hello and widen it is a beautiful spring day and we are back in the Czech Republic and this time we're in the gorgeous medieval center of burnor the second biggest city in the country and today we're going on a 15-minute walk north of The Gorgeous medieval Center into this slightly less gorgeous part of town because there is something big at the back of this car park should we just here no idea if we can get in here we go what we've come here to see is one of the largest abandoned football groun
ds in the whole of Europe but it's also the story of a man with a mullet who went from hero to villain a team who were ripped out of their home in the Heart of the City and a club Captain who missed the old place so much that he brought it back to life for one final match welcome to the study on zalu zhankami thank you this is what was once the biggest stadium in the Czech football league and the former home of local Club is until they were forced to move out in 2001. in the 1990s they used to g
et bigger crowds here than any of the Prague teams or anyone else really in fact these crumbling old stands still hold the record for the highest ever attendance at a league game in the Czech Republic when over 44 000 people squeezed in here on an October afternoon in 1996 so watch their table topping team bag a late equalizer against reigning Champions slavia Prague but only five years after that goal went in the ground saw its last competitive match the league had ruled that the stadium was no
longer up to their standards the owner could no longer afford to update it and sproyovka had to move out to a new temporary home two decades on they're still there some of the fans still dream of returning one day to what they call the lujanki first they'll have to find a way of getting inside it I think they've sealed off the stadium at Bowl itself apart from this that's a proper concrete Bowl isn't it the stadium was always a bit bigger than it really needed to be put it this way when it firs
t opened back in 1953 sproyovka was still in the Czechoslovakian second division so in order to get a big crowd down to the opening game they invited two other teams dinamo Moscow who were one of the best teams around at the time and featured several star players from the Soviet National side and check first division team Bannick ostrava who were available and an estimated 40 000 people turned up to watch easily beating the previous record attendance for a Czech football match and side note play
ing one of his first games for Dynamo that day was a promising young goalkeeper by the name of Liev Yashin it's fair to say sproofka hardly needed such a grand venue for their second division games but just like your first badly fitting football shirt they eventually grew into it this is very open this is where we saw the people from the other side earlier on yeah oh these are the Posh seats in the 1970s sprayovka saw their real Glory Days first winning promotion to the Top Flight and then going
on to become champions of Czechoslovakia in 1978 a title that they celebrated in front of a heaving crowd at the lejanki admittedly by the mid-80s they'd already been relegated back to the second tier and they were beginning to struggle financially but at the dawn of the 90s the good times looked like they were about to arrive again in the shape of this absolutely magnificent mullet it belonged to a man called lubemir Frisco better known to his friends as Bobby he was a local ice hockey Legend
from the 1970s but was now enjoying a second life as an entrepreneur running a chain of fitness centers and in 1992 one of his friends a guy called Carol Krupa who was himself a legend from the 1978's royalka team asked Bobby if he would be willing to step in with some cash and help out the struggling Club and if you've ever watched one of my videos before you might be able to tell where this is going sprayovka fans woke up the next morning to find that Bobby had bought the entire club and not o
nly that he had renamed it for commercial reasons and they were now called Bobby Borno next he borrowed some more cash bought a patch of land in front of the stadium and built a giant Leisure complex with a hotel restaurant Casino fitness center and what my source material refers to as a huge disco he called it the Bobby Centrum and just like the stadium next door it was probably a bit bigger than it really needed to be for the fans though it was a time of great optimism Bobby was pumping money
into the club new signings came in who improved the team and before long Bobby Bruno were challenging at the top end of the table home games in the mid 90s regularly attracted 20 or even 30 000 fans to the lujanki still not quite filling the place but pretty impressive for a league where the average attendance was only seven thousand unfortunately for the fans though it was all about to go very badly wrong Bobby had borrowed so much money to build his Bobby Empire that by 1998 he owed his credit
ors an estimated 700 million Czech crowns he had no way of repaying the debt and well you know what happened next the whole business collapsed there was no money available to repair the ground the club were forced to move out and Bobby ended up spending five years in jail with a lot of regrets these look like platter showers or oh urinals for sure yeah yeah now suitably graffitied everywhere and the current drama is that a lady has lost a dog in there somewhere yeah amen the team have now perhap
s understandably renamed themselves back to sproyovka berno but after two decades is there any chance they could ever come back here and fans could once again fill the stands of the lujanki well actually for one special day a few years ago they already did this is in 2015 he was the captain of sproyovka berno and at 37 years old he was coming to the end of a career that had seen him play nearly 200 games for his hometown Club but before hanging his boots up he had one last dream to play one fina
l match at the old abandoned Stadium word got around and suddenly dozens of fans appeared at the lejanki to help clean everything up volunteer workers came down to repair the cracked old concrete structure and someone relayed the entire pitch for free on the day itself 35 000 fans packed into the stands and they could have sold 50 000 tickets there is a video of it on YouTube it is incredible and I'll put a link in the description and since then schwansara has continued leading the campaign to t
ry and bring sprayovka back home permanently but eight years later it still hasn't happened frankly I've lost count of how many old newspaper articles I found saying a renovation is planned for next year basically the lujanki has had more false Dawns than a French and Saunders look-alike competition but fundamentally it's still here despite several attempts by the city to have it all torn down and replaced with apartments and despite transferer's campaign to get it renovated and brings royovka b
ack what's actually happened is neither of those things at least not yet I think that might be the check for please do not go inside but I can put my camera in right I'm not fluent but yeah but one thing has happened since that day in 2015. although the old concrete Terraces have fallen quiet once more the pitch itself is now back in use there are youth teams who play on the grass during the football season and in the summer they have live music festivals here and sorry wait there's a 1990s musi
c festival in this stadium in September I wonder if I can make it but sorry I'm gonna have to wrap up the video now because um are you all ready for this [Music] if you'd like to visit the legendary study on zalushankami it's a 10 minute tram ride from buruno Central Station plus a five minute walk and it goes without saying in its current state it is not the safest place in the world and any exploring is at your own risk but bear in mind the legal negotiations between svansara and the city are
still ongoing and by the time you're watching this video it could be a shiny newly renovated stadium and it's also possible the whole place might have been demolished but for now thank you very much for watching and I'll see you soon
Comments
I was the designer of all the lighting, sound and video systems in the Boby Centrum. It was nuts - 3 discotheques, a roller rink, concert hall, recording studio and a radio station. £1.8M contract. I had to live in Brno for about six months during the build and commissioning. This wasn't long after 'the wall' came down and we all assumed there was some great expansionist plan going on - German money in particular was pouring in. Alas it seems there was no plan. Boby himself was a quiet, small but extremely muscular man. It all went together reasonably smoothly and we got paid. Best gig ever. The Czech people were lovely and two of our crew eventually had Czech wives! The week of the opening we saw Metallica in that very stadium and they did their TV and Press in the Centrum. The 80s - good times.
This city was famously named during the great vowel shortage in the 11th century
The Tim Traveller is the only person in the world who can make me watch a whole video about an abandoned football stadium and really enjoy it.
More false dawns than a french and Saunder lookalike competition, is my new favourite line from a Tim video
Hello Tim, I was there in October 1996 during the match. Not as visitor, but as part of teams who supplied the boards with adverts around the playground. I spend all the game close to one of the gates. It was first football match I visited and I was shocked. The crowd was so loud...
I was just in Europe (I'm Australian) and because of Tim's videos, I made sure that I visited Urk on Flevoland. I also rode on the suspended train in Düsseldorf and saw the Deltaworks. Thanks for all the geeky tips Tim! Urk was a beautiful little town. They had a market on when we visited and my Dutch friend told me all about how the people there are a little... unusual.
Dammit, Tim. "You all ready for this?" Now that's gonna be stuck in my head all day. (Also, the URL for that concert...could generate some misconceptions.)
Isn’t it time you visited the abandoned railway station of Canfranc on the Franco-Spanish border? The one that looks like it should be a royal and very palatial château worthy of a place along the banks of the River Loire. Plus it’s very close to the Pyrénées so great for hill walking / mountain climbing for you too!
The part about how people volunteered to fix the place up for one last game for a player made me smile. That sounds really nice! I do hope they could permanently rebuild the place to become as good as it once was though. And oh... part 2? Interesting and exciting!
This is pretty surreal, I lived 10 minutes walk away from the place and I would have never guessed it's something you'd might visit one day. And here we are! Thanks a lot for the video, you clearly did your research and I'm glad you enjoyed the visit.
The story is even more tragic. There also used to be a hockey arena Za Lužánkami. Similar story. They just forced the hockey team to leave only about 2 years before the football stadium was abandoned (however unlike Zbrojovka the hockey team hasn't died because of it). Now after more than 20 years city leadership still keeps the entire area frozen to make people forget and once they stop caring they will sell it to unaffrodable housing developers. Petr Švancara planned to rebuild the football stadium to a football academy. His project was extremely popular and it basically became the number one on city's participatory budgeting website. But instead of getting the money it deserves (and has a right to) the city consideres it as "impossible" and they plan to demolish the stadium. Yeah I guess that expensive apartments would be more possible for city leadership members' wallets. Injustice. It's unfair and wrong in so many ways.
The Great Strahov Stadium in Prague is still used as a training pitch for the local club. Or should I say "pitches" as the main field holds more than 6 standard-sized football pitches. At a capacity of over 250,000 (only 56,000 seated though), it is the largest football stadium in the world, even if it has been over 20 years since it hosted a football match.
Hello Tim! Thank you for the video. If you would plan any next trip to Brno, just hit me up! Not only for the festival, but also for other interesting stuff in Brno and its surroundings.
6:19 I love that the dog is playing hide and seek with its owner 🤣🤣
"More false Dawns than a French and Saunders lookalike competition." I had to pause the video for laughing. Well played, sir. Well played. :)
I liked the reference to the newspapers that every year seem to be saying that "next year Zbrojovka Brno will be moving back to their original stadium." I've lived in Essex for more than 25 years and I think that for about as long as I've lived here Southend United football team have been saying they're going to move to a new stadium. They still haven't.
You have caused my dad so much pain 🤣. Because of your videos on our road trip round western europe, we went to the vennbahn and kneiff. He was confused about what was so special about them
I'm being kind of self-centered for my nationality but I can't help but feel like you're getting close to Slovakia and I'm excited for the prospect of that happening.
I particularly like how you introduce Boby with what everybody thinks of when you say "circus music", "Entrance of the Gladiators", which was, appropriately enough, written by a Czech, Julius Fučík.
Whaattttt... I was just in Brno and stayed at the crazy Bobycentrum hotel. That stadium is literally at the back of a car park! Such a good description hahaha thank you for bringing the rest of this story to light, which was such a mystery to me!