Manchester City worked with the council to build a training facility that remains world class 10 years after opening
Manchester City worked with the council to build a training facility that remains world class 10 years after opening
Jon Stemp had never been to Manchester before September 2008 when he was hired to transform the infrastructure of the newly-rich Manchester City, yet his first day served as a perfect crash course in the city and its football teams.
His taxi driver at the train station asked him if he meant 'the f****** council house' when he asked to go to the stadium, and once he arrived a City executive gave him a book covering 100 years of the club's history and a Jimmy Grimble DVD. The message was clear: this club has existed long before you so learn about the history and leave it in a better place.
The job description was no less daunting. City's owners, having tried to improve what they had after their 2008 takeover, had quickly reached the conclusion that a new facility was needed to match their lofty ambitions and realised that they could come to a mutually beneficial partnership with a city council that was desperate to see regeneration in east Manchester.
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So was born the 'World Leading Project', which saw Stemp and his colleagues go around the world for two years learning from what the top sporting organisations had got right - and wrong - with their training grounds. One of the biggest lessons came from Arsenal, where Arsene Wenger admitted where they had gone wrong with London Colney in 1999.
"We went and sat with him and he said: 'We realised the biggest mistake at our training ground on the day that we opened. We didn't leave room in our building design for what we didn't yet know. We designed for a moment in time,'" Stemp told the Manchester Evening News.
"That resonated with us and when we designed the facility we had 12 teams of different age groups - there are 24 teams now and the reason why we can accommodate them is because we built in room for evolution and growth. Even now, it's starting to grow but because it's landlocked you can't really go bigger once you've locked your acreage in. It was vital that we left room for it to grow over time.
"Most football clubs think in one, three or five-year cycles. Our ownership and the city council were encouraging us to think in a 30-year cycle. That's very rare when you're encouraged to take a long-term view. That's a testament to the ownership, they told us not to rush and to build a meaningful partnership with the city.
"At the end of our research, we consolidated our learning into an insights document that can be distilled into three things: all great sporting organisations have a very clear philosophy that drives who they are, that philosophy shapes their functionality - the way their business functions - and that dictates the architecture.
"Philosophy drives function and function drives architecture, which is what you design. We went round the world and then came back to what Manchester City believe in."
While City worked out what they wanted, they also needed to work out what they could physically do. The site was contaminated having previously been a chemical plant and steelworks, while a United-supporting businessman refused to sell up a significant bit of land that was needed, threatening to sell it off to 50,000 fellow Reds at £250 for a square foot.
City paid £22m - a big deal at the time - to remediate the land but even that only covered four metres under the ground. That meant that when it came to installing 2,000 trees that had been brought over three years earlier to a farm on the outskirts of the city to acclimatise to the weather, they had to be planted on top of clay bottoms to stop the roots growing down into the contaminated land and killing them.
With those hurdles overcome, Stemp and his team settled on version 19 of the City Football Academy, with an intent to deliver philosophy and function with every element of their architecture. The feeling from City's bosses was that everything needed to be right because they would only get one shot at it.
"There was a will from the leadership that said if we can create this campus, it is going to have a profound impact not only on the city but the sector. Not many places have that connection between the first team, the stadium, the academy in one place," said Stemp.
"We experienced that at Carrington because the academy was at Platt Lane and the offices were at the stadium. There was a real sense in those years that we never felt whole, and I think other clubs wrestle with this because the geographical situation means different communities who don't really feel the same.
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"There was a sense that if we could assemble everything we would get a 1+1=3 outcome. We'd get everything everyone needs but we'd all be together and that was a profound psychological impact on the workforce, the fans, and the players. We wanted each one of those communities to get exactly what they ended without cross-pollination of people getting in their way, but to be reminded that they exist as part of a wider eco-system.
"Where they come into contact with each other, they're just a part of a wider community. They have what they want, they don't cross-pollinate so the first team needs to be private but the academy can see the first team and are close enough to smell it.
"Every day in that place somewhere between 100 to 300 people are coming into work everyday whose job is to win and be better at what they do, whether they are working in the kitchen or they are Erling Haaland. Our job is to create the environment where you can be the very best version of yourself and say there is no impediment here to me being better tomorrow than I was today."
From taking tips from the White House on how to arrange the press seating, to making sure the receptionists are sat below eye level to look up at anyone entering the facility, everything is designed with the intention of making the City Football Group a place where things and people can thrive. And while the template has been adapted for the many clubs in the CFG - there are now 10 CFAs around the world and another four are in development - Manchester will always be the mothership.
Executives from other clubs are flown in to meet with Manchester council officials to demonstrate the importance of working together, and ideas about local work and employment have been exported around the world; 46 young apprentices were hired with reading and writing lessons incorporated into their programme and all were employed in the city at the end of their three-year course, while the club set out that 70 per cent of the labour and materials should come from within 15 minutes of the stadium.
In a story that really deserves better telling, Stemp's attempts to prove he was an honorary Mancunian saw him dressed as a giant bumblebee in the Royal Box at Wembley in 2011, two rows behind chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, as City won the FA Cup Final to kick off their trophy haul under Sheikh Mansour. The artwork installed in 2014 near the west edge of City's training ground outside Connell College, Ryan Gander's Dad's Halo Effect featuring three giant steel chess pieces is a nod to the industrial past of the area as well as the 'learning through playing' that has transformed east Manchester.
"That's a credit to the vison of the ownership and the city council. That's a partnership," said Stemp. "You don't get that stuff without real strategic alignment. In the first couple of years the city and our leadership group created the Strategic Regeneration Framework (SRF) so a visual framework document for all development that could come in the next 30 years for east Manchester. It was a platform for how you might develop the east of the city. How many times does a football club get a chance to participate in something like that? It's smart because we're going to be here so we can align our values.
"It's always been a Manchester story. Manchester has opened its doors to lots of people who have been able to land and contribute to something that will be here long after we've gone. We'll be able to say we've left it better than we've found it but others are going to take it on and make it even better."
It has not been without its critics but the work done by the club and the council has brought real change both to Manchester and the world. As well as significantly altering the demographics of the city, the City Football Academy serves as the base for a club that has climbed to the top of world football - and still wants to win more.