Via NTV Kenya, news that Kenya has signed up China Road and Bridge Corporation to build a 60,000-seat stadium in Nairobi for Africa’s biggest sporting competition, the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON). It comes ahead of AFCON 2027, which Kenya will host jointly with its neighbors Tanzania and Uganda.

Kenya sports ministry

The facility, set to open in December 2025, will be known as Talanta Sports City, drawing on the Swahili word for talent. The stadium’s design incorporates the shield from the Kenyan flag emblazoned across the stadium’s exterior. The stadium will be the country’s largest purpose-built football stadium, excluding the running tracks present in Kenya’s other major stadiums. Despite the association with Kenya’s iconic athletes, running tracks are considered a dampener in football because they keep fans farther away from the action, and impact the atmosphere of matches.

The government hopes to transform the area surrounding the stadium to an economic hub. Talanta Sports City sits on 46.5 hectares of mostly unused land on the outskirts of the city, which the government reclaimed amid ownership disputes.

The cost of the project was not disclosed. To generate revenue, Kenya’s government is looking into selling naming rights for the stadium and handing over its management to a professional body. A comparable Chinese-built stadium is the 60,000-seat Alassane Ouattara Stadium in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, which hosted the AFCON 2023 final in February, and carried a construction cost of $257 million. Chinese firms also built stadiums used in previous AFCON editions in Angola, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea.