Selhurst Park · Profile

The Lord Mayor of London opened Selhurst Park on 30 August 1924, and that afternoon a crowd of about 25,000 watched Crystal Palace lose 1-0 to The Wednesday, the club later renamed Sheffield Wednesday. The ground stands in Selhurst, in the London Borough of Croydon, in the south of the English capital. Crystal Palace have played their home games there since that day, and the club owns the stadium.

A former brickfield

Crystal Palace had spent years looking for a ground of their own. Talks over the Selhurst site began on 25 February 1919, and in 1922 the club bought a former brickfield from the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway Company for £2,750. The Scottish architect Archibald Leitch, who designed many British grounds of the period, drew up the plans. Humphreys of Kensington, a firm Leitch often worked with, built the stadium for about £30,000. The Main Stand, opened in 1924, survives from that original design.

Internationals and the Olympic Games

Selhurst Park hosted the England team early in its life. England played Wales there on St David's Day 1926, and the ground also staged several England amateur internationals. At the 1948 London Olympics it hosted two matches of the football tournament. The venue was used for other sports as well: bicycle polo in the late 1940s, boxing, cricket and, in the 1980s, music concerts. In 2024 around 15,000 fans attended Chris Billam-Smith's WBO cruiserweight title defence against Richard Riakporhe at the stadium.

Floodlights and stands

The first floodlights went up in 1953. Nine years later, pylon-mounted lights replaced them, and Real Madrid played under the new floodlights in their first match in London. The Arthur Wait Stand opened in 1969 and was named after the club's long-serving chairman; its lower tier became all-seated in the summer of 1990. The Whitehorse Lane Stand was redeveloped in the early 1980s and was roofed and made all-seater in 1993, with 24 executive boxes. The Holmesdale Road terrace was demolished in 1994 and replaced by a two-tier stand completed in 1995. In the summer of 2013 the Main Stand was re-clad in white and fitted with new seats.

Attendance records

The biggest crowd in the ground's history came on Friday 11 May 1979, when 51,482 spectators saw Crystal Palace beat Burnley 2-0 to clinch the Second Division title. In 1961 a game between Crystal Palace and Millwall had drawn 37,774, a Fourth Division record. At the other end of the scale, only 3,039 people watched Wimbledon play Everton on 26 January 1993, the lowest attendance recorded in the Premier League.

A shared ground

Selhurst Park was among the first Football League grounds in England to host two clubs. Charlton Athletic played there as tenants from 1985 to 1991. Wimbledon arrived that same year and used Selhurst as their home from 1991 until 2003, when the club relocated to Milton Keynes. For much of that period the ground staged top-flight football almost every week, with two different sides taking turns on the same 101-by-68-metre pitch.

Ownership and expansion

In 1986 Ron Noades bought the stadium from the club, and ownership changed hands several times over the next two decades. In April 2008 Crystal Palace were granted a 25-year lease, and in June 2010 club and stadium were reunited under the same owners. On 19 April 2018 Croydon Council approved plans for a new three-tier Main Stand holding 13,500 seats, which would take overall capacity to around 34,000. Work originally scheduled for the summer of 2019 was delayed, and the council approved the expansion again in August 2024, the year Selhurst Park turned 100.