U2 Announce 'The Greatest Show On Earth' 2027 UK and European Tour — Presale Starts Today

U2 have announced a 12-date UK and European leg of their new world tour, and the race for tickets starts today. The run — billed as 'Carnaval De Luz presents: The Greatest Show On Earth' — was announced by U2 and Live Nation on 29 October 2026, and it will be the band's first tour of the UK and Europe since the Experience + Innocence tour in 2018. For subscribers, the first presale opens this morning, Monday 2 November, at 10am local time.

The tour supports the band's 16th studio album, Carnaval De Luz — their first new material in nine years. The album is due on 13 November, which means the entire presale week will play out in the final days before fans have even heard the record it is named after. Its title single, 'The Greatest Show On Earth', has been released with a music video directed by Anton Corbijn, the photographer and filmmaker whose visual partnership with the band stretches across decades of their career.

THE EUROPEAN DATES

The European leg kicks off on 26 April 2027 in Stockholm, at the Strawberry Arena, and closes on 6 July 2027 in Milan. In between, the 12 shows are spread across seven cities, with London among the stops confirmed for the run. Twelve dates across seven cities is a deliberately concentrated itinerary by U2 standards — a short, stadium-scale sweep rather than an exhaustive trek — and it lands in late spring and early summer 2027, the heart of the European stadium season.

Support on the UK and European leg comes from Wolf Alice. It is a pairing that bridges two generations of guitar music: one of the biggest live acts in the world sharing a bill with one of Britain's most acclaimed modern bands, in front of crowds that will span both audiences. For Wolf Alice, the slot puts them on the largest stages of their career to date; for U2, it continues a long habit of using the support slot to anoint a successor rather than simply fill an hour. It is the latest in a run of major UK tour announcements for 2027, alongside the Backstreet Boys' UK dates at The O2.

PRESALE ORDER: HOW THIS WEEK WORKS

Tickets are being released in stages, and the order matters. The subscriber presale begins today, Monday 2 November, at 10am local time — with the Feedback group going first, followed by The Hype. A Visa presale follows on Wednesday 4 November, then the artist presale on Thursday 5 November, before the general sale opens on Friday 6 November. Fans who miss the subscriber window still have two further presale chances before Friday, but the staggered order means the earliest access goes to the band's longest-standing subscribers — and with only 12 dates on the leg, demand is expected to concentrate heavily on the first morning.

Anyone planning to buy should treat today's 10am local start as the main event rather than a warm-up. Seven cities for an entire continent's worth of fans — on the band's first European tour in nine years, behind their first album in nine years — is a recipe for fast sell-outs, and the later presales may be picking over what the subscriber groups leave behind.

A WORLD TOUR TAKING SHAPE

The European dates are the second piece of a world tour that has been assembling in stages. The original announcement on 15 October covered Latin America: Mexico City on 23 and 26 February 2027 at Estadio GNP Seguros, São Paulo on 10 and 12 March at Estádio MorumBIS, and Buenos Aires on 23 and 25 March at Estadio River Plate. Read together, the two announcements sketch a tour that opens in Latin America in February, crosses to Europe in late April and runs into July.

Two pieces of the map are still blank. North American dates are still to be announced, and an Ireland homecoming is described as 'in the works' — but to be clear about the record, no Ireland date has been announced yet. For a band whose homecoming shows are events in themselves, that gap will be the most-watched space on the itinerary until it is filled, and nothing about it should be treated as confirmed until U2 say so themselves.

NINE YEARS BETWEEN ALBUMS

The numbers behind this tour explain its scale. A 16th studio album, arriving nine years after the last new material, would be a major event on its own. Combined with a first UK and European tour since 2018, it becomes something closer to a reset: a band returning simultaneously to the studio and to the stadiums, with a new record — not a retrospective — as the reason for both. The tour's very name, 'The Greatest Show On Earth', is drawn from the album and its title single, underlining that this is a new-material tour rather than an anniversary lap.

What happens next is easy to list and hard to predict: the album on 13 November, the general sale on 6 November just before it, and then the two announcements still outstanding — North America, and Ireland. For today, though, the story is simpler. At 10am local time, the first tickets for U2's return to Europe go on sale, nine years after the band last toured here behind new music. The greatest show on earth, as billed, starts with a presale queue.