AFCON 2027 in Nairobi: the dates, the grounds, and where to base yourself

The AFCON 2027 runs from 19 June to 17 July 2027, and it is the first Africa Cup of Nations to be held across three countries — Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, under the Pamoja banner. It is also the first time the tournament has come to this part of the continent since Ethiopia in 1976, which is a long wait by anyone’s reckoning.

If you are coming to the Kenyan half of it, one fact shapes everything else: Nairobi is the only Kenyan host city. Eldoret and Kakamega were in the early plans and are no longer. Every Kenyan match will be played inside one city, at one of three grounds — which makes where you sleep a more interesting question than it first appears.

The three Nairobi grounds

They are not clustered. Two sit close to the centre and one is well out to the north-east, and on a match day the difference between them is not kilometres but hours.

• Nyayo National Stadium (30,000) — about twenty-five minutes on foot from Upper Hill. The closest to us by a distance — walkable on a match day, when the roads around it will not be.
• Raila Odinga International Stadium (60,000) — roughly ten minutes by car from Upper Hill. The new build, on the Talanta Sports City site south of the centre.
• Moi International Sports Centre, Kasarani (60,000) — across the city — allow an hour in traffic from Upper Hill. Nairobi's established big ground, renovated for the tournament.

Those are distances from our own street, measured from the door rather than from “central Nairobi”, which is a phrase that can mean almost anything. Upper Hill sits on the ridge just south-west of the business district, which is how it manages to be a walk from one ground and a short drive from another.

Why the walk matters more than you think

Nairobi traffic is the thing visitors underestimate. On an ordinary Tuesday evening a three-kilometre journey can take forty minutes. On a day when sixty thousand people are converging on one stadium, the roads around it stop being roads.

Being able to walk to a ground — or to walk away from it afterwards, while everyone else is waiting for a taxi that cannot reach them — is worth more than a slightly nicer room somewhere further out. This is the single piece of advice we would give anyone booking for a tournament in this city.

Book before the draw, not after

The group draw is when prices move. Once supporters know their team is playing in Nairobi on a particular week, the rooms within walking distance of the grounds go first and the rest follow.

There is an obvious objection: book early and you might book for the wrong week. Worth knowing how a place handles that before you pay — ours is on the cancellation page, and in short, dates can be moved at no charge whenever we have the space.

What a month-long tournament does to accommodation

Four weeks is long enough that the distinction between a hotel room and an apartment stops being about comfort and starts being about money and sanity. Breakfast out every morning for twenty-eight days is a meaningful sum; so is laundry at hotel prices. A kitchen and a washing machine change the arithmetic.

It also matters for the people who are not here for the whole thing but come and go — journalists, sponsors, officials, family joining partway through. We have written about longer stays and what to ask before committing to one.

Arriving

Jomo Kenyatta International is about eighteen kilometres from Upper Hill on the Expressway: twenty-five to thirty-five minutes late in the evening, an hour or more in weekday traffic. Expect the airport to be busier than usual for the whole tournament, and expect the roads into town to be worse on match days.

Our guide to that journey covers the sensible ways to do it. Send us a flight number and we will have somebody waiting with your name at a fare agreed before you land, which during a tournament is worth arranging in advance rather than negotiating at one in the morning.