There was a time, not so long ago, when Premier League clubs would sign players before they had even visited the training ground.

In 2002, when then Bolton Wanderers manager Sam Allardyce wanted to convince Jay-Jay Okocha to join from Paris Saint-Germain, he took him to the club’s impressively modern Reebok Stadium rather than their rundown practice facilities. “I didn’t do my research,” Okocha later told the BBC. “We didn’t even have changing rooms, we were changing in a (portable) cabin!”

Advertisement

Times have changed. Now, training grounds are becoming a yardstick by which you are measured — particularly in attracting new players, who are often provided with video tours of what awaits them, usually dressed-up with some suitably stirring music, by staff in the buying club’s recruitment team, before they join.

A key factor in Florian Wirtz’s decision to move to Liverpool from Bayer Leverkusen in the summer was a session at the Merseyside club’s Kirkby complex the day after playing a Champions League tie at Anfield last November. The superb setup made a lasting impression.

Florian Wirtz was impressed by Liverpool’s facilities when still a Leverkusen player (Nikki Dyer – LFC/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)

Similarly, Belgian goalkeeper Senne Lammens cited Manchester United’s base at Carrington — upgraded at a cost of £50million over the summer — as one of the reasons for joining them. “I saw a lot of it online already but when you come here and see it in real life, it’s something else,” he told United’s club media. “It’s the best of the best. New things everywhere.”

They are far from alone. A wide range of club recruitment figures consulted by The Athletic for this article — some of whom asked to remain anonymous, to protect their positions — say players are taking more interest than ever in the day-to-day facilities clubs have to offer, and are using these to help decide on where to move next.

That is particularly true of younger players who have fewer points of reference and more of their development and career still ahead of them. One recruitment figure compares youngsters visiting suitors’ training grounds to a “university open day”, with clubs vying with each other to showcase the best facilities.

It helps explain the unofficial training ground ‘arms race’ in England’s elite game, as rivals try to match or better each other to tempt the best talent to join them and persuade their current stars to stay.

It was in the late 1990s, as sports science began reshaping football, that a cultural shift began at English football’s training grounds.

Advertisement

Before then, many of these — even at leading clubs — were functional at best, and decrepit at worst.