Ricoh Arena

The Ricoh Arena (commonly known as the Ricoh) is a stadium complex situated in the Rowleys Green district of the city of Coventry, England. It contains a 32,609-seater rugby union and association football stadium used by Wasps RFC and Coventry City F.C., a 6,000 square metres (65,000 sq ft) exhibition hall, a hotel and a casino. The site is also home to Arena Park Shopping Centre, containing one of the largest Tesco Extra hypermarkets. The site was previously the Foleshill gasworks. The stadium is named after its sponsor, Japanese company Ricoh, which paid £10 million for the naming rights over 10 years. For the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, where stadium naming sponsorship was forbidden, the stadium was known as the City of Coventry Stadium.

Originally built as a replacement for Coventry City's Highfield Road ground, the stadium was initially operated by Arena Coventry Limited (ACL), with Coventry City as tenants. ACL was owned jointly by Coventry City Council and the Higgs Charity. The stadium hosted its first football match in August 2005. The official opening was performed by Dame Kelly Holmes and sports minister Richard Caborn on 24 February 2007, by which time the arena had already hosted a sell-out England U21 football match against Germany as well as a full season of Coventry City matches.

Arena

An arena is an enclosed area, often circular or oval-shaped, designed to showcase theater, musical performances, or sporting events. The word derives from Latin harena, a particularly fine/smooth sand used to absorb blood in ancient arenas such as the Colosseum in Rome. It is composed of a large open space surrounded on most or all sides by tiered seating for spectators. The key feature of an arena is that the event space is the lowest point, allowing for maximum visibility. Arenas are usually designed to accommodate a large number of spectators.

The term arena is sometimes used as a synonym for a very large venue such as Pasadena's Rose Bowl, but such a facility is typically called a stadium, especially if it does not have a roof. The use of one term over the other has mostly to do with the type of event. Football (be it association, rugby, or gridiron) is typically played in a stadium while basketball and ice hockey are typically played in an arena, although many of the larger arenas hold more spectators than do the stadiums of smaller colleges or high schools. There are exceptions. The home of the Duke University basketball team would qualify as an arena, but the facility is called Cameron Indoor Stadium. Domed stadiums, which, like arenas, are enclosed but have the larger playing surfaces and seating capacities found in stadiums, are generally not referred to as arenas in North America. There is also the sport of indoor American football (one variant of which is explicitly known as arena football), a variant of the gridiron-based game that is designed for the usual smaller playing surface of most arenas; variants of other traditionally outdoor sports, including box lacrosse and futsal/indoor soccer, also exist.

Coventry City F.C.

Coventry City F.C. is an English association football club based in Coventry in the West Midlands. The team competes in League One, the third tier of the English football league system.

Coventry City, which was formed as Singers F.C. in 1883, joined the Football League in 1919. They won their only major trophy in 1987 when they beat Tottenham Hotspur 3–2 to win the FA Cup in a match listed by the FA as one of the twelve classic FA Cup Finals. They are one of only five clubs to have ever won the FA Cup and FA Youth Cup 'double' in the same season and they also reached two Football League Cup semi-finals, in 1981 and 1990.

The club, which is nicknamed the Sky Blues owing to the colour of their strip, was an inaugural member of the Premier League in 1992 and had spent 34 consecutive seasons (since 1967) in the English top flight prior to their relegation in 2001. Following eleven seasons in the second-tier Football League Championship without any significant success, Coventry were relegated to Football League One in 2012, the first time in 48 years that the club played in the English league system's third tier.