Junior Eurovision 2025 will now take place at the Tbilisi Gymnastics Palace, after organizers confirmed a late change of venue from the Tbilisi Olympic Palace just three weeks before the contest.
The move keeps the event in Georgia’s capital but shifts it to a different arena within the city’s Olympic complex. Reports first surfaced on 24 November that the venue listing on official contest materials had been updated to the Gymnastics Palace, and Georgian media later linked the change to the Olympic Palace not being available for a required inspection visit by the European Broadcasting Union.
The new arena has a considerably smaller seated capacity. The Tbilisi Gymnastics Palace can welcome just under 1,300 fans, compared with around 3,600–3,700 seats in the hall at the Olympic Palace that was originally due to stage the show. Despite the reduced audience size, the floor area of the gymnastics hall is larger, giving producers flexibility for staging and camera work even as fewer tickets are expected to be available.
Preparations at the new venue have already started. Stage construction began this week, with Georgia’s Head of Press for Junior Eurovision, Lasha Kapanadze, sharing the first behind-the-scenes photos from inside the Gymnastics Palace. It has not yet been confirmed publicly whether the previously unveiled stage concept, which incorporates elements of Georgian landscape and a stylised doli folk drum at its centre, has been altered to suit the new space.
Junior Eurovision 2025 will be broadcast live from Tbilisi on Saturday 13 December at 17:00 CET, marking the second consecutive year that the children’s contest airs on a Saturday rather than the traditional Sunday slot. Eighteen countries are set to compete in this 23rd edition of the show.
Georgia is hosting on home soil thanks to Andria Putkaradze’s victory in Madrid in 2024 with “To My Mom”, which earned 239 points and delivered the country a record fourth Junior Eurovision title. Tbilisi now welcomes the contest for the second time, having first staged Junior Eurovision at the Olympic Palace in 2017.
With the new venue confirmed and work inside the arena underway, attention now turns to how producers will adapt the production to the more intimate Gymnastics Palace — and what kind of atmosphere the smaller crowd will bring to Junior Eurovision’s return to Georgia.
