Biggest Cricket Stadium in the World: Narendra Modi Stadium (132,000)

The biggest cricket stadium in the world is the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, India, with an official seating capacity of 132,000. That single number puts it not just at the top of cricket’s own leaderboard but ahead of every other stadium on the planet, cricket or otherwise. Second place, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, seats 100,024, a gap of roughly 32,000 seats that no other ground in the sport comes close to closing.

Quick Facts: Narendra Modi Stadium at a Glance

The World’s Biggest Cricket Stadiums, Ranked

Capacity in cricket swings far more than the playing area does, since the field itself sits within a fairly narrow permitted range. What separates a 30,000-seat ground from a 130,000-seat one is stands, tiers, and how much a region has been willing to build. Here are the 12 largest cricket venues on earth by seating capacity, verified against ESPNcricinfo, Wikipedia, and official team or venue sources.

*Figures marked with an asterisk are genuinely disputed or configuration-dependent across otherwise reliable sources; see the methodology note below.

India supplies eight of the twelve biggest grounds, a direct reflection of the sport’s scale there. Australia holds the rest of the top ten, and once the list drops below roughly 48,000 seats, England’s Lord’s (around 31,000) and The Oval (around 25,500) enter the picture, but neither cracks this top 12.

How This List Is Ranked

Every entry here is ranked by official or most-commonly-cited seating capacity, cross-checked against at least two independent sources: ESPNcricinfo ground profiles, Wikipedia venue pages, official cricket board or stadium sites, and ICC tournament venue listings. Where sources disagreed, that is flagged in the table rather than smoothed over. Three recurring reasons for the disagreement:

• Design capacity versus matchday capacity. Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium in Hyderabad has a design capacity of 55,000, but reported matchday configurations for international fixtures have run closer to 39,000.
• Multi-sport configuration. Perth’s Optus Stadium seats 61,266 in full multi-purpose mode but is more often cited around 55,000 for cricket’s oval layout.
• Renovation history. Wankhede Stadium’s 33,108 seats today are down sharply from roughly 45,000 before its 2011 World Cup-driven rebuild, so older sources still float the larger number.

Inside the Narendra Modi Stadium: History and Rebuild

Motera has hosted international cricket since the 1980s, but nothing about today’s stadium resembles the ground that once stood there. The original structure was demolished entirely, and a new 132,000-seat stadium rose in its place at an estimated cost of ₹800 crore, reopening in February 2020. The launch event was itself a political spectacle: a state visit from then-US President Donald Trump for the “Namaste Trump” rally introduced the world’s biggest cricket venue to a global audience before a single ball was bowled there in a Test. That came a year later, in 2021, when India hosted England in a day-night Test that packed the new stands for the first time. The venue was renamed after Prime Minister Narendra Modi in February 2021.

What Makes It the World’s Biggest Cricket Ground

Scale alone would be a feat, but the design choices behind it explain how Ahmedabad supports a crowd nobody else in cricket can match:

• Fast drainage. Engineered to clear standing water quickly, which keeps rain delays from eating into a full day’s play.
• Four dressing rooms. Enough capacity to host more than two teams without reshuffling logistics, unusual even among major venues.
• An on-site cricket academy for player development, plus a clubhouse and indoor hall that make the complex closer to a sporting campus than a single-purpose ground.
• 132,000 seats arranged in tight, steep tiers, so that even fans in the upper bowl sit closer to the field, relatively speaking, than at many far smaller grounds.

Narendra Modi Stadium in 2026: Current Status

As of 2026, the Narendra Modi Stadium’s position at the top has not been seriously challenged. It hosted the final of the 2023 ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup between India and Australia, and on 8 March 2026 it staged the final of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, co-hosted by India and Sri Lanka, where India beat New Zealand. It also set a non-cricket attendance record in January 2025, drawing 111,989 fans for a Coldplay concert, the largest crowd the venue has verifiably held to date. No stadium currently under construction anywhere, cricket or otherwise, is planned at a scale that would threaten its lead; India’s next major project, the Anil Agarwal International Cricket Stadium in Jaipur, is being built for roughly 75,000, less than 60% of Ahmedabad’s capacity.

For more on how this ground stacks up against every stadium on earth, not just cricket ones, see our breakdown of the largest stadiums in the world. At the opposite end of the scale, our guide to the smallest cricket stadium in the world covers grounds that seat only a few thousand fans yet still host top-level cricket.

Want more on the theme? Read What Is a Nightwatchman in Cricket? next.

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