The "Kingdom of Football" is printed on the side of Casablanca’s Port train station in Morocco’s biggest city. These are no empty words. Morocco is a huge football country, it’s national team the best in Africa and semi-finalists at the last World Cup finals, it’s derby games creating some of the best atmospheres in world football.
The country is also showing its intent by staging major tournaments. Beyond Casablanca’s outskirts and 30 kilometres to the east, the world’s biggest football stadium, Grand Stade or the ‘Hassan II’ stadium which will seat 115,000, is being constructed.
Morocco hopes it will stage the final of the 2030 World Cup, though Real Madrid’s 84,000 capacity Bernabeu is likely to also be a serious contender. The vast arena, with a tent design for the roof inspired by culturally relevant Moroccan tents, will become a home for local giants Wydad AC and Raja Casablanca. It is scheduled to be completed in 2028 and confidence is high that it will be.
Morocco has become a world leader in stadium construction and several new venues have already been completed for the Africa Cup of Nations currently being staged in the country. The biggest so far is the Tangier Grand Stadium in the northern port city and seats 78,000.
Redeveloped and expanded before being opened as recently as November, it stages Friday’s quarter-final match between Senegal and Mali and then one of the semi-finals. The stands are steep, there’s complete cover, it’s stunning. The city is linked by Morocco’s modern high-speed rail network.
On Wednesday, The National visited some of the impressive new venues in the capital, Rabat. The biggest, the Prince Moulay Abdellah Sports Complex, was built in record time between 2023 and 2025 and sits seven kilometres south of Morocco’s wealthy, ordered capital city. The 68,700 venue hosted the opening game of Afcon and will stage the final. It has the expected state-of-the-art facilities in a bowl built to enhance the atmosphere, but the big story is the illuminated facade which uses similar technology to The Sphere in Las Vegas. At sunset in this city by the Atlantic, the facade turns into a giant animated screen.
The light shows are not projections, but created using individually illuminated pixels that make up the facade itself and are all fully programmable. Populous, the architects behind some of the best stadiums in sport, were involved and the stadium features a 23,000-capacity fan section behind one goal – which will be bouncing when hosts Morocco play Cameroon on Friday night in another sell-out game.
It’s not the only facility on the site. A large new rail station on the main Rabat–Casablanca route has just opened to serve the stadium. It’s impressive, though the train south from it to Casablanca was too busy. Next to the stadium is yet another new venue, the 21,000 capacity Rabat Olympic Stadium which was built in the staggering short time of only nine months.
And, amazingly, these are not the only new football stadiums in the capital city of two million people. On Tuesday, The National saw Algeria defeat DR Congo in the 22,000-seater Moulay El Hassan stadium in the Handa district which is as good as anything in Europe for its size, if not better. And that’s not all for Rabat, which also boasts the totally redeveloped El Madina Stadium in downtown for another 18,000 seats. Morocco is using football to assert its identity in a football-mad nation.
There’s still much to do before 2030, when six Moroccan cities (Casablanca, Rabat, Agadir, Fez, Marrakesh and Tangier) will stage games during the World Cup finals. Morocco is well ahead of where it needs to be.
The stadium in Agadir will be renovated and covered to hold 46,000, the one in Fez will be boosted to have a 55,800 capacity and a roof will also be built. That would have been useful on Monday during the rain-drenched match between Nigeria and Mozambique.
For now, all attention is on Afcon and Morocco is showing its best face to welcome fans from all over Africa. Despite their power and status as the top ranked team in Africa (11th in the world, Senegal are 19th, Algeria 34th, Egypt 35th), Morocco have only ever been crowned African champions once against seven wins for Egypt, five for Cameroon and four for Ghana. It’s a huge underperformance.
That win was in 1976 when the team plane narrowly escaped an air disaster on the way to the tournament in Ethiopia. Shortly after take-off, one of the engines caught fire, traumatising those on board. The plane landed and the players initially refused to get back on a plane to continue their journey. But they did and won the competition, that tournament seen as a symbol of the thin line of sporting triumph and tragedy.
Morocco is a very different country now. Wealthy by African standards, it boasts some of the best football stadiums in the world, with the biggest one yet to come.
