Image shows stadium under construction in Morocco, not Kenya

A new sports stadium called Talanta is being built in Kenya’s capital Nairobi as the country prepares to co-host the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) football tournament in 2027. A post shared on X claims to show the progress of the stadium’s construction while praising Kenya’s armed forces who are overseeing the Chinese contractor on site. But the claim is false; the image used in the post shows the construction of the Moulay Abdellah Stadium in Rabat, Morocco, where the 2025 edition of AFCON will be held.

“KDF professionalism is on another level. This is Talanta Stadium.... built from scratch,” reads the X post published on December 17, 2024.

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Screenshot of the false post, taken on December 23, 2024

KDF refers to the Kenya Defence Forces.

Liked and shared more than 2,000 times, the post includes an image of a partially built sporting arena, surrounded by cranes and scaffolding.

Talanta stadium

Kenyan President William Ruto presided over the groundbreaking ceremony of the Talanta Sports Stadium at the Jamhuri Showground in Nairobi on March 1, 2024 (archived here). The 60,000-capacity stadium is one of the venues for the 2027 AFCON.

The Ministry of  Defence, through the KDF, is overseeing the construction of the stadium by the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) (archived here and here).

Kenya won a bid to jointly host the football tournament with Uganda and Tanzania (archived here).

This marks the first time a country in East Africa will host AFCON since Ethiopia in 1976 (archived here).

Failed bids by Kenya to host football tournaments in the past were put down to poor infrastructure. This happened with the 2018 African Nations Championship (CHAN) and the 1996 AFCON (archived here and here).

Kenya is finally poised to end the hoodoo in 2027 with the construction of Talanta stadium, but the image purported to show the emerging venue in Nairobi depicts a different facility in Africa.

Ground in Morocco

AFP Fact Check conducted reverse image searches and found news reports from Morocco published with the same image.

Moroccan newspaper Ana Al-Khabar used the picture and others like it in an article on December 16, 2024. According to the report, it shows construction work on Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium in Rabat (archived here and here).

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Screenshot of the Ana Al-Khabar article with the image of the Moroccan stadium, taken on December 24, 2024

The image appears to have points of interest highlighted with arrows and other markers but is otherwise a match to the version in the false post.

A video of the stadium’s construction was published by another Moroccan media outlet Le360 Sport on November 2, 2024. It shows matching design features, like the tiering, the entrances and exits to the stands and raised sections behind the goal ends (archived here).

Nineteen seconds into the video, two smaller enclosed stadia -- one oval and the other square -- appear in the background.

These are the Salle Omnisport Moulay Abdellah indoor sporting arena and the Piscine Olympique Moulay Abdellah indoor swimming pool, visible on Google Maps.

Morocco beat Zambia and a joint bid from Benin and Nigeria to win the right to host the 2025 AFCON (archived here). 

The country will also co-host the 2030 World Cup tournament alongside Spain and Portugal (archived here).

Kenyan stadium progress

Ruto, accompanied by government officials, inspected the Talanta stadium’s construction on November 7, 2024 (archived here).

The head of the presidential special projects and creative economy, Dennis Itumbi, published a video of Ruto’s visit on X, including aerial views showing the progress (archived here).