Astana confirmed as 2027 World Table Tennis Championships host

Astana took the ITTF World Championships flag from London and, with it, the next major shift in the sport’s map. The International Table Tennis Federation confirmed that Kazakhstan’s capital will host the 2027 ITTF World Table Tennis Championships Finals, after the city was chosen at the ITTF Annual General Meeting in Doha in May 2025.

The handover was staged with clear ceremony and clear intent. Clare Briegal MBE, chair of Table Tennis England, presented the official flag of the ITTF World Championships to ITTF president Petra Sörling, who then passed it to a Kazakh delegation led by Kazakhstan Table Tennis Federation president Daniyar Abulgazin. For Astana, the handover was more than symbolic. The ITTF has framed the 2027 event as a landmark for Central Asia, a chance to bring elite world-level competition to a region that has rarely sat at the center of the sport’s biggest stage and to give emerging local players a home-soil shot against the best in the world.

That move matters well beyond the ceremony. A World Championships in Astana changes travel patterns for players, federations and fans across Asia, while also widening the sport’s reach in a part of the world where table tennis is still working to deepen its audience. Kazakhstan’s bid presentation, led by Abulgazin, stressed the sport’s power to unite people and inspire new generations, and the federation will now have two years to turn that promise into an event with lasting regional pull.

The handover also carried one of the championship’s most recognizable traditions. The Egypt Cup, a trophy that first debuted in Cairo in 1939 and was created at the initiative of King Farouk, was presented to Kazakhstan as one of the symbolic cups returned to the next host city. In the same recognition segment, Wang Chuqin received the Victor Barna Award and Sun Yingsha the Diane Schöler Award, honors for the leading male and female players in the ITTF World Team Championships. Their awards added another line to a growing record, after both had already won a third consecutive mixed doubles world title in Doha in 2025.

All of it played out against the scale of London 2026, the centenary World Team Championships held 100 years after the first World Championships in 1926. England had hosted the event seven times before, and this edition brought 128 teams, 64 men’s and 64 women’s squads, across the Copper Box Arena and OVO Arena Wembley. The message from London to Astana was unmistakable: table tennis is not just preserving its history, it is redrawing where that history happens next.