The City of Manchester Stadium in Manchester, England – also known as the Etihad Stadium for sponsorship purposes – is the home ground of Manchester City Football Club, the fifth-largest stadium in the Premier League and the twelfth-largest in the United Kingdom, with a seating capacity of 47,805.
The SportCity location but with a larger stadium, had been proposed for the main athletics arena in Manchester's failed bid for the 2000 Summer Olympics. In the 2002 Commonwealth Games bid, the capacity for the Games was to be 38,000, and after the games it would be converted to be 48,000. The stadium was built by Laing Construction at a cost of £112 million from a design by architectural consultants Arup Associates.
To ensure the long-term financial viability of the project after the Commonwealth Games, Manchester City F.C. leased the stadium from Manchester City Council as a replacement for Maine Road, but only after the northern segment of the stadium bowl was completed and the athletics track excavated to make way for an additional lower circumferential tier of seats. The conversion from a field and track arena to a football stadium cost the city council £22 million. Manchester City F.C. spent an additional £20 million installing bars, restaurants and corporate entertainment areas. The club moved into its new home during the summer of 2003.
In addition to athletics, the stadium has hosted the 2008 UEFA Cup Final, England football internationals, rugby league matches, boxing world title fights and music concerts.
Read more about City Of Manchester Stadium: Architecture, Names, SportCity, Reception, Recent Developments, Transport, Other Uses
Famous quotes containing the words city of, city, manchester and/or stadium:
“The City of New York is like an enormous citadel, a modern Carcassonne. Walking between the magnificent skyscrapers one feels the presence on the fringe of a howling, raging mob, a mob with empty bellies, a mob unshaven and in rags.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“I have developed a visionary modern lyric, and, for it, an idiom in which I can write lyrically, colloquially, and dramatically. My subject is city life—with its sofas, hotel corridors, cinemas, underworlds, cardboard suitcases, self-willed buses, banknotes, soapy bathrooms, newspaper-filled parks; and its anguish, its enraged excitement, its great lonely joys.”
—Rosemary Tonks (b. 1932)
“The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“In their eyes I have seen
the pin men of madness in marathon trim
race round the track of the stadium pupil.”
—Patricia K. Page (b. 1916)