The long-awaited revival of Ozzfest is edging closer and it’s heading back to the most emotionally loaded venue imaginable. Sharon Osbourne has confirmed that the festival’s 2027 relaunch will take place at Villa Park, the Birmingham stadium where Ozzy Osbourne played his final show, with an official announcement said to be just around the corner.
In a new interview with the U.K.’s Metal Hammer, Sharon, Ozzy‘s manager and widow, reaffirmed that the reborn festival will return to the home ground of Aston Villa Football Club, the same site as the star-studded “Back To The Beginning” concert on July 5, 2025, which turned out to be Ozzy‘s last-ever performance. “It’s going to be at Villa Park again,” she said, leaving the scale of the Birmingham leg partly in the hands of the audience: “Whether it’ll be two nights [in Birmingham], that’s up for the fans to tell me.”
On the question everyone’s asking, who will actually play, Sharon kept her cards close, but signaled that news isn’t far off. “Of course we’re speaking to people,” she said. “I can’t let that out yet, but it’ll be soon.”
The framework for the comeback has been taking shape for months. Rather than an immediate return to the multi-city road trek of old, the 2027 edition is planned as a pair of destination weekends: a two-day event at Villa Park to launch it, followed by a two-day event in North America, with Sharon inviting fans to help choose the U.S. stop. As she explained on a recent episode of “The Osbournes Podcast“ alongside her son Jack Osbourne: “We wanna do two days in Aston Villa and then come to America. And we wanna hear from everyone where we should go in America. And also we’ve gotta find a lot of young, new talent, because that’s what [Ozzy] would want.”
She’s also left the door open to something bigger down the line, should the demand be there. “Yeah. And then see how it does. And then if people want it, we’ll be there [in the] following years,” she said, hinting that a full touring format could return in 2028 and beyond.
For Sharon, reviving Ozzfest is about protecting a spirit she feels set the festival apart from the rest of the industry. “It was more fun. When you go to other festivals, everybody’s so uptight,” she said at the time. “But that was always the thing about our festival. There was never anybody jockeying for position or thought they were better than anyone else. It was a summer camp.” In keeping with the event’s history as a springboard for emerging bands, the team is actively hunting for new talent — though Sharon has also name-checked at least one piece of metal royalty she’d love to see involved, saying she wants Judas Priest‘s Rob Halford on the bill.
Underpinning all of it is a deeply personal blessing. Speaking earlier this year at the MIDEM 2026 conference in Cannes, Sharon revealed that Ozzy himself had encouraged her to carry the festival on without him: “Well, the last one we did was 2018. It was just a month before Ozzy got sick, and that was at the Forum in L.A. And there was no plans to stop it. We were still gonna do it, but Ozzy couldn’t. And Ozzy and I would talk about it, and he’d say, ‘Do you think Ozzfest would work without me?’ And I’m, like, ‘Yeah, it’s a brand. It will work without you.’ And he said, ‘We should do it.’”
Founded in 1996 by Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne, Ozzfest grew from a two-day event into a near-annual touring institution and one of heavy metal’s most important proving grounds, launching countless careers between 1996 and its last standalone outing in 2018. Sharon has said she’s been in talks with Live Nation about the return. The 2027 relaunch will mark the first Ozzfest staged without Ozzy, who died in 2025, making its homecoming to Villa Park all the more poignant.
