The City Ground is a football stadium in West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire, England, on the banks of the River Trent. It has been home to Nottingham Forest since 1898 and has a capacity of 30,455, with plans to increase capacity to 45,000.

The stadium was a venue when England hosted UEFA Euro 1996, and is only three hundred yards (270 m) away from Meadow Lane, home of Forest's neighbouring club Notts County; the two grounds are the closest professional football stadiums in England and the second-closest in the United Kingdom, after Tannadice Park and Dens Park. They are located on opposite sides of the River Trent.

Nottingham Forest are the second oldest league football club in the world, and were founded in 1865, but did not move to the City Ground, their seventh home, until 33 years later in 1898. For their first fourteen years the club played most of their matches at the Forest Recreation Ground, from which they took their name. This was common land so the club were unable to exploit their matches commercially, and as there was no gate money, revenue came mainly from the players' membership fees. When Forest first entered the FA Cup in 1878–79, reaching the semi-finals, they were unable to play home fixtures, as the cup competition rules stipulated that spectators should be charged admission. In 1879 the club left The Forest to play at the Castle Ground in The Meadows, after the Notts Castle Football Club which had previously played there disbanded and its players joined Forest. This allowed Forest to charge admission in time for its second FA Cup campaign in 1879–80. Rapidly-growing interest in the game saw the ability to accommodate large numbers of spectators at football matches increase in importance, and from 1880 most of the club's important games were played at Trent Bridge Cricket Ground, then Nottingham's most advanced enclosed sports venue. In 1883, however, Forest were abruptly replaced as tenants at Trent Bridge by local rivals Notts County, a move possibly connected with Notts County's appointment of the assistant secretary of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club to their own newly created post of paid Club Secretary.

Forest only discovered they were being replaced at Trent Bridge in early August 1883, leaving them very little time to find a new ground, and the Parkside Ground in Lenton, where Forest first played on 22 September, was criticised for its distance from the town, its slope and its uneven surface, with one newspaper columnist commenting that "so long as the Forest Club will maintain a ground on which it is impossible for them to play their particular game accurately, in addition to being bleak and generally inaccessible, they will meet with little patronage". Despite moving three years later to the nearby Gregory Ground, which was much better reviewed in the press, Lenton's distance from the centre of Nottingham saw attendances continue to decline and in 1890 the club moved again, this time to the Town Ground in The Meadows, which was much closer to the club's roots and became Forest's first proper football stadium.

In July 1897, the Town Ground was briefly renamed the City Ground, in recognition of Nottingham being granted city status, but the newly-formed city council planned to redevelop the site for building and terminated Forest's lease, offering instead the site on the south side of the river that would become today's City Ground. This land had been granted to the Mayor and Burgesses of Nottingham by Edward VI in a royal charter dated 21 February 1551, with the intention that rentals from the agricultural land would pay for the upkeep of the adjacent Trent Bridge. The City Council granted the club a 21-year lease on the new site, and the club approved the scheme to move to the new ground at their annual meeting in December 1897. To raise the £3,000 required to finance the move the club asked members, supporters and businessmen to subscribe to "New Ground Scheme" bonds which cost £5 each, raising over £2,000. Many of the bonds were never redeemed, the bondholders effectively making a donation to fund the new ground.

Forest first played at the new City Ground a week before their FA Cup final victory in April 1898, and the reserve team played there on the afternoon of the final itself, but the ground was not officially opened until the first match of the following season, a Division One game against Blackburn Rovers on 3 September 1898 with an attendance of 15,000. The ground had a wooden-slatted main stand on the west side with a barrel roof, a narrow wooden shelter covering the full width of the Trent End, and a shorter roof covering part of the east side. The pitch was considered to be among the finest in the country, "a velvet carpet of lush turf". This was the result of the work of club committee-member William Bardill, a nurseryman and landscape gardener whose family firm still exists in Stapleford. Bardill excavated the playing area to a depth of two feet, lay a bed of clinker to ensure perfect drainage, and on top lay a pitch of high-quality turf brought by barge up the river from Radcliffe-on-Trent.

Forest's first round FA Cup match against Aston Villa in 1898 attracted a crowd of 32,070, the first time a football match in Nottingham had attracted gate receipts of over £1,000. The ground was considered to be "one of the best in the country" and was chosen to host the FA Cup Semi final in 1899, recognition that was proclaimed at the club's annual meeting to be "beneficial to the club and the city". The ground held a total of four FA Cup semi-finals between 1899 and 1905, and a full international match between England and Wales in 1909.

Throughout the 1900s, Notts County also regularly used the City Ground for home matches when their usual venue at Trent Bridge was unavailable for football due to cricket taking precedence.