Ninian Park & Cardiff City Stadium

A new ground was first mooted as a long term target by Cardiff City's former owner Sam Hammam, and the plan gained public approval after a meeting between Hammam and the then Cardiff Lord Mayor, Russell Goodway, in January 2002, which gave the club twelve months to agree a planning and business plan. In November 2002 the club and Cardiff Council signed an outline agreement for the development, subject to later agreement for outline planning permission. Opposition surfaced in March 2003, when stories began to emerge that the chief executive of the Millennium Stadium wanted Cardiff City to use that ground instead, seeing no viable plan for two stadia of 50,000 seats or more in the Welsh capital. The pressure grew with the club's promotion to the Championship in May 2003 and with local fears over traffic and access. On 20 August 2003 Cardiff councillors nonetheless gave unanimous approval to the stadium plans, while expressing concerns over the need for and the scale of the accompanying retail development, which they understood was needed to fund the stadium itself. The Welsh Assembly approved the plan on 9 September 2003.

In April 2004 Cardiff Council approved the first phase, covering a stadium with a capacity of 30,000 seats and a new athletics track. The next phase was held up by legal and technical delays from November 2004 to January 2005, when the council approved three detailed plans for the retail development, subject to agreement of suitable underlying business plans. Development could have begun in May 2005, but the search for seed financing exposed the state of the football club: debt of over £30 million, the sale of star player and club captain Graham Kavanagh to Wigan Athletic in March 2005, and the revelation that players and staff had gone a month without pay as the club struggled with a wage bill believed to be £750,000 a month, with auditors examining possible cutbacks. On 1 March 2005 the club delayed the development until at least July. After a 1-0 home defeat by Sheffield United and a mobbing by supporters, Hammam apologised to fans on 6 March 2005 and released club accounts showing debt of £29.6 million as at March 2004.

A summer sale of players and the arrival of the former Leeds United chairman Peter Ridsdale changed the club's position, and Cardiff Council gave the development a period of 90 days from 31 December 2005 to finalise the underlying business plan. On 31 January 2006 the developers secured Asda as the lead retailer of the new development, which allowed the final funding of the stadium to start and the council timetable to extend by four months to September 2006. Laing O'Rourke won the contract to build the 30,000-seat stadium on 24 October 2006. On 27 November 2006 the council approved the business plan and granted a 125-year lease on the land the stadium was to sit on, allowing final planning approval to be gained from the council authority and the office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

Land clearance started on 21 February 2007, and on 9 May the final finances were put in place for Laing O'Rourke to bring equipment on site and begin construction. The lead developer was PMG Developments, a Cardiff-based property firm led by the Cardiff City director Paul Guy and the former Wales rugby captain Mike Hall. Laing O'Rourke were also contracted to build the highway improvements needed to cope with the increased capacity, to demolish the old Cardiff Athletics Stadium and to construct the retail park. The council insisted that a replacement athletics stadium be built before construction started on the football ground, so that the city would not be without a major athletics facility for any length of time.

The stadium went up on the site of the former Cardiff Athletics Stadium as part of a 60-acre Leckwith development estimated to cost £100 million, which also took in the replacement athletics ground, the Cardiff International Sports Stadium, a retail park, housing on the site of Ninian Park and a new road system. In March 2007 the stadium plans were altered so that construction could begin as soon as possible: to minimise costs the 30,000 capacity was reduced to 25,000 by removing three-quarters of the second tier of seating, though the plans kept the option of completing that tier to reach 30,000 if required. In March 2008 Steve Borley, a former chairman of Cardiff City, said that "We are working to raise the capacity and right now it stands at 26,830. The task is to raise that even further, and we believe it could be almost 28,000 when the stadium opens."

In August 2007 Ridsdale revealed that the club had reduced a £24 million debt to the Swiss-based financiers Langston, agreed under Hammam's chairmanship, to £15 million, by agreeing to sell the stadium's naming rights to Langston for £9 million. The name was unveiled in March 2009 as Cardiff City Stadium, and on 1 May the official logo of both the ground and the management company, Cardiff City Stadium Ltd, was unveiled. Ridsdale had expected the ground to be ready by Christmas 2008; it was finally completed in May 2009. Although some believed that slight delay was caused by the club's continuing legal action with Langston, it was in fact caused by unexpectedly poor weather during the summer of 2007.

The stadium was completed several weeks ahead of schedule, and two games were played there before the formal opening: a Cardiff City Legends match on 4 July 2009 and a friendly against Chasetown on 10 July, in which Jay Bothroyd scored the ground's first goal. It was officially opened on 22 July 2009 with a pre-season friendly against Celtic, which ended 0-0, and it replaced Ninian Park as Cardiff City's home ground. The first league game followed on 8 August 2009, a 4-0 win for Cardiff over Scunthorpe United. Wales played at the ground for the first time on 14 November 2009, beating Scotland 3-0, and on 10 August 2010 the Football Association of Wales announced that the side would also play its opening UEFA Euro 2012 qualifier there, against Bulgaria on 8 October 2010.

Cardiff City had lined up a second tenant well before the ground opened. On 19 September 2007 the club and the Cardiff Blues rugby union team signed a Heads of Terms agreement for the Blues to become tenants, and on 24 May 2008 the two clubs signed a contract finalising the deal, with a licence agreement set at twenty years that would have kept the Blues away from Cardiff Arms Park until 2029. The Blues played at the stadium from the 2009–10 season to the 2011–12 season, and the ground staged the 2010–11 Amlin Challenge Cup final on 20 May 2011, in which the English club Harlequins beat the French side Stade Français 19-18. On 8 May 2012 the Blues confirmed that they would leave for the Arms Park from the 2012–13 season onwards, by mutual agreement.

The stadium also took on work outside sport. Stereophonics headlined the first gig there on 5 June 2010, a show billed as Summer in the City, the band having already played thirteen sell-out shows at the Cardiff International Arena as well as dates at the Millennium Stadium and Cardiff Castle. Supporters added a memorial of their own: on 17 December 2009 Cardiff City confirmed that a statue of Fred Keenor, the captain who won the FA Cup in 1927, would be built, and the £85,000 needed was raised by the Cardiff City Supporters Trust by May 2012. The statue was revealed on 10 November 2012.

On 14 June 2012 Vincent Tan, the Malaysian co-owner of Cardiff City, set out plans for an additional £35 million investment in the Championship club, to pay off debts, to bring the training facilities up to Premier League standards and to spend £12 million raising the stadium's capacity by 8,000 seats, from 26,828 to around 35,000. In April 2013 a Cardiff City director announced that the capacity could be expanded to 35,000 before the start of the 2014–15 season, and extra seats added around the ground during the first few months of the 2013–14 season took it to around 28,000.

In August 2013 the club submitted a planning application to the local authority for the first phase of a fuller expansion: a second tier on the Ninian Stand, providing 5,150 extra seats including commercial and hospitality facilities for around 1,500 people and lifting the capacity to approximately 33,280. The local authority granted permission on 9 October 2013, and the work was finished in the weeks before the ground hosted the UEFA Super Cup in August 2014. Later phases were to add up to 3,000 seats at both the Canton and Grange ends, bringing the ground to around 38,000. In March 2015, however, it was announced that the Ninian Stand extension would be shut for the 2015–16 season because of poor ticket sales, dropping the capacity to 27,978.

Since it opened the ground has been the home of the Wales national football team, though not without exception: a handful of internationals were taken elsewhere, to Parc y Scarlets in Llanelli, to the Liberty Stadium in Swansea and, for the Euro 2012 qualifier against England, to the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. The ground's record attendance, 33,280, was set by Wales against Belgium on 12 June 2015.

On 12 August 2014 the stadium hosted the UEFA Super Cup between Real Madrid, winners of the 2013–14 Champions League, and Sevilla, winners of the 2013–14 Europa League, with Real Madrid winning 2-0 in front of 30,854 spectators. On 1 June 2017 it staged the final of the 2016–17 UEFA Women's Champions League, and on 20 July 2023 a first qualifying round tie in the Europa Conference League between Haverfordwest County and KF Shkëndija, which Haverfordwest won on penalties after a 1-1 draw on aggregate. Cardiff City's own record attendance at the ground is 33,082, against Liverpool on 21 April 2019, and its lowest 3,500, against Sutton United on 10 August 2021. Elton John performed at the stadium in June 2019, and in March 2021 Newport County played two games there because of poor pitch conditions at Rodney Parade.

The stadium is owned and operated by Cardiff City F.C. and managed by Cardiff City Stadium Ltd, which is in turn owned by Cardiff City Football Club Holdings Ltd. After the Millennium Stadium it is the second largest stadium in Cardiff and in Wales, and following the expansion of the Ninian Stand it officially holds 33,280 supporters.