Bayern Munich and Ajax will play the first match at Nairobi’s new 60,000-seat stadium on Tuesday 5th January 2027. President William Ruto announced the friendly on Wednesday in a recorded address. “Come January 5, 2027, we will open this stadium with a historic match between two giants of European football, FC Bayern Munich of Germany and FC Ajax of Amsterdam,” he said.
Both clubs have since confirmed it. Ajax called the invitation an honour and said the game will be its last warm-up before the second half of the Dutch league season. It plays Willem II four days later. For Bayern, it’s the club’s first ever visit to Kenya, squeezed into the Bundesliga’s winter break. Between them, the two clubs have won the Champions League ten times, six for Bayern and four for Ajax.
The venue is the one most Kenyans still call Talanta Stadium, the centrepiece of Talanta Sports City off Ngong Road. Ruto said in December 2025 that it would be renamed after the late former Prime Minister Raila Odinga. It’s also one of Kenya’s venues for the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON), which Kenya co-hosts with Uganda and Tanzania from 19th June to 17th July 2027. Two and a half weeks after the football, the same stadium hosts the Nairobi leg of World Rugby’s HSBC SVNS 2 sevens series on 23rd and 24th January. This year’s leg was at Nyayo, and in February we covered how Safaricom wired its media centre and ran M-PESA app offers for fans as the tournament’s technology partner. So the Bayern game is the stadium’s first big crowd, and the first time its ticketing and gates have to handle tens of thousands of people at once.
Where the tickets will be sold
Tickets go on sale on Thursday 5th November at talantasportscity.com, the address the Bundesliga’s own announcement points to. Right now the site is a sign-up page. You leave your details and get ticket news by SMS and email. Its terms say no tickets are sold on the site yet, and that separate terms of sale will apply once they are.
The domain was registered through GoDaddy on 25th October 2026, three days before Ruto spoke. The privacy page names the operator only as “Talanta Sports City, Ngong Rd, Nairobi”, with no company or government body behind it. The page mentions pre-sale links that will be sent to people who signed up, and the site runs behind Cloudflare, a service that screens out automated traffic such as ticket-buying bots.
Since no ticket has been sold through the official site yet, any “Bayern v Ajax ticket” on offer on WhatsApp, on a lookalike website or from a vendor before 5th November isn’t one bought from the organisers.
What went wrong at CHAN 2024
When Harambee Stars played African Nations Championship (CHAN) group games at Kasarani in August 2025, the Confederation of African Football’s online ticket portal crashed minutes after sales opened at noon.
At the Morocco match, hundreds of fans were turned away holding tickets that looked valid. Each digital ticket carries a QR code that the gate scans once. Resellers had bought tickets in bulk and sold the same code to several people, so only the first person through got in and everyone after them showed up as “already scanned”. Some fans jumped the perimeter fence, and CAF later fined the Football Kenya Federation over crowd control.
So if you buy a ticket for January, buy it from the official seller, keep the QR code in your own account or inbox, and don’t post or forward it, because anyone with a copy can get through the gate before you.
What we don’t know yet
The organisers haven’t said what tickets will cost, which company is running the sales and the gate checks, whether tickets are mobile-only, or how you’ll pay. Nobody has named a kickoff time or a Kenyan broadcaster or streaming service. Ruto said the event will be paid for through corporate partnerships, but no sponsor has been named.
The stadium itself isn’t finished. A Senate committee that inspected it in mid-October put the main arena at about 94% complete, with an LED screen built into the outer wall already working. The same visit found the transport question unresolved. Talks with Kenya Railways and the Kenya Urban Roads Authority on rail links and road upgrades were still going on, and nobody has said how 60,000 people will get home after the match.
Of all these gaps, the ticketing ones have a deadline. At CHAN, a portal that crashed at noon and QR codes that could be copied are what kept paying fans outside Kasarani. Whoever runs talantasportscity.com has until 5th November to say who they are, what a ticket costs and how it will be checked at the turnstile.
Featured Image: An artist's impression of the Raila Odinga International Stadium, which opens with Bayern Munich v Ajax on 5th January 2027 Credit: Talanta Sports City.
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