Conseco Fieldhouse is a sports arena in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. It is the home of the Indiana Pacers of the National Basketball Association and the Indiana Fever of the Women’s National Basketball Association. The Indiana Ice of the United States Hockey League also use Conseco Fieldhouse as their home arena for a few games a year. Additionally, other entertainment events such as concerts are frequently scheduled there. The name is a result of the naming rights to the venue being sold to Conseco, the financially-troubled financial services organization based in nearby Carmel.
Conseco Fieldhouse replaced Market Square Arena as the home of the Indiana Pacers on November 6, 1999. It is notable for being the first modern “retro”-styled facility in the NBA.
In 2002, Conseco Fieldhouse served as one of two sites for the FIBA Men’s World Basketball Championship, sharing the honors with RCA Dome.
The venue has hosted four Big Ten Conference men’s basketball tournaments (2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008) and it will host the tournament for five straight years starting in 2008 after it won the Big Ten bid over Chicago and the United Center.
Conseco Fieldhouse has received widespread acclaim as one of the finest facilities in all of the sports world. It is designed after Hinkle Fieldhouse at Butler University and the other great fieldhouses that covered the state of Indiana with standing room only crowds on Friday nights in the formative years of high school basketball. The fieldhouse is a veritable museum to the rich heritage that is Indiana basketball.
In 2005, 2006, and 2007, Conseco Fieldhouse was ranked the No. 1 venue in the NBA according to the Sports Business Journal/Sports Business Daily Reader Survey. In 2006 The Ultimate Sports Road Trip reaffirmed Conseco Fieldhouse as the best venue in all 4 of the major sports leagues. ?The Ultimate Sports Road Trip has recently concluded a re-scoring and re-evaluation of all 122 franchises in the four major sports, based on our personal visits to each of the teams in a journey that began in 1998. Based on our criteria, Conseco Fieldhouse has once again withstood scrutiny to be named the ?best of the best? in the four major sports. Everything about Conseco Fieldhouse is top notch, a sparkling venue in a sparkling city, said Farrell and Kulyk.?
In October 2004, Conseco Fieldhouse hosted the 2004 FINA Short Course World Swimming Championships. A 25 meter 300,000 gallon competition pool and 175,000 gallon warm-up pool were temporarily installed. A total of 71,659 tickets were sold for the four day event. The crowd on the evening of Saturday, October 11th, 2004 set a record for the largest attendance at a U.S. Swimming event outside of the Olympics with 11,488 people.
Conseco also played host to WCW Sin, a professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) event produced by World Championship Wrestling, on January 14, 2001. It also hosted The Great American Bash on July 23, 2006 . Conseco will also host the 21st SummerSlam on August 17, 2008.
The Feijenoord Stadion, better known by its nickname de Kuip (the Tub), is a stadium in Rotterdam, completed in 1937. Today it’s called “Stadion Feyenoord”. The name is derived from the area “Feijenoord” in Rotterdam, and from the club with the same name.
Capacity at completion: 64,000. Maximum capacity: 69,000 (1949). Present day capacity: 51,177.
It is the home stadium of football club Feyenoord, one of the traditional top teams in the Netherlands. It has also long been one of the home grounds of the Dutch national team, having hosted over 150 international matches, with the first one being a match against Belgium on May 2, 1937. Also, a record number of ten European finals has taken place in the Feijenoord stadium. The last one was the 2002 UEFA Cup final in which Feyenoord defeated Borussia Dortmund 3-2.
In 2000, the Feyenoord stadium hosted the final of Euro 2000, played in the Netherlands and Belgium, with France beating Italy in extra time.
Leen van Zandvliet, Feyenoord’s president in the 1930s came up with the idea of building an entirely new stadium, unlike any other on the continent, with two free hanging tiers and no obstacles blocking the view. The great examples at that time were Highbury, where the West and East stands had been recently built as a double deck, and Yankee Stadium in New York City. Johannes Brinkman and Leendert van der Vlugt, the famous designers of the van Nelle factories in Rotterdam were asked to design a stadium out of glass, concrete and steel, cheap materials at that time. They came up with a design that is modern even in this era. In fact, “de Kuip” acted as an example for many of the greatest stadia we know today, eg Nou Camp. The stadium was co-financed by the billionaire Daniël George van Beuningen, who made his fortune in World War I, exporting coal from Germany to England through neutral Netherlands.
In World War II, the stadium nearly got torn down, because the German occupiers needed the materials. Fortunately it didn’t come to that. After the war the stadium got extra seats (1949) and stadium lights (1958).
On 29 October 1991 De Kuip was named as being one of Rotterdam’s monuments. In 1994 the stadium was extensively renovated to its present form. It became an all seater and the roof was extended to cover all the seats. An extra building was constructed for commercial use by Feyenoord, it also houses a restaurant and a museum, The Home of History. The stadium has hosted concerts since 1978. The first ones were Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. Others who have played there include Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, U2, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Dido, Guns N’ Roses, Genesis and Dire Straits. Since 1996 the stadium didn’t host many concerts anymore, because of the competition of the Amsterdam ArenA. As of January 2007 the stadium can be found in 3D format on Google Earth.
Ernst Happel Stadium (Ernst-Happel-Stadion) in Leopoldstadt, the 2nd district of Austria’s capital Vienna, was known as the Prater Stadium (Praterstadion) prior to 1992. It was built between 1929 and 1931 for the second Workers’ Olympiad to the design of German architect Otto Ernst Schweizer. The stadium was renamed in honour of Ernst Happel following his death in 1992. It will host the Euro 2008 final on 29 June.
The Ernst Happel Stadium is the largest football stadium in Austria. It is the home of the Austrian national football team. Club football matches are generally limited to the domestic cup and international competitions featuring one of Vienna’s top clubs, FK Austria Wien and SK Rapid Wien, as their regular stadiums are too small to host UEFA Champions League and UEFA Cup matches. Local derbies between FK Austria and SK Rapid have also been played in the stadium.
Although its current capacity is only 49,825, the stadium is rated one of UEFA’s Five Star Stadiums (normally 50,000+ capacity), permitting it to host the UEFA Champions League final. The seating capacity is being expanded to 53,008 for the 2008 European Football Championship, with the final to be held in the stadium. The stadium will also host 3 group games, 2 quarter final matches and a semifinal. The attendance record of 92,706 for a match against the USSR was in 1960. The capacity has since been reduced.
The Alamodome is a 65,000 seat, multi-purpose facility that is primarily used as a football/basketball stadium and convention center in San Antonio, Texas, USA. The facility opened on May 15, 1993, at a cost of $186 million.
Along with placating the San Antonio Spurs ownership’s demands for a larger basketball venue, the multi-purpose facility was intended to increase the city’s convention traffic and attract a professional football franchise. The Spurs played basketball in the Alamodome for a decade, but became disenchanted with the facility and convinced Bexar County to construct them and the San Antonio Livestock Exposition Inc. a new arena now called the AT&T Center.
The Alamodome was constructed after voters in 1989 approved a five-year, half-cent sales tax increase that was collected by VIA Metropolitan Transit, the local transit authority. Upon completion of the facility, it was nearly debt-free and showed a net operating profit within its first two years of operation. On June 9, 1994, ownership of the Alamodome was transferred from the transit authority to the City of San Antonio.
On April 15, 2005, the San Antonio City Council voted to spend close to $6.5 million to renovate the Alamodome in an effort to lure a Major League Soccer franchise to the city. After the election of Phil Hardberger as the new mayor, those efforts were abandoned, though the approved renovations to the facility will continue as planned. The city administration and local business leaders have re-focused their efforts to bringing an NFL franchise to San Antonio.
On April 19, 2007, the San Antonio City Council unanimously approved an additional $8.3 million to fund renovations and enhancements to the facility.
Although when the Alamodome was built it was an ideal state-of-the-art NFL stadium, by today’s standards the facility would have to undergo renovations and add a considerable number of luxury suites in order to make it a profitable venue for an NFL team. Preliminary estimates put the cost of improvements at $100-150 million.
