Estádio José Alvalade

Sporting's ground stands on the site of the old Alvalade, demolished in 2006, three years after this one opened next door on 6 August 2003. Tomás Taveira designed it.

What changed the place most came two decades later. Over the summer of 2025, the stadium went through a rebuild known as Alvalade 2.0: the moat around the pitch was filled in, the playing surface lowered, and three new rows of seats added around the lower tier, taking capacity up by 2,000. Fenwick Iribarren Architects drew the plans, and the consortium of Inexo and Politérmica Engenharia carried out the work, at a cost of roughly €50 million. The first match on the reworked pitch came on 18 August 2025, against Arouca. A second phase, aimed at premium seating areas, started in June 2026.

The playing surface itself changed with it — the old grass came out for a hybrid pitch, following on from a resurfacing already done in June 2021.

None of that touched the name. It has been Estádio José Alvalade since it opened, after the man who founded the club, and the wider development around it — the Alvaláxia shopping centre and the rest of the complex — carries the separate label Alvalade XXI, which never applied to the stadium itself.

The record crowd came on 19 April 2026, when Benfica won the derby 2-1 in front of 51,470 — just short of the ground's full capacity of 52,095.