The stadium with the capacity to seat 60,000 football fans was built to the design by architect M.Hrechyna. It was to be festively inaugurated on Sunday, 22 June 1941. But in the early morning of that very day, the Great Patriotic war against the Nazi invaders broke out.

In order to assuage the shaken people, an announcer of the Kyiv wired-radio broadcasting network declared: The football match has been postponed. All the tickets will be valid on the first Sunday after the end of the war. Finally, after the five years of the horror, deaths, destruction and hardships, the festive inauguration of this stadium did take place; and among the participants of that event were 19 people who had managed to preserve the historic tickets. Those people were greeted with standing ovation. As to the tickets, they are now kept at the Museum of Sporting Glory of the Palace of Sports. The stadium was twice under reconstruction. In the 1960s, a second tier of seats was built over the existing stands, also to the design by M.Hrechyna. Now it can seat over 80,000 spectators.

Worth of mentioning are the athletes whose names are known throughout the world: Larisa Latynina and Irina Deriugina, Sergiy Bubka and Oleg Blokhin, Yana Klochkova and Liliya Podkopaeva, Andriy Shevchenko and, certainly, the incomparable Klitschko brothers, Vitali and Volodymyr.