About Men Arena

The Manchester Evening News Arena or M.E.N. Arena is also called with The M.E.N. or simply Manchester Arena). It is a big indoor arena in Manchester, England. It is at present sponsored by the Manchester Evening News and has a capacity of 3,000–21,000. It was available for pulic in 1995, and was initially sponsored by NYNEX (a British cable television provider, as opposed to the NYNEX Corporation, a telephone service provider in the United States) as the NYNEX Arena. The Arena took its presend name in 1998 after the NYNEX brand name had disappeared as a result of a merger with Mercury Communications in 1997.

The M.E.N. Arena is Europe's biggest indoor arena and music venue. The arena was built to coincide with Manchester's two bids to host the Olympic games in 1996 and 2000 (which were won by Atlanta in 1996 and Sydney in 2000).

The M.E.N. Arena was one of the first indoor venues in Europe to be built following the conventionally American arena layout of 360 degree seating and is the only arena in the UK to have this feature (London's O2 Arena has just one tier of seating that is 360 degrees whereas the MEN Arena has two) Other European indoor venues built to the same concept are the Kölnarena in Cologne, O2 arena in Prague, Color Line Arena in Hamburg, and The O2 arena in London, amongst others.