“One of the players came over to me last week who has been out injured for a while and he said, ‘I’m five weeks away but I might only be three now.’
“Whether that turns into reality in this instance is another matter but we’ve got something here for the long term that will help players get back on the pitch sooner.
“That’s one of the things on which you can measure the impact of this building. It gives you the best chance of getting results of keeping your players available or, if they get injured, they come back sooner.”
That is the hope and expectation of Stoke City vice-chairman Richard Smith as he sits in a new £10 million first team training facility at Clayton Wood.
He has just completed a 15-month project to bring this to fruition as a cutting edge, top spec scheme that he is confident is Premier League quality.
“We’re absolutely delighted,” he said. “I’ve worked in construction for the best part of 40 years now and there is nothing more satisfying than seeing the end result and it being populated by people.
“You start with a sketch on a pad of paper and you know roughly what you want to put into something but translating that into a design and actually getting it built then seeing people bringing it to life is fantastic. We’re delighted with the finished product.
“We obviously want to get back into the Premier League and if we’re going to achieve that we want to attract the best talent we can and then, not only that, have equivalent facilities for a Premier League club. There is no point us having the best facilities in the Championship. We need to be on a level with Premier League teams and they have been putting some serious investment into their training grounds.”
Stoke have now spent more than £25m at Clayton Wood since Smith was headhunted by his father-in-law Peter Coates to take responsibility for the club’s properties back in 2008.
When he arrived there was no mains electricity nor running water and part of the site, which is on a flood plain, virtually became a swamp in the winter. About £500,000 has sorted out the drainage and about £1m has gone on irrigation.
Smith and colleagues embarked on a tour of rival clubs including Everton and Aston Villa before setting about building the original £4m pavilion, which opened in 2009 and has since had a series of major extensions.
But player and staff count has spiralled for senior and youth sides to mean that building gradually became crowded – plus rules have changed and there have been almost science fiction level developments in potential facilities.
“At the time we built the first building we thought that would be sufficient for the first team and academy,” said Smith. “Then the Premier League were good enough to change the (academy) rules so we had to extend the existing building. Then we found that was getting a bit tight for us and we extended it again in several places. The most recent extension was only finished at the beginning of last year, which was the far end of the existing building.
“I guess we never really knew at the outset that we would end up putting up a new building here but we did actually have a masterplan which always showed a building being on this particular site that we’re sitting on now but it didn’t have a name. It just said ‘future development’ or words to that effect. When we decided we needed a separate building just for the first team this was the natural place for it to go – and thankfully it fits!”
About £400,000 has gone on stocking the gymnasium with new equipment, including personalised Stoke City weights. There are force plates to measure reaction times and Wallace and Gromit-style trousers to decompress air and speed up muscle recovery.
Stoke had previously been renting a mobile cryotherapy unit but now have a world class one of their own. Players can spend two or three minutes at -120C (minus one hundred and twenty) in an extreme treatment to reduce inflammation and aid rapid recovery. It is going to cost a fortune in upkeep for liquid nitrogen alone.
“I know when one of our peer group won the Premier League, much to a lot of people’s amazement, one of the things that helped that happen was the fact they had a cryotherapy unit,” said Smith. “It became the in thing then but rather than it being the latest, greatest thing, it’s become part and parcel of having elite athletes. It’s something you need now.
“We identified what we didn’t have in the existing facility. We didn’t think our gym was big enough, for example. We wanted to have a pool other than a hydrotherapy pool and a cold plunge pool. We also were bringing in cryotherapy units on a rental basis and we wanted to have that as a permanent feature of the new facility.
“But of course it’s not for me to decide. I’m a football fan but I’m not a football man so you rely on people working in your team on the football side to identify, with a blank canvas, what we wanted in this building and how we would want it to be different than we have now. You pick up all of those requirements on a wish list and try to deliver most of them.
“You future proof as much as you can. We did that as much as we could with the existing building but that’s more than 15 years old now so things are bound to change. The game moves on. You’d never have predicted how the game was going to go. We’ve got certain teams working in this building that didn’t exist back in 2008. We would never have anticipated that.
“You try to look into your crystal ball and work out what is going to happen in the game and how we can best prepare for that.”
All this has been funded by club owner and chairman John Coates, who is restricted by financial fair play rules about what he can spend in the transfer market but not in terms of infrastructure.
It is no secret he has deep pockets but Smith added: “We set a budget and we had to work to that throughout. I’m delighted to say that we didn’t quite meet the budget but it was very close, certainly within an acceptable level.”
It was also important to Stoke’s owners that, if they are spending this kind of money, it should go on local expertise and back into the North Staffordshire economy as much as possible.
Smith said: “It was a key factor to me when we appointed the contractor that built this building that they utilise local resources. We said that one of the key things you will be measured on is your ability to bring in companies that are within a 25-mile radius of this site.
“To pick one example, the audio-visual installation, like the one we had put into Ricardo’s sports bar, has all been delivered by a local company based in Longton. That’s a significant investment for us but also some real kudos for them. Both projects are a real string to their bow to be able to market those products outside of this football club. We are not only investing in local companies but helping them a greater opportunity to provide more employment for their organisations.
A significant part of the work was the mechanical, electrical and plumbing installations and a local company called Drayton Beaumont delivered that.”
It has all made for this being the club’s second most expensive standalone project in its long history, behind only the building of the stadium.
“I think we’ve spent it in a very measured way,” said Smith. “We haven’t gone for a vanity project. We’ve gone for things we actually need to actually make us better, hopefully.”
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