PFC Lokomotiv Plovdiv of sporting conditions in the city. Most notably, the powerful national railway company through ZSK Plovdiv is the main benefactor for the creation of a state-of-the-art multi-purpose stadium in the city that opens in 1943. The stadium is constructed on the football pitches of the team of "Levski Plovdiv" and as such is the home grounds for both ZSK Plovdiv and Levski Plovdiv. As a result, the stadium is named "ZSK-Levski". In the years after 1944, the newly established communist rule embarks in several campaigns for "reorganisation of the sporting clubs in Bulgaria" so that they are aligned with the
Plovdiv is the second or the third-largest cosmopolitan city inhabited by Bulgarians, after Sofia and possibly Varna. According to the 2001 census, out of a population of 338,224 inhabitants, the Bulgarians numbered 302,858 (90%). Stolipinovo in Plovdiv is the largest Roma neighbourhood in the Balkans, having a population of around 20,000 alone; further Roma ghettos are Hadji Hassan Mahala and Sheker Mahala. Therefore, the census number is a deflation of the number of Roma people, and they are most likely the second-largest group after the Bulgarians, most of all because the Muslim Roma in Plovdiv claim to be of Turkish ethnicity