The Saprissa has also been home to the Costa Rica national team for six FIFA World Cup™ preliminary competitions. It was first used for qualifying matches for the 1974 World Cup in West Germany and subsequently hosted qualifiers for the 1978 World Cup™ in Argentina, the 1982 World Cup in Spain, the 1998 World Cup in France, the 2002 World Cup in Korea/Japan and recently the 2006 World Cup in Germany. It is a venue that is feared by opposing sides and never a very pleasant experience for them. “It’s an inferno” was how US goalkeeper Brad Friedel chose to describe the highly charged atmosphere he encountered at the “monster’s cave” during his side’s 2-1 defeat in the first qualifying round for the 1998 World Cup in France. Following his country’s 3-2 loss to Costa Rica in the final qualifying round for that tournament in 1997, former US striker Eric Wynalda said that the pressure from the fans is very intense “because the stands housing the ordinary people are right on the edge of the pitch”.
However, this heady atmosphere has also led to problems for the Costa Rica national side – in 2005 disturbances were caused by fans following Costa Rica’s 2-1 defeat to Mexico in a qualifier for the World Cup in Germany. This behaviour resulted in Costa Rica’s next match, a 2-1 victory over Panama, being played behind closed doors.
The Costa Rica national side have played 40 international “A” matches at the Saprissa stadium and have a record of 25 wins, ten draws and only five defeats. The Costa Ricans also went 18 matches without defeat (12 wins and six draws) after losing 3-0 to Guatemala in 1980.

Some years later, the club decided to purchase several plots of land in San Juan de Tibas, the legal title to which was signed on 3 August 1965. Five square plots belonging to a coffee plantation were acquired for the sum of 363,398 colons, with 50,000 payable upon signing the deed and the rest in monthly instalments. To secure financing for the project, campaigns under the slogans “the square yard” and “the bag of cement” were launched, but to no avail. Eventually, political intervention by two former presidents of Costa Rica, Mario Echandi and Daniel Oduber, and private donations helped to raise the funds.
Many memorable events have taken place at the Saprissa stadium since its inauguration more than three decades ago. Deportivo Saprissa have won 16 of their 25 first division championships since moving to the stadium, including six successive league titles between 1972 and 1977, but this is not all the stadium has hosted. In August 1990, Ricardo Saprissa’s funeral was held at the stadium as a tribute to a man who would go down in history as a great advocate of sport, besides which all kinds of religious activities, concerts, fairs, motocross competitions and motor shows have taken place there. Various improvements have been made to the dressing rooms, roof and lighting, but the biggest transformation took place thanks to foreign investment in the pitch, which in April 2004 became the first artificial turf surface in top-level Central American football. The investment was made by the club’s owner, Mexican magnate Jorge Carlos Vergara, who bought the turf and had it installed at a cost of around USD 600,000.

Many years before the joyful scenes witnessed at the inauguration of the stadium that was named after him, Ricardo Saprissa Ayma never concealed his misgivings about building the “colossus” in San Juan de Tibas in the province of San Jose, Costa Rica. The revered co-founder and president of Costa Rican capital San Jose’s top club Deportivo Saprissa between 1948 and 1981 considered it madness to attempt to build a stadium for the club without local or central government backing. “The national stadium is enough. Why contemplate moving to another ground?” was how Saprissa, born in El Salvador to Spanish parents, saw it – he was worried that the costs would escalate and that the project would end up a complete failure. As the official opening scheduled for Sunday, 27 August 1972 approached, however, Saprissa – once of Spanish club Espanyol – underwent a change of heart and threw himself into the project wholeheartedly with six months to go before the inauguration.
The construction of what is known today as the “monster’s cave” or the “colossus of Tibas” cost 15 million Costa Rican colons. The money was raised through the work of the stadium committee, the sale of 25-year leases on VIP boxes and the board’s tenacious efforts and pragmatism.
The idea of laying a training pitch, from which the stadium project emerged, first came to light between 1955 and 1956, but was not well received by the fans, who were reluctant to donate funds for the purchase of land in the district of Lujan in San Jose.