The City of Manchester Stadium (currently known as the Etihad Stadium for sponsorship reasons) is the home of Premier League club Manchester City, with a domestic football capacity of 53,400, making it the 6th-largest football stadium in England and ninth-largest in the United Kingdom.
Built to host the 2002 Commonwealth Games, the stadium has since staged the 2008 UEFA Cup final, England football internationals, rugby league matches, a boxing world title fight, the England rugby union team's final group match of the 2015 Rugby World Cup and summer music concerts during the football off-season.
The stadium, originally proposed as an athletics arena in Manchester's bid for the 2000 Summer Olympics, was converted after the 2002 Commonwealth Games from a 38,000 capacity arena to a 48,000 seat football stadium at a cost to the city council of £22 million and to Manchester City of £20 million. Manchester City F.C. agreed to lease the stadium from Manchester City Council and moved there from Maine Road in the summer of 2003.
The stadium was built by Laing Construction at a cost of £112 million and was designed and engineered by Arup, whose design incorporated a cable-stayed roof structure and supported entirely by twelve exterior masts and cables. The stadium design has received much praise and many accolades, including an award from the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2004 for its innovative inclusive building design and a special award in 2003 from the Institution of Structural Engineers for its unique structural design.
In August 2015, a 7,000 seat third tier on the South Stand was completed, in time for the start of the 2015–16 football season. The expansion was designed to be in keeping with the existing roof design. A £300 million redevelopment programme of the existing North Stand entailing the construction of a new hotel with 400 rooms, covered fan park for 3,000 people and increased net capacity to 61,474 commenced in July 2023 and will be completed by the end of 2026.
History
Background
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 west of Manchester city centre. 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 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, the firm that helped select the Eastlands site. On 23 September 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 downsized 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, at the time, the United Kingdom still lacked plans for a large athletics venue due to the capability of installing an athletics track having 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 had a venue capable of being adapted to hosting large-scale athletics events through the use of movable seating.