How St George's Park has become 'the Oxford and Cambridge of English football' (2024)

As 2007 rolled over into 2008, and 41 years of hurt became 42, the Football Association was faced with decisions on two big investments: one was the Fabio Capello project, a £6 million a year punt to see if an Italian could turn England into Italy, and the other was a capital project, the National Football Centre.

The latter would cost an estimated £80 million, £50 million more than the original budget, and many in the game thought that was far too much to spend on a training base near Burton upon Trent, a Midlands town a two-and-a-half-hour drive from England’s place of work, Wembley. But England had just failed to qualify for the 2008 European Championship and the FA was under pressure to do something about it, so it gave the green light to both projects, one more enthusiastically than the other.

Now, as the country hopes the hurtometer will reset on Sunday night after hitting 55, one of those decisions looks decidedly better than the other, and it is perhaps fitting that England’s opponents in their first senior men’s final since 1966 are Italy, the country that built Europe’s first national football centre — Coverciano, on the outskirts of Florence. Capello’s homeland did that in the 1950s, so we have had some catching up to do. And not just with Italy.

The French Football Federation — worried that Germany, the Netherlands and even England were winning things — started to think about an elite base in the 1970s and eventually opened the Institut National du Football de Clairefontaine in 1988, a decade before France would win their first World Cup. The Dutch FA built something similar in Zeist, while the German FA had an unofficial base at Cologne’s German Sports University. The Spanish completed the set when they opened Football City in Madrid in 2003.

The English? Well, we can be a bit hard of learning.

“The National Football Centre was part of a plan — a very comprehensive plan — that we produced in about 2000,” says Howard Wilkinson.

Now 77 and the chairman of the League Managers Association, Wilkinson led Leeds United to the last First Division title before the creation of the Premier League in 1992 and remains the last Englishman to manage a top-flight championship-winning side. But having left Leeds in 1996, he became the FA’s technical director the following year, responsible for the governing body’s coaching and player development work. A former teacher, Wilkinson knew what England needed: a Coverciano or Clairefontaine of their own.

“Its impact can be summed up by the answer I gave to the architect when he asked me what I wanted the place to be and do,” he says when asked if St George’s Park, as England’s base became known when it finally opened in 2012, has played a part in the upturn of the national side’s fortunes.

“I said I wanted it to be the Oxford and Cambridge of football. I wanted it to assist in the development of able and well-educated coaches, who would then be able to better develop players, in a more rounded way. Gareth Southgate and his team exemplify the ambition we had 21 years ago, and if Burton had not been delayed because of the financial problems at (the new) Wembley, we might well have seen the results we’re getting now a little earlier.”

Ah, yes, the delays.

As Wilkinson points out, he and like-minded administrators, such as former England and West Ham United midfielder Sir Trevor Brooking, wanted the FA to build a permanent training base 20 years ago. That was when Wilkinson found the site — 350 acres of rolling Staffordshire countryside — and persuaded the FA board to buy it for £2 million from the Forte Hotels group. They did not know what to do with it either.

“The first time I saw it, I just thought it was fantastic,” Wilkinson recalls. “I saw it from a farm, looking over a gate. I thought, ‘This is it’.”

Unfortunately, he fell out with the FA’s then-chief executive Adam Crozier over the latter’s decision to appoint Sven-Goran Eriksson as England manager without consulting him, so he quit. Wilkinson was soon followed out of the FA’s revolving door by Crozier, who left for an even bigger turnaround job at the Royal Mail, and his replacement, Mark Palios, was forced out in 2004 when a tabloid revealed he and Eriksson both had affairs with the same FA secretary.

This was all a bit of a sideshow, though, to the FA’s real problem: the ballooning costs of rebuilding Wembley. Long story short, it could only afford one building scheme and Wembley won. Burton was mothballed in 2003 and a big fence was put around the dozen pitches the landscapers had put in at that point.

Over the next three years, the FA dithered, with several big voices, namely Football League chief Lord Brian Mawhinney and Premier League chairman Sir David Richards strongly opposed, calling for the FA to cut its losses on the £20 million already spent and try to see if £5 million could be recouped by selling the land.

Crunch votes of the board came and went, the security budget grew, local clubs Burton Albion and Gresley Rovers enjoyed the use of some lovely pitches, and England’s golden generation glittered but failed to get over the tournament hump.

Did Wilkinson ever fear St George’s Park would get parked forever?

“Oh yeah, absolutely. I remember standing up at the FA Council and arguing for it,” he says. “It was much like the recent debate on whether the FA should have sold Wembley to fund grassroots pitches. I lost that one but, thankfully, we won the argument over Burton.

“Over the last few days, I’ve had one or two calls from people who remember and that’s been pleasing. But we had a strong team of supporters, some known, some not. And many of the ideas that were in the Charter for Quality, that my team produced in 1997, have been taken on by good people, Dan Ashworth (the FA’s former director of elite development, who is now the director of football at Brighton & Hove Albion), for example, and Gareth himself.

“I remember talking to him about the National Football Centre in the car to a game when he had just joined the FA (in 2011), and he got it immediately. It’s good to hear him talk about the players as adults who are given guidance on what to do, they are not told. I am sorry if it sounds too scholarly but that’s what coaching and development is — part science, part experience and intuition, part caring.

“The idea sold itself in the end.”

And is it how he pictured it leaning on that farm gate 20 years ago?

“We were sent lots of different sites by the estate agents and I visited at least half a dozen,” he says. “I initially wanted a site closer to Birmingham, somewhere nearer the M40 (motorway) would have been ideal, but Burton ended up being perfect.

“I wanted somewhere with space for pitches and classrooms, somewhere people could learn but also enjoy spending time there. I remember there was a big pine tree in the forest that had been planted to commemorate the Battle of Waterloo. I wanted people to be able to see that from the hotel — I thought it might send a subliminal message. Maybe that sounds strange!

“And I didn’t want a straight drive leading up to it, I wanted a road that would take you somewhere, so you’d come around a bend and then it would just open up in front of you and you’d say, ‘Wow’.”

St George’s Park, which was eventually opened in 2012 at a total cost of £105 million, definitely does that.

As Wilkinson explains, you turn into the property off a two-lane B-road between two villages, Newborough and Needwood. Burton, a town famous for brewing beer, is six miles to the east. Birmingham and Nottingham, the Midlands’ biggest cities, are about 30 miles away in opposite directions.

To some, it is in the centre of England; to others, it is in the middle of nowhere.

But even its detractors would have to admit that it is a well-appointed nowhere.

There are 14 pitches, including the Sir Bobby Charlton Wembley replica pitch and the Sir Alf Ramsey indoor pitch.

It has swimming pools, exercise bikes, rowing machines, lifting racks, a hydrotherapy pool, a three-lane sprinting track, medical rooms, a 330-room four-star Hilton hotel, the Sir Bobby Robson ballroom, a futsal gym, an outdoor “leadership centre” for team-building activities, conference rooms, a health spa, restaurants and inflatable unicorns.

It is the home of FA’s coaching and education division, as well as the League Managers Association, and the training base for all of England’s 28 representative teams.

“It has proven to be exactly what was required and when I think about those two huge capital projects, which most football federations wouldn’t have touched, St George’s Park has been far more important than Wembley,” says one former FA employee, who asked to remain anonymous as he well remembers how fraught Burton’s early years were.

“But it has taken time for that to become obvious and it is part of wider cultural change in English football. Academies are only about 20 years old, we only brought in the Pro Licence in 2000, then you’ve got the Elite Player Performance Plan and the work that Dan Ashworth and others did on the “England DNA”.

“I remember Trevor Brooking saying in 2009 that the second half of the decade we’ve just been through would be better than the first, because that’s how long it takes to develop a generation of coaches and players.

“St George’s Park is working now, because a generation has got used to being there. It wasn’t that long ago that the senior team really wasn’t sold on the place. Moving the FA’s technical department there lock, stock and barrel was a big step. But it has become home over time.

“I also wonder if that calmness people notice when they go there is because the current group, while very talented, perhaps don’t have as many superstars as there were 10 or 15 years ago. But that could just be about that change of culture. And that’s the important thing. It’s not really about the building, it’s about the culture.”

David Sheepshanks, the former Ipswich Town chairman who was given the job of completing Wilkinson’s vision, agrees.

“Before St George’s Park, we (England) were living out of a suitcase,” says Sheepshanks, who has been the national football centre’s chairman since 2008.

“We had different teams training in different places and there was no rub-off effect between the age-group teams and the senior side, which you get at clubs. It was a revolution in the much-maligned FA Council that got the project back on track — they told the board they had to build it and I was lucky enough to be given the chance to lead a great team in getting it done.”

Former Sunderland owner Sir Bob Murray, the centre’s first chief executive Julie Harrington, local councillor Frank McArdle, former FA chiefs Martin Glenn and Alex Horne, Ashworth and Southgate are just some of the people Sheepshanks names as being crucial players in the building of the complex.

But he admits he was one of those who originally worried it was in the wrong place and says the concerns that many voiced weighed heavily on him.

“There were plenty of sceptics! I remember them saying this cannot be a white elephant,” he explains.

“Well, it isn’t. And yes, there were lots of questions about the location — I had them, too — but it has turned out to be perfect.

“We didn’t build it sooner for the simple reason that we couldn’t afford it. I know that frustrated people and we’ll never know if we could have got to this point sooner, but we did learn a lot during that delay.

“I remember meeting the architect for the first time — a great guy called Alan Smith from Red Box Design — it was late 2010 or early 2011. Bob Murray took me up to the north east to meet him for dinner and Alan kept pouring me large glasses of wine and asking me what my vision for the place was. I just spouted off some things that we’d been brainstorming.

“But we eventuallycame up with seven words: accessible, aspirational, educational, rewarding, stimulating, sustainable and symbolic.

“We wanted the National Football Centre to be somewhere people could visit, somewhere they could dream and learn something, we wanted it to be a place where time would be well spent and we wanted it to be sustainable, in every sense. What really pleases me now is that the players want to be at St George’s Park.”

The issue of the base’s sustainability has come up, particularly at times when the FA has had to tighten its belt and shed staff. The pandemic has not been kind to anyone in professional sport, particularly those with expensive hotel and conferencing sidelines.

The FA has tried hard to turn St George’s Park into a cash-generator but a sports medicine joint venture with Spire Healthcare did not work out and a plan for US Olympic sprinting great Michael Johnson to open a training base there never panned out.

That said, if you want to book a room there, perhaps as a base for Burton Albion’s home League One opener against Ipswich on August 14, there are a range of rooms available from £142 to the presidential suite at £432. That will get you access to the pool and your breakfast, as well as a chance to take a picture of the infamous “Countdown to Qatar”(next year’s World Cup) clock that Ashworth installed but former FA chairman Greg Dyke thought “daft”. Southgate might have reset that clock, though, by August.

“Look, buildings don’t win tournaments, people do,” says Sheepshanks. “But what I hope we’ve created is a place of learning, a place where best practice can be shared, somewhere you can prepare and rest.

“And there has been no bigger supporter of St George’s Park than Gareth, going back to when he was England Under-21s manager. I’m a big believer in the idea of place-making. You can build something, but it’s up to the people who use it to define and shape the place.

“It’s definitely been a factor in England’s recent successes but by far the biggest contribution has been made by Gareth Southgate and the incredible team he’s assembled.

“But that team has come through St George’s Park, so it has certainly played its part.”

Not bad for 350 acres of nothing, in the middle of nowhere.

(Main graphic — Photos: Getty Images. Design: Sam Richardson)