Where the Sputnik stadium used to stand there is a housing block, Orbita’s pitch is now wasteland and the old Voskhod ground, named after a space rocket, is crumbling into ruin.
These are just some of the old football arenas in Samara, the Russian World Cup host city that is most famous for helping drive the Soviet Union’s space race with the United States.
About 1,000km south east of Moscow on the Volga river, Samara has so far hosted three World Cup matches, including Uruguay’s win over Russia on Monday.
But way back when, Samara’s factories built the rocket that in 1961 propelled Yuri Gagarin into orbit as the first man in space.
It is a city of about 1.2m people and is still home to Russia’s aerospace and aviation industries. But since the collapse of Communism in 1991, the teams that used to represent its factories – and the places where they used to play – have been disappearing.
Take Voskhod. It means sunrise or dawn but was also the name of a series of rockets that launched the Zenit reconnaissance satellites that observed western powers during the Cold War.
And it was also the name given to Soviet space engineering company Motorostroitel’s factory team. Motorostroitel is now part of a new bigger enterprise, JSC Kuznetsov. They still make rocket engines but they no longer play football.
Company headquarters on Zavodskaya Shosse (Factory Road) are about 200m from where Voskhod used to play.
Walking past a pile of dumped rubbish, an abandoned car and out onto long grass, you see it – one crumbling concrete stand, covered in broken glass, weeds and shrubs.
There are goalposts, a few kids kicking a ball around, others chasing each other on broken ground and a couple of guys drinking beer while they contemplate the enormous tower block rising opposite.
A couple of metro stops away – on the way from the centre you pass stations called Sovetskaya, Sportivnaya, Gagarinskaya and Pobeda (victory) – I find the old Orbita stadium, round the back of a brand new leisure centre.
All that remains is the rough outline of a pitch and the concrete steps climbing up to where once there would have been an entrance. Now they lead you up onto a raised stretch of rubble and wilderness. A father is helping his two young children fly mechanical planes that racket through the sky, round in circles above two pairs of badly bent goalposts.