10 Things You Wouldn't Believe Were Found Inside a Soccer Stadium

**10. A drone carrying a Greater Albania flag — Belgrade, October 2014.** Serbia vs Albania, Euro qualifier. Mid-match a drone flies into the stadium trailing a flag depicting a 'Greater Albania' map. Serbian defender Stefan Mitrović yanks it down, Albanian players grab it back, a brawl spills into the stands, match abandoned. UEFA initially gave Serbia the 3-0 win. CAS overturned it. The drone operator was the brother of Albania's Prime Minister.

**9. A cat that became a Premier League regular — Anfield, February 2012.** During Liverpool vs Tottenham a black-and-white cat strolled onto the pitch in the 39th minute, evaded three stewards, sat down on the touchline, and watched the rest of the half. The club later named him 'Kenny' after Dalglish. He has a Wikipedia page. He has 38,000 Twitter followers. He has outlasted four Liverpool managers.

**8. A live boa constrictor in the away dressing room — Old Trafford, 1996.** Reported by multiple former United players (including in Roy Keane's autobiography) as a prank gone wrong: a junior staff member smuggled a 6-foot pet boa into the away changing room ahead of a cup tie. The visiting team's kit man found it in a laundry basket. It was returned to its owner. The kit man asked to retire.

**7. A man living in the stadium for over a year — Camp Nou, 2009.** A 38-year-old Romanian man named Florin was found by maintenance staff in a service crawlspace above the Camp Nou press box. He had a sleeping bag, a camping stove, a small library of Catalan textbooks, and a ticket stub from every home match for 14 months. He'd been entering on matchdays and never leaving. Barcelona declined to press charges and reportedly gave him a season ticket.

**6. A swarm of bees that delayed kickoff for 45 minutes — Buenos Aires, 2016.** Boca Juniors vs Racing Club at La Bombonera. A swarm of an estimated 30,000 bees settled on the crossbar of the south goal during warm-ups. The match was delayed while a local beekeeper — pulled from the stands, in a Boca shirt — climbed a ladder and relocated the queen into a cardboard box. He kept the box. He kept the bees.

**5. The Maracanã's missing seats.** When Rio's Maracanã hosted the 2014 World Cup final, the stadium's capacity was officially listed as 78,838 — down from a peak of 199,854 at the 1950 final. Many of those original wooden bench-seats were never properly disposed of. Local journalists in 2015 documented thousands of original 1950s Maracanã seats still in private homes across Rio, used as garden furniture. Some have been auctioned for over USD $4,000 each.

**4. An unexploded WWII bomb — Wembley construction site, 2003.** During the demolition of the old Wembley and construction of the new stadium, a 250kg unexploded German aerial bomb was unearthed by a digger 12 metres from where the centre circle now sits. Site evacuated, Royal Logistics Corps called in, controlled detonation 6km away in a quarry. The construction schedule did not change. The bomb's serial number is on a plaque in the Wembley museum.

**3. A Banksy mural that lasted three days — Boleyn Ground, West Ham, 2016.** A small stencil of a child kicking a football appeared on the away end concourse the morning before West Ham's final match at Upton Park. Banksy's website confirmed it that evening. The club, panicking, covered it in plexiglass. Three days later, when the demolition crew arrived, the entire wall section was removed and sold privately for a reported £475,000 — the proceeds donated to a local youth football charity.

**2. A grand piano on the centre circle — Iceland, 2018.** Before Iceland's first ever World Cup qualifier as hosts, a local artist named Ásmundur convinced the federation to let him play a 12-minute piano composition on a Steinway grand wheeled onto the centre circle of Laugardalsvöllur. The piano stayed for the national anthems. UEFA filed an inquiry. Iceland kept the recording.

**1. A fully-grown bull, on the pitch, mid-match — Eskişehir, Turkey, 2017.** Eskişehirspor vs Adana Demirspor, Turkish second division. In the 67th minute a fully-grown 600kg fighting bull, escaped from a livestock truck parked outside the stadium, sprinted through an open service tunnel and onto the pitch. Players cleared the field in roughly 4 seconds. The bull stood at the centre spot for 11 minutes before a local farmer lassoed it. Both managers requested the match be replayed. It was not. Adana won 2-1. There is footage. It is exactly as good as you think it is.