Greece has no national sport written into law, but football is its most popular team sport and is generally treated as the national game. The Hellenic Football Federation was founded in 1926, and the national team won UEFA Euro 2004. Basketball comes a close second. Greece won the EuroBasket titles of 1987 and 2005, and Panathinaikos and Olympiacos have won eleven EuroLeague titles between them. Behind both stands athletics, which carries the legacy of the ancient Olympic Games, first recorded at Olympia in 776 BC. This guide goes through the places where these sports are actually played: the stadiums of Piraeus, Athens and Thessaloniki, the arenas of the EuroLeague clubs, and the marble stadium where the modern Olympics began in 1896.
Piraeus: Karaiskakis Stadium and Olympiacos
Greece's largest football-only ground stands by the sea in Piraeus, the port city of Athens. The Georgios Karaiskakis Stadium is named after a commander in the War of Independence who was mortally wounded nearby. It holds 33,334, second in the country only to the Olympic Stadium in Marousi. The site is older than Greek league football. During the 1896 Olympics it was the Neo Phaliron Velodrome, where the Frenchman Paul Masson won three track cycling golds. Renovated in the 1960s, it hosted the first European final played in Greece: the 1971 Cup Winners' Cup final between Chelsea and Real Madrid, which Chelsea won 2–1 in a replay after a 1–1 draw. The stadium was completely rebuilt in 2004 and hosted the 2023 UEFA Super Cup after the match was moved from Kazan.
Karaiskakis is home to Olympiacos, the most successful club in Greek football. The Greek championship was first held in 1927–28 and the Greek Cup in 1931–32, and Olympiacos has dominated both, ahead of Panathinaikos, AEK Athens and PAOK. It is also the only Greek club with a European trophy. On 29 May 2024 it beat Fiorentina 1–0 after extra time in the Europa Conference League final in Athens, with a header by Ayoub El Kaabi.
The stadium also carries the worst day in Greek football. On 8 February 1981, after Olympiacos beat AEK Athens 6–0, 21 supporters died in a crush at Gate 7. Twenty-one seats in the stand at that gate are black instead of red and form the figure 7, and a monument on the east side lists the names of the dead.
Athens: Leoforos Alexandras, Agia Sophia and the Olympic Stadium in Marousi
Athens has three grounds that matter. The Leoforos Alexandras Stadium in Ampelokipoi opened in 1922 and is the oldest football stadium still in use in Greece. It is the historic home of Panathinaikos, and its record crowd is 29,665, for a Cup Winners' Cup match against Bayern Munich in 1967. Four years later Panathinaikos reached the European Cup final, where they lost 2–0 to Ajax at Wembley on 2 June 1971.
AEK Athens moved into the Agia Sophia Stadium in Nea Filadelfeia in October 2022. The ground holds 32,500 and is the newest stadium in Greece. It stands on the site of the old Nikos Goumas Stadium, and its name, taken from the Hagia Sophia, recalls the club's roots in Constantinople. Within two years it had hosted a European final, the 2024 Conference League final that Olympiacos won.
The largest venue in the country is the Olympic Stadium in Marousi, in the north of Athens, with 75,000 seats. It was built in 1982 for the European Athletics Championships and an unsuccessful bid for the 1990 World Cup. It served as the main stadium of the 2004 Olympics, and it is named after Spyros Louis, winner of the first modern Olympic marathon. Panathinaikos, Olympiacos and AEK have all used it as a home ground, and Panathinaikos still plays its European matches there.
Thessaloniki: PAOK at Toumba
Greek football's second city is Thessaloniki, and its most passionate ground is in the eastern district of Toumba. PAOK's stadium was built in 1958–59 on land from the army, with 1.1 million drachmas from the Ministry of Culture and Sport. It opened on 6 September 1959 with a friendly against AEK Athens. Expansions took it to 45,000 by 1971, second in the country at the time only to the Kaftanzoglio Stadium of PAOK's city rivals Iraklis.
Safety later cut those numbers. After part of Toumba's Gate 8 collapsed in March 1980, and after the Gate 7 disaster in Piraeus the next year, the legal limit fell to 41,073. All-seater stands brought it to 32,000 in 1998, and new security zones in 2000 left the 29,000 seats of today. With Olympiacos in Piraeus, Panathinaikos and AEK in Athens and PAOK in Thessaloniki, the top end of the Super League maps neatly onto the country's two largest urban areas.
Estádio da Luz, Lisbon: The Night Greek Football Peaked
The most famous result in Greek sport happened outside Greece. At Euro 2004 in Portugal, Otto Rehhagel's Greece beat the hosts 2–1 in the opening game, drew with Spain and lost to Russia, and scraped through in second place in Group A behind Portugal. They then knocked out the holders France in the quarter-finals and beat the Czech Republic with a silver goal in the semi-final. On 4 July 2004 they met Portugal again in the final at the Estádio da Luz in Lisbon. In the 57th minute Angelos Charisteas headed in a corner from Angelos Basinas, and the 1–0 win in front of 62,865 spectators is still described as one of the biggest shocks in the sport.
The national team has qualified for three World Cups, in 1994, 2010 and 2014, and reached the round of 16 in Brazil in 2014. It has played at four European Championships: 1980, 2004, 2008 and 2012. The youth sides have come close too: the under-21s were European runners-up in 1988 and 1998, and the under-19s in 2007.
Neo Faliro: The Peace and Friendship Stadium and EuroBasket 1987
Many Greeks would argue that basketball deserves the title more, and the reason is a building in Neo Faliro, across the road from Karaiskakis. The Peace and Friendship Stadium (SEF) opened in 1985 with 14,940 seats. From 3 to 14 June 1987 it hosted the whole of EuroBasket 1987. In the final Greece beat the defending champions, the Soviet Union, 103–101 in overtime, and Nikos Galis was voted most valuable player. It was the first major title any Greek national team had won in a team sport, and basketball took off across the country. Greece added a EuroBasket silver in 1989 and bronzes in 1949, 2009 and 2025, and won a second European title in 2005 in Serbia and Montenegro. At the 2006 World Championship it beat a United States team that included LeBron James 101–95 in the semi-final and went on to take silver. Greece was also one of the eight founding members of FIBA in 1932.
Marousi's Olympic Indoor Hall: Panathinaikos and the EuroLeague
The clubs have done even more. Panathinaikos, whose basketball section dates from 1919, has won seven EuroLeague titles and forty Greek championships. It plays at the 18,300-seat Olympic Indoor Hall in the Marousi complex, renamed after Nikos Galis, where its green seats sit under banners of retired shirts. Olympiacos, the SEF's tenants, have won four EuroLeagues. While the SEF is being renovated, they are playing at the SUNEL Arena in Athens.
Greek basketball's best-known export grew up in the same city. Giannis Antetokounmpo was born in Athens in 1994 to Nigerian parents and started at Filathlitikos. In 2021 he led the Milwaukee Bucks to their first NBA title since 1971 and was named Finals MVP.
Kallimarmaro, Athens: The Marble Stadium of 1896
Below football and basketball, Greece's sporting identity rests on its ancient stadiums. In Athens, the Panathenaic Stadium, or Kallimarmaro ("beautiful marble"), is the only stadium in the world built entirely of marble. Lykourgos laid out a stadium there around 330 BC. Herodes Atticus rebuilt it in marble by AD 144 with room for 50,000. Excavated in 1869, it staged the opening and closing of the first modern Olympics in 1896, where the water carrier Spyridon Louis won the marathon. Today it is the finish of the annual Athens Classic Marathon and the venue where the Olympic flame is handed to each host nation.
Olympia and the Pool: Greece's Olympic Medal Count and Water Polo
Olympia, in the western Peloponnese, held the ancient Games from 776 BC, which is why Greece traditionally enters first in the Olympic parade of nations, and why the Olympic flame is still lit there before every Games. The 1896 Games remain Greece's best: 47 medals, more than any other nation, and second place in the table with 10 golds, one fewer than the United States. In all, Greek athletes have won 129 Olympic medals across 15 sports, most of them in athletics and weightlifting, with wrestling, gymnastics and shooting next. In the pool, the men's water polo team won Olympic silver in Tokyo, world championship silver in 2023 and the 2026 World Cup, all under the Hellenic Swimming Federation.
Those results make a strong case for several sports, but on a winter Sunday the crowds are at Karaiskakis, Toumba and the OAKA arena. Those three grounds sit in Greece's two biggest urban areas, which head our list of the largest cities in Greece. The 2004 final is set against the two countries' geography in our Portugal vs Greece comparison, and Spyridon Louis appears among the people profiled in famous people from Greece.