FM FEATURE CASE STUDY CATHY HAYWARD
FEVER PITCH COST: £113M BUILD TIME: 18 MONTHS STADIUM SEATING CAPACITY: 32,000 CAR PARKING SPACES: 2,000 SIZE OF G CASINO: 43,056 SQ FT SIZE OF JAGUAR INDOOR ARENA: 64,583 SQ FT JAGUAR ARENA STANDING CAPACITY: 10,000 NUMBER OF BEDROOMS (ON-SITE DE VERE HOTEL): 80 ON-SITE CAR PARKING SPACES: 2,000 FITNESS STATIONS (ARENA HEALTH AND FITNESS CENTRE): 100
The Ricoh Arena will be a star player of the football competition in the 2012 Olympic Games, finds FM World editor Cathy Hayward
he journey from Coventry train station to the Ricoh Arena takes about 10 minutes and is somewhat nondescript; around the A4053 ringroad, past the familiar IKEA blue box and north for a few miles on B roads. It’s not a journey many visitors will remember. But all that will change next summer when the venue plays host to the 2012 Olympics football competition and the route from station to stadium will be dressed with everything from banners and flags to flowers and giant models of footballers on roundabouts. The city is being transformed, thanks to European funding, with a new development welcoming Olympic visitors. “When people arrive at the station or at one of the outlying car parks they must feel like they have arrived at the Olympics,” explains the venue’s facilities director Anthony Mundy.
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The 40-acre, £113m site will play host to 12 football matches during the competition including five days of two matches a day back-to-back. And the home of Championship side Coventry City FC is in good company: Old Trafford, Wembley, Hampden Park and Cardiff are also hosting Olympic football. Aston Villa had been chosen as the Midlands venue in the original Olympic bid, but the club had to pull out because of planned building work. The Ricoh competed with Notts Forest, Derby, Leicester and Birmingham football clubs but won, Mundy believes, because of the facility’s flexibility. “We are not just a football club with a few thousands seats and a pitch. The Ricoh includes an 80-bed hotel, the UK’s largest casino, an indoor arena which holds 10,000 people standing and 3,000 seated for a
dinner, an auditorium, restaurants, bars and cafés and numerous meeting and entertainment facilities,” says Mundy, who was head of FM at Millennium Point, Birmingham’s flagship millennium project, before joining the Ricoh three years ago. Kicking off the games The first football of the games to be played in England will be hosted at the venue (a game in Cardiff kicks off 20 minutes before) and the women’s bronze final will be held here but Mundy won’t know which specific games will be played, and what countries could be coming, until the draw in April next year. Time is even more of a pressure at the arena, because the football starts on 22 July 2012 – two days before the opening ceremony – to fit in all the games. There are more football matches, in fewer venues with less time www.fm-world.co.uk
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