Al-Hilal Stadium

Al-Hilal Stadium exists because the club decided to stop borrowing pitches. Until it was built, Al-Hilal played on shared public grounds in Omdurman, among them the field at the Khalifa Courtyard; work on a ground the club owned outright began in 1964. It opened on 26 January 1968 against the Ghana national team, a match that finished 1–1, and the nickname that followed it — The Blue Jewel (الجوهرة الزرقاء) — has outlasted every rebuild since.

There was work in 1992, but the overhaul that shaped the ground as supporters last knew it was completed on 18 January 2018 at a cost of around $20 million. It went well beyond a coat of paint: structural reinforcement, floodlighting imported from Spain, rewired electrics, new dressing rooms and press facilities, and reworked safety and crowd-control arrangements. The surface remained natural grass.

The civil war that broke out in Sudan in April 2023 reached the stadium within months. Structures were scorched, the ground was looted, and by early 2024 the pitch had grown over and could not be played on; the facility passed under the control of the Sudanese Armed Forces. Club officials put the cost of putting it right at roughly $4 million as of 2024.

One point of confusion is worth clearing up: this is not the home of Al-Hilal SFC of Riyadh, who play at the Kingdom Arena. The two clubs share a name and nothing else.