With 5,338 new red and white seats, the Cardiff City Stadium will see its first 30,000+ game tonight. The Supercup between Real and Sevilla ends a year of preparation works.

Tonight at 20:45 (CET) Real Madrid will face Sevilla in the battle of Champions League and Europa League winners. Although banners advertising the game were installed within the last week, preparations for the game took much longer. The entire expansion of Cardiff City Stadium's east stand was planned in order to end for the game.

Photo: DJ LeeKee

Works on increasing capacity by over 5,000 seats began after the 2013/14 season. Cardiff City first mounted new rows of seating wherever possible within the existing stands’ layout, most notably in the corners. This allowed to increase capacity to 27,748 by autumn last year.

At the same time prefab elements were being prepared off site and construction of the new east stand infrastructure began in early 2014. In order not to disrupt matchdays for fans, first the skeleton outside the stadium was built, only recently fully connected with the existing stand. Finally after the 2013/14 season roof was taken off over the east side and new one covered both the lower and new upper tiers.

According to the club, current capacity is just short of 33,500 seats. However, adding together all the numbers given by Cardiff City beforehand we come up with 32,898 seats.

Exact numbers aside, many fans are displeased with what they saw as the new expansion received its outer cladding and seats. Despite having promised to keep the stadium blue, owner Vincent Tan now has a partially red section at Cardiff City Stadium.

Photo: DJ LeeKee