Re: Etihad Campus, Stadium and Collar Site Development Threa
Oliver Holt column: Manchester City have gone home — now United need to fear being shut out
Dec 09, 2014 20:30
OPINION BY OLIVERHOLT
The Blues' new £200m training base in the heart of their hometown should cause embarrassment and concern at Old Trafford
Cream of Manchester: The new City complex makes Man United's seem rather last century
There is still, apparently, some cynicism about Manchester City’s state-of-the-art new training complex.
There are still doubts about whether, despite all the money they have spent, any of their academy kids will make it into the first team.
The cynicism will redouble if the Blues fail to reach the last 16 of the Champions League after their clash with Roma here in Italy on Wednesday evening.
The template for longevity they unveiled on Monday suggests a desire to become the Eternal City, but Rome may not be willing to give up its title just yet.
Anyway, I’m sorry, but there’s a bigger picture here that makes the doubts and the cynicism all but irrelevant.
Sure, it will be a setback if City do not progress to the knock-out stages of the world’s premier club competition this season.
But, in the long term, what the club’s owners have created on the east side of the city centre is more important than that.
As a Mancunian, it’s hard not to feel great pride in the regeneration of a hitherto deprived part of the city.
You don’t have to take a tour of the City Football Academy (CFA) that was opened this week to sense that pride, although it helps.
You just have to take the tram – the smart, clean, gleaming new tram - a couple of stops from Manchester Piccadilly station.
Get off at the Holt Town Metrolink station and walk up the hill to the Etihad Stadium, where the current champions of England play.
Or alight at Etihad Campus or Velopark to find yourself at the centre of the kind of sport city that we are only used to glimpsing abroad.
VIEW GALLERY
Wander around the campus of UCLA, just off Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, and you marvel at the wealth of sporting facilities on offer.
It happens in Australia, too. This pride in sport. This willingness to put it at the heart of modernisation and progress.
Too often, we think ‘Why are we incapable of doing that here?’
Now, in Manchester, City have done it.
You know what made me really proud, though? The club hasn’t run away from its city. It has embraced it.
More and more, clubs are divorced from their communities -particularly when it comes to their training grounds.
It’s the football equivalent of white flight. Their facilities are usually on the outside of town, either in an affluent suburb, further out in the countryside or close to the airport.
Sometimes, all three.
Real Madrid, Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United, Inter Milan – they all conform to that model.
The players don’t need to have any contact with their club’s community. They don’t even need to see their city, except on match days.
City have done the opposite of that.
They have moved from their greenfield site at Carrington, outside the M60 motorway ring road, into Manchester city centre.
City have come home.
“Before,” City captain Vincent Kompany said, “the players could stay on the borders of Manchester without ever coming in except for the game.
“Now we are in Manchester every single day.
"It just creates that bond. The people that we see now are not just people who worked at Carrington. They are local people that we work besides every day.
“There is so much more happening here that has to do with the local community. We are side by side with them.
“At Carrington, it was goats and cows and that was it. This move changes a lot.”
Kompany is right.
The move embeds the club in Manchester even more strongly than it was before.
The argument about who is Manchester’s team is facile in many ways, but fans from the red half of the city may look on with some envy at these latest developments.
United need to be careful that they do not get left behind here.
They still have a massive support base, a spectacular record of winning trophies, a proud tradition of bringing kids through from the youth team, considerable spending power and a club history as rich and as powerful as any in the world.
But, compared to what is going on at City, they are starting to look a little bit last century.
Their training base, also at Carrington, seems tired compared to what City have just unveiled.
Their media facilities - their outlet on the world – are desperately outmoded compared to those of Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Chelsea and City.
If I was in any position of influence at Manchester United, I’d be worried about the latest flood of information about developments at City.
In fact, I’d be embarrassed.
I’d be embarrassed that a gaggle of ex-United players have chosen to send their footballing sons to the CFA, not to their alma mater.
And I’d be embarrassed that City, once characterised as crazed spend-thrifts, are starting to look like the better long-term planners.
I’d be applauding the Glazers for recognising the need to throw money at replenishing the first team, but I’d be suggesting that maybe instead of taking so much cash out of the club, they should be investing more heavily in the future, too.
That’s what City are doing.
Be as cynical as you want, but it’s hard not to admire Sheikh Mansour’s long-term vision for the club.
It’s hard not to think that, sooner or later, it’s going to pay off handsomely on the pitch, too.
It has to.
“They don’t build facilities like this for us to fail,” Kompany said.
