Ratina Stadium in the context of UEFA Women's Euro 2009

Ratina is a district in the center of Tampere, Finland, on the east side of Tammerkoski. The Ratina Stadium, Tampere Bus Station and Tampere's largest shopping mall, the Ratina shopping centre, are located in the district, among others. To the north of Ratina is also the Koskikeskus shopping centre. The district consists of a peninsula called Ratinanniemi, which is surrounded on three sides by Ratinansuvanto and Viinikanlahti. Between Ratinanniemi and the Laukontori square is a pedestrian bridge called Laukonsilta, which significantly shortens travel time to the city center. The Tampere highway has good connections to the Helsinki-Tampere motorway and along it to the Tampere Ring Road, and via the Ratinansilta bridge and the Hämeenpuisto park to Highway 12. Ratinanranta is the southern part of the Tampere highway from Ratina, which used to be a recreation ground and factory area. Its new construction into a dense apartment building area of 1,000 inhabitants began in 2008, and the latest residential buildings east of the Voimakatu street are expected to be completed in 2013.

The name ratina probably dates back to the road meaning rata. Ratinanniemi, which lies between the Ratina Reservoir and Lake Pyhäjärvi's Viinikanlahti, remained uninhabited for a long time, until a few residential buildings began to rise there in the late 19th century. In 1874 a glass factory was built on the peninsula and a dozen years later two machine shops, but all these companies remained short-lived. Later, a brick factory and the city's electric power station operated in the area. The first town plan for the Ratinanniemi district was completed in 1886, according to which a total of 57 residential estates were reserved in the area, the smallest of which were for villa buildings. The plan for the eastern part of the Ratina district, with an area reserved for a new bus station, was confirmed in 1935.

A multi-purpose stadium is a type of stadium designed to be easily used for multiple types of events. While any stadium could potentially host more than one type of sport or event, this concept usually refers to a design philosophy that stresses multifunctionality over speciality. It is used most commonly in Canada and the United States, where the two most popular outdoor team sports—Canadian football or American football and baseball—require radically different facilities. Football uses a rectangular field, while baseball is played on a diamond with a large outfield. Since Canadian football fields are larger than American ones, the design specifications for Canadian facilities are somewhat less demanding. The particular design to accommodate both is usually an oval, although some later designs use an octorad. While building stadiums in this manner allows sports teams and governments to share costs, it also presents some challenges.

In North America, multipurpose stadiums were primarily built during the 1960s and 1970s as shared home stadiums for Major League Baseball and National Football League or Canadian Football League teams. Some stadiums were renovated to allow multipurpose configurations during the 1980s. This type of stadium is associated with an era of suburbanization, in which many sports teams followed their fans out of large cities into areas with cheaper, more plentiful land. They were usually built near highways and had large parking lots, but were rarely connected to public transit. As multipurpose stadiums were rarely ideal for both sports usually housed in them, they had fallen out of favor by the 1990s, with the SkyDome (in Canada) that opened in 1989 being the last such stadium completed to accommodate baseball and football. With the completion of the Truman Sports Complex in Kansas City in 1973, a model for purpose-built stadiums was laid down. Since the Baltimore Orioles left the multi-purpose Memorial Stadium for the baseball-only Oriole Park at Camden Yards in 1992, most major league sports stadiums have been built specifically for one sport. However, some newer NFL stadiums (e.g. Seattle, Atlanta, Charlotte) have been built with consideration for the possible use of the stadium for Major League Soccer or international soccer, which has similar field dimensions to American football. Fields that are suitable for soccer are almost always equally suitable for either rugby code (rugby union or rugby league), and the 2031 Men's Rugby World Cup is expected to employ the same stadiums as the NFL and MLS.