City of Manchester Stadium - History - Background

Background

See also: Bids for the 1996 Summer Olympics, 2000 Summer Olympics bids, and 2002 Commonwealth Games

Plans to build a new stadium in Manchester were formulated before 1989 as part of the city's bid to host the 1996 Summer Olympics. Manchester City Council submitted a bid that included a design for an 80,000-capacity stadium on a greenfield site in west Manchester. The bid failed and Atlanta hosted the Games. Four years later the city council bid to host the 2000 Summer Olympics, but this time focusing on a brownfield site 1.6 kilometres (0.99 mi) east of the city centre on derelict land that was the site of Bradford Colliery, known colloquially as Eastlands. The council's shift in focus was driven by emerging government legislation on urban renewal, promising vital support funding for such projects; the government became involved in funding the purchase and clearance of the Eastlands site in 1992.

For the February 1993 bid the city council submitted another 80,000-capacity stadium design produced by design consultants Arup Associates, the firm that helped select the Eastlands site. In October 1993 the games were awarded to Sydney, but the following year Manchester submitted the same scheme design to the Millennium Commission as a "Millennium Stadium", only to have this proposal rejected. Undeterred, Manchester City Council subsequently bid to host the 2002 Commonwealth Games, once again proposing the same site along with stadium plans derived from the 2000 Olympics bid, and this time were successful. In 1996, this same planned stadium competed with Wembley Stadium to gain funding to become the new national stadium, but the money was used to redevelop Wembley.

After successful athletics events at the Commonwealth Games, conversion into a football venue was criticised by athletics figures such as Jonathan Edwards and Sebastian Coe, as the United Kingdom then still lacked plans for a large athletics venue, once the capability for installing an athletics track had been dropped from the designs for a rebuilt Wembley Stadium. Had either of the two larger stadium proposals developed by Arup been agreed for funding, then Manchester would have ended up with a venue capable of being adapted to hosting large scale athletics events through the use of movable seating.

Sport England had wished to avoid creating a white elephant; and so to give the stadium long-term financial viability insisted that the City Council agree to undertake and fund extensive work to convert it from a field and track arena to a football stadium. Sport England hoped either Manchester City Council or Manchester City F.C. would provide the extra £50 million required to convert the stadium to a 65,000 seater athletics and footballing venue with movable seating. However, Manchester City Council did not have the money to facilitate movable seating and Manchester City were lukewarm about the idea of movable seating. Stadium architects Arup Sport believed history demonstrated that maintaining a rarely-used athletics track often does not work with football – and cited examples such as the Stadio delle Alpi and the Munich Olympic Stadium, with both Juventus and Bayern Munich moving to new stadiums less than 40 years after inheriting them.