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Stoke City starting work on new training HQ as £30m investment plan revealed
Stoke City are starting work on a new state-of-the-art training facility to consolidate the club’s Premier League ambitions – as a £20m five-year infrastructure plan grows to £30m over seven years and with visions being added beyond that.
Contractors from Speller Metcalfe are set to begin the club’s most expensive individual project since building the bet365 Stadium, a new two-storey development for the first team at Clayton Wood on what has previously been used as a warm-up area.
The club hopes to open doors for players and staff before Christmas 2025, with the existing building then being used solely by the academy and women’s teams.
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Vice chairman Richard Smith said: “We’re absolutely delighted. We can’t wait to get going. It’s taken a long time to get to this stage. We put this into our five-year development plan right at the start. We’re in year four of that now so the initial idea was some time ago and we started doing work on the actual project well over 12 months ago. To be seeing it actually starting on site is great.”
The new facility will include as gymnasium, swimming pool, hydrotherapy suite, cryotherapy suite, offices for all the support staff in the first team operation, a tactics room for video analysis and catering facilities for staff and players, with views out onto the pristine training pitches. It will be arguably the best facility in the EFL and go up against what clubs can offer in the top flight.
The demand has been pressing because of Stoke’s commitment to running a Category One academy. The evolution of youth set-ups over the last decade has seen the number of full-time staff rocket since Clayton Wood was designed for an initial £4m in 2009, with a couple of extensions since then at £1.5m and £1m each.
Smith said: “I don’t think we’ve made any secret of the fact we want to get back into the Premier League. We spent 10 years there but we’ve been out of it for a while now and we’re very keen to get back up there. I think other clubs have invested heavily in facilities in the Premier League and we want to make ourselves ready for the transition before we get in there.
“I’ve been with the club now for a long time and when I first arrived we had portacabins on this site to support the first team. One of my first jobs was to develop the building we have on the property now but we’ve outgrown that facility. We need somewhere to accommodate first team, academy and women’s team operations.
“When the Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan rules came into being we had to extend our existing pavilion having only finished it two years previously. We found that we needed to have more staff to qualify for category one academy and part of the requirement for this new building is so that we can sustain that so we’re not so overcrowded in the facility we have at the moment. It gives people space to breathe and hopefully improve their working environment so we can do better overall.”
This project was on a long list of schemes put forward in 2021 when Smith and chairman John Coates drew up a five-year investment plan. A catalogue of improvements since then has also included the redevelopment of Delilah’s bar into Ricardo’s, launching a fan zone behind the Boothen End, introducing safe standing into the south stand and relocating the away end. Suites and concourses have been made over and seating replaced.
But there is no sign of slowing down.
Smith said: “We’re now into year four but I’ve already put together plans that will go into year seven and it will become a rolling plan. It’s not about just getting to that point in time and then stop. Through the course of this year I will be looking ahead even further at what we are going to do next because, financially, you need to plan.
“The five-year plan was initially projected at £20m. That turned to £30m and now we’re tending to run at £5m-6m each year investment (in infrastructure). You have lumps, peaks and troughs but that’s the average. This is a significant investment here. It’s part of a wide project taking in refurbishment and all in all we’ll be spending £12m down here.
“I would hope that our supporters will see it as a commitment from the owners that we want to get back to where we feel we belong.”
