Dortmund: Coal, steel, beer and football

May 17, 2006, 15:52 GMT

Dortmund - Dortmund`s Westfalen stadium, will host four group matches, one round of 16 match as well as a semi-final.

Built for the 1974 World Cup and home to Borussia Dortmund, the Westfalen stadium was upgraded throughout the 1990s and is now the most visited football arena in the German Bundesliga, with over one million fans passing through its gates this year.

Although its capacity will be reduced from over 89,000 to 66,000 for the World Cup due to the removal of its terracing, the atmosphere will still be electric.

For generations, Dortmund`s population worked in heavy industry such as Thyssen-Krupp or Hoesch and in Dortmund`s eight breweries, which in the 1960s made Dortmund the second largest beer brewing city in the world after Milwaukee in the United States.

But all that has passed; prices of imported coal and steel sank lower then the domestic product and German beer began to face foreign competition.

Dortmund subsequently experienced a painful period of transformation, resulting in an unemployment rate of 18.5 per cent.

But at the same time new perspectives have opened with the establishment in the area of technology businesses, such as IT, software development and microelectronics.

Group games:

June 10: Trinidad & Tobago v Sweden 
June 14: Germany v Poland 
June 19: Togo v Switzerland
June 22: Japan v Brazil

Round of 16:

June 27: WF v RE

Semi-final:

July 4: W57 v W58