Veste means fortress in Dutch. The word is a deliberate echo of Groenlo - Grolle in the old spelling - a fortified town a half hour southwest of Enschede that survived sieges in the Eighty Years' War and gave the world the Grolsch brewery in the process. When the brewery put its name on FC Twente's stadium in May 2008, it was buying more than advertising; it was attaching itself to a piece of regional identity. Grolsch beer is still brewed in Enschede. The fortress in the name is the brewery's own origin story, transplanted to a football ground at the edge of the Business and Science Park, next to the University of Twente.

FC Twente played for decades at the old Diekman Stadion in central Enschede. By the mid-1990s the ground was tired, its layout awkward, its location no longer ideal for the kind of expansion the club wanted. The decision came down to build new rather than renovate. The foundation stone for what was then called the Arke Stadion went down on 31 January 1997, and fourteen months later, on 22 March 1998, the new ground was open. The first competitive match was a 3-0 win against PSV on 10 May 1998. Chris De Witte scored the opening goal in the 14th minute, the kind of detail that becomes a trivia answer years later. The whole thing cost about 33 million guilders and was designed from the start to be expandable - new tiers could be added without tearing down the existing stands.

By 2011, the expansion plan had grown ambitious: a second U-shaped ring and roughly 30,000 additional seats. Construction was running through summer to be ready for the new season. When the roof above the short side collapsed on 7 July, the part where the second ring was already complete held. The structure that gave way was the roof itself, which Dutch investigators later concluded had been built without key components - a failure of parts and a failure of understanding. Two workers died. Fourteen were injured. FC Twente played the opening competition matches of the following season partly without a roof, the absence itself a kind of silence. The official reopening came on 29 October 2011 - a 2-2 draw with PSV Eindhoven. The monument was unveiled the next July, exactly one year after the men were killed, on the spot where the collapse occurred. It is impossible to walk into the stadium without walking past it.

Today De Grolsch Veste seats 30,205 in an all-seated configuration, with under-pitch heating, a promenade in place of perimeter fences, and the Enschede Kennispark railway station essentially next door. The Dutch national team played a friendly here for the first time on 5 September 2009 - a 3-0 win against Japan. In 2017 the stadium hosted the final of the UEFA Women's European Championship, the moment when Sarina Wiegman's Netherlands team won the title in front of a home crowd. On Eredivisie evenings the place is loud and red-and-white, the chants rolling out across the science park, the city's identity briefly compressed into ninety minutes.