup, the 2014 FIFA U-20 Women's World Cup, international rugby and soccer, and the stadium-scale concert circuit. The 42-acre complex wraps the bowl with a recreation centre and fitness facility open to the public year-round, and the Stadium LRT station on the Capital Line sits at the gates - the transit access that makes 56,000-person event nights workable in a residential quarter. Old Clarke Stadium, the ground it replaced, still operates next door as the city's community and soccer field. Through green-and-gold football Sundays, World Cup summers and headline tours, Commonwealth has done what few Games-built stadiums manage: it never became a white elephant, converting an eleven-day athletics commission into Edmonton's permanent big-event room.