Stadion Meerdijk opened on 27 August 1977, on a street called Meerdijk that gave the ground its first name. The opening match, in front of 6,500 people, saw the amateur side vv Emmen beat CVV Germanicus 3-1. The whole place held 12,000 then, but only one stand had seats. The rest was uncovered standing terrace, a typically Dutch arrangement for a club that was not yet professional. Professional football arrived in Emmen in 1985. The record attendance came five years after that, in 1990, when 12,000 packed in for a promotion-relegation playoff against SC Heerenveen. Then the Dutch federation changed the rules: by the year 2000, every professional ground in the Netherlands would have to be all-seater. A new stadium elsewhere in town was discussed and rejected. Instead the existing one was renovated in 1994, 1996, 1997 and again in 2001. Each round of work added a stand and subtracted some capacity. The final number landed at 8,600 covered seats.

The stadium today reads as four distinct buildings, each from a different decade. The Main Stand on the west, with its red brick and pale aluminum facing in the club colors, houses the offices, the dressing rooms, the press room, the FC Emmen Museum and five skyboxes. The East Stand, completed in November 1993 after a temporary structure was destroyed in a 1992 storm, carries the seat pattern of the Drenthe flag - which is why locals sometimes call it the Drenthe Stand even though that has never been the official name. The North Stand from 1997 took the last of the standing terraces out of service and added the 400-seat away section. The South Stand, completed in 1996, was renamed in 2015 for Jan van Beveren, the late Dutch goalkeeper who began his career in Emmen. Beneath it is a sports hall. The seat pattern includes two depictions of FC Emmen's old triangular logo. Sections 25 and 26 at the eastern end have always been where the loudest fans sit.

In the summer of 2005, De Oude Meerdijk hosted six group-stage matches and two round-of-sixteen ties of the FIFA U-20 World Cup. To meet FIFA's broadcast standards, the fences in front of the stands were torn out and the floodlight system was upgraded again. The new array put 120 metal halide fixtures into the existing masts and pushed horizontal illuminance to 1,400 lux, bright enough for international television. Six years later the stadium added another international tournament to its list: the 2011 CPISRA Football 7-a-side World Championships, the global event for footballers with cerebral palsy and related conditions. For a venue of its size, De Oude Meerdijk has done unusual duty as a host. The capacity is modest. The lighting and pitch are not.

In 2018 the entire lighting rig was replaced again, this time with LEDs from the Dutch manufacturer AAA-LUX. Ninety-six WS-STAD Gen-6 fixtures took over from the 120 metal halide units, holding the 1,400-lux level with far less power and far more control. In November 2020 a software upgrade gave the system something new: choreographed flashes for player entrances and goal celebrations. The first time the trick was used in a league match was 5 March 2021, when FC Emmen hosted Sparta Rotterdam. The lights now blink in time with the announcer when a home goal goes in. It is a small show, the kind of thing a smaller club uses to feel a little bigger on a Friday night in March. The masts holding those fixtures are the same masts that lit up the FC Barcelona friendly in 1992. They have just stopped being only lights.