Egypt has no national sport fixed in law, but football is its national sport in every practical sense. No Egyptian statute, presidential decree or constitutional article names an official sport, so the title is settled by popularity rather than legislation, and football wins it by a distance: around 60% of Egyptians describe themselves as football fans, the Egyptian Football Association has run the game since 1921, and the national team, the Pharaohs, holds the record of seven Africa Cup of Nations titles. Squash is the strongest challenger, because Egyptian players have dominated the world rankings for two decades, while handball and weightlifting supply much of the country’s Olympic and continental success.
No Statute, No Decree: Egypt’s Legal Position Since 1910
Some countries settle the question on paper. Canada wrote ice hockey and lacrosse into law in 1994, and Bangladesh gave kabaddi the status of national game in 1972. Egypt has never taken that step. Its sporting institutions are old and formal, with the Egyptian Olympic Committee founded in 1910 and the football association in 1921, yet none of them was created to crown one game above the others.
That leaves two kinds of claim. The legal claim is empty for every sport. The cultural claim is about who plays, who watches and what a whole country stops for. Measured that way, football holds the role alone, squash has a strong case among Egypt’s results abroad, and the ancient past adds a curious footnote: the tomb of the governor Khety at Beni Hasan, from around 2000 BC, shows 122 pairs of wrestlers, but no modern Egyptian body treats wrestling as the national game.
The question is therefore open in a way it is not in Canada or Bangladesh. Football’s status rests on its audience, its clubs and a century of national-team history, not on a statute that could be cited or amended. When Egyptians argue about their national sport, they are really arguing about which game best represents the country: the one everyone plays, or the one in which Egyptians most often become world champions.
Football: From the Sultan Hussein Cup (1917) to the Egyptian Football Association (1921)
Football reached Egypt through British soldiers and the cosmopolitan port cities in the late nineteenth century, while the country was under British occupation. The first official tournament, the Sultan Hussein Cup, began in 1917. It mixed Egyptian sides with teams from British and Allied military clubs, and at first Zamalek was the only Egyptian club to enter, a choice its supporters still describe as an act of resistance. Al Ahly, which had refused at first, joined in 1918, and Zamalek won the cup in 1921.
The national institutions followed quickly. Egypt fielded a team at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, the Egyptian Football Association was founded in 1921, and Egypt joined FIFA in 1923. The Egypt Cup, first won by Zamalek in 1922, is still played and is the oldest surviving competition in Egyptian football. Its gaps tell the country’s political history: there was no cup between 1967 and 1971 during the War of Attrition, none in 1973–74 after the October War, and none in 2011–12, the season of the Port Said Stadium disaster.
That disaster, on 1 February 2012, is the darkest date in Egyptian sport. After Al Masry beat Al Ahly 3–1 at Port Said Stadium, home supporters invaded the pitch and attacked the away end. Seventy-four people were killed and more than 500 injured, many of them trapped and crushed because the stadium gates were kept shut.
Al Ahly, Zamalek and the Cairo Derby
Egyptian club football is a two-club story. Al Ahly, whose name means “the national”, was founded on 24 April 1907 and has since won 45 Egyptian Premier League titles, 39 Egypt Cups and a record 12 CAF Champions League titles. The Confederation of African Football named it the African club of the twentieth century. Zamalek, founded on 5 January 1911 as Kasr el-Nil and renamed after King Farouk in 1941 before taking its current name after the 1952 revolution, has won 15 league titles, 29 Egypt Cups and five CAF Champions League titles.
The Cairo Derby between them divides families and neighbourhoods across the capital, and the BBC once listed it among the seven toughest derbies in the world. The usual stage is Cairo International Stadium in Nasr City, designed by Werner March, the architect of Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, and opened by President Gamal Abdel Nasser on 23 July 1960. It now seats 75,000. Below the big two, the Egyptian Premier League has 20 clubs, and the strongest regional traditions belong to Ismaily in Ismailia, Al Masry in Port Said and Al Ittihad in Alexandria, where Borg El Arab Stadium also stages national-team matches. Most clubs are multi-sport institutions, so the same badge often appears on handball, basketball and squash teams. You can read more about the capital that hosts most of this rivalry in our guide to Cairo’s geography.
The Pharaohs: Seven Africa Cup of Nations Titles and Mohamed Salah
The national team gives football its strongest claim to be Egypt’s game. Egypt was a founding member of the Confederation of African Football in 1957 and won the first Africa Cup of Nations that year, then again in 1959, 1986 and 1998. Its finest run came in 2006, 2008 and 2010, three titles in a row, a feat no other African side has matched. Seven titles remain the continental record.
Egypt also opened doors for the continent. At the 1934 World Cup in Italy it became the first African and the first Arab country to play at the tournament, losing 4–2 to Hungary. It returned in 1990, drawing with the Netherlands and the Republic of Ireland before a 1–0 defeat by England, then waited 28 years for Russia 2018. Its highest FIFA ranking, ninth in the world, came in 2010, at the end of the three-title run. Egypt qualified again for 2026, when Mohamed Salah captained the side to its first World Cup win, 3–1 over New Zealand, then past Australia on penalties into the round of 16, where Argentina won 3–2. At the Olympics, Egypt has qualified 13 times, an African record, and finished fourth in 1928, 1964 and 2024.
Salah, born in 1992 and raised in the village of Nagrig, is the modern face of all this. He began at Al-Mokawloon in Cairo, moved through Basel, Chelsea, Fiorentina and Roma, and in his first Liverpool season scored 32 Premier League goals, then a record for a 38-game season. He was CAF African Footballer of the Year in 2017 and 2018 and is the Premier League’s top foreign scorer. Our page on famous people from Egypt places him alongside the country’s writers, scientists and leaders.
Squash: Shabana, Farag and El Sherbini
If the title went to the sport in which Egypt is most dominant rather than most watched, squash would win. Egyptian men and women have repeatedly reached world number one since the mid-2000s, and Egypt won its first Men’s World Team Championship on home courts in Cairo in 1999, won again in Denmark in 2009, and has added more team titles since.
Amr Shabana, born in Cairo in 1979, won the World Open in 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2009 reached world number one in 2006 and played in both of those winning team sides. Ali Farag, born in 1992, won four world individual titles between 2018–19 and 2022–23. Nour El Sherbini, born in 1995, has won eight women’s world titles, the last in 2025, sharing the all-time record with Malaysia’s Nicol David.
Squash needs a walled court and club membership, so it cannot match the reach of a game played on any patch of dusty ground. But it is the sport in which an Egyptian is most likely to be world champion in any given year.
Handball, Weightlifting and the Rest of Egypt’s Olympic Story
Handball is Egypt’s most successful indoor team sport. The men’s team has won the African Championship a joint-record number of times, shared with Tunisia, finished fourth at the 2001 World Championship, then the best result by a non-European side, and hosted the 2021 World Championship, the first with 32 teams. At the Tokyo Olympics, held in 2021, Egypt beat Germany in the quarter-final and finished fourth, the first African team to reach an Olympic handball semi-final, after losing the bronze-medal match to Spain. In that home World Championship earlier the same year, Egypt finished seventh, going out to the reigning champions Denmark on penalties.
The Olympic medal table points elsewhere again. Egypt first competed at the Games in 1912 and has won 41 medals in total, with weightlifting its most productive sport. In the 1930s and 1940s Egyptian lifters, boxers and wrestlers were among the world’s best, and at Athens in 2004 Egypt’s boxers still won a silver and two bronzes. Its Olympic history also reflects its politics, because Egypt boycotted Melbourne 1956 over the Suez War, withdrew from Montreal 1976 after three days to join the African boycott, and stayed away from Moscow 1980.
So the legal answer is that Egypt has no national sport, and the answer from the stands is football, with squash as the game in which Egypt most often wins. Countries that have written the choice into law make a useful contrast, and our overview of national sports around the world shows which ones did it by statute and which, like Egypt, left it to the crowds.