Benjamin Mkapa Stadium

Sixty thousand seats make this the largest ground in Dar es Salaam, and for years the arena was simply Taifa Stadium — "national" in Swahili, a name that told you everything about its purpose before anyone bothered to rename it. That changed in July 2020, when President John Magufuli attached the name of Benjamin Mkapa, the former president who had pushed the project through during his own time in office between 1995 and 2005.

The build itself ran quickly by regional standards — ground broken in July 2005, finished within two years — and the opening fixture, a 2010 World Cup qualifier against Uganda on 1 September 2007, doubled as the stadium's first real test. The full state ceremony came later, in February 2009, when Chinese President Hu Jintao attended during a visit to the country, a reminder of who had financed and built the ground in the first place.

More recently, in 2024, the stadium went through a reconstruction that touched nearly everything but the shell: all 60,000 seats replaced, floodlighting rebuilt around 288 units, new gates and running track, a media zone with its own press conference room, and VAR technology installed for the first time. The point of the work was administrative as much as physical — pushing the venue from FIFA's Grade B classification up to Grade A, the tier required to host the bigger international fixtures the country wants to bring in.

The pitch remains natural grass, run under the Tanzania Football Federation, which oversees the ground from its base in the city.