By Andre Moura, FootballPredictions.NET, 14:10 14/09/2020
Updated at: 19:26 23/09/2020
Like many top Premier League and European teams Manchester City have a training ground complex that is nearly unrivalled. Thanks mostly in part to the takeover from the Abu Dhabi Group boss Sheikn Mansour which gave the club the financial ability to build one of the best training complexes in the world.
Manchester City’s training base is called Etihad Campus and is in an area of Sportcity in Manchester and it is predominantly owned and operated by the club.
The club formerly trained at the Carrington Training Centre up until 2015 before they moved into their new state of the art training facility in East Manchester.
The impressive Etihad Campus includes the club’s stadium, training ground as well as the club's football academy. The Campus was built in 2012 before being officially opened in 2013.
Revamp
The Manchester City football club announced in 2014 that it wanted to revitalise the campus and there were two main areas they wanted to focus on, the club’s football academy and expanding the stadium’s capacity.
Manchester City’s training ground and football academy design are loosely based on Italian powerhouse AC Milan’s facility which many regard to be one of - if not the best - training complexes in all of world football.
Construction began to upgrade the site in late 2012 and was finished in 2013. Currently, both the Manchester City first team and academy players train at the City Football Academy training base.
https://twitter.com/IFEastLothian/status/1172787669908230144
The other area the club wanted to upgrade was the capacity of the stadium. The club wanted to add as many as 2000 new seats to the stadium’s capacity but did not want to alter the structure of the stadium to do so.
The southern stand of the stadium and the pitch side areas of the ground were increased in size and in doing so the club was able to add an additional 7000 seats and that brought the overall stadium capacity to 55,097.
There are plans to eventually get the stadium capacity up to around 70,000 but plans yet have not been made to go ahead with the increase.
Manchester City want to add a Leisure Centre to the Etihad Campus in the future
Thanks to the investment from the Abu Dhabi group, the club also has ambitions to build a leisure centre on the vacant land that sits directly across from Etihad Stadium.
The hopes are that eventually, the leisure centre will house a 23,500-capacity indoor arena that could be used for all different kinds of non-footballing events including music concerts and basketball matches just to name a few.
City Winning On and Off the Field
Since the club’s takeover in September 2008 by the Abu Dhabi Group Manchester City have gone from strength to strength, thanks to the huge financial injection by CEO Sheikn Mansour.
Before the takeover, Manchester City had not won a trophy for more than 30 years and were training at the Carrington Training Centre.
Fast forward to today and City has had nearly unrivalled on-field success, winning Premier League titles as well as multiple League and FA Cups. Not to mention the club moving into its brand new state of the art 50 million pound training complex.
City is poised to be at the top of English football for a long time so do not expect these noisy neighbours to be going anywhere anytime soon.