Manchester City unveil their £10m women’s headquarters. What’s next for the new WSL champions?
From where Alex Greenwood sits, the Manchester City Women captain can look into the eyes of all of her team-mates at once. That was the point, or more accurately, the lack of points. The dressing room at City’s new £10million purpose-built women’s first-team headquarters, which the team moved into in April and has been officially opened today, consciously omits points.
It is an unambiguous circle, organised by shirt number and running clockwise. A fully-loaded kit and nutrition table from which to plunder at will sits in its centre , but is not so tall that Greenwood could ever fail to look any one of her team-mates in the eye. Circular dressing rooms are hardly groundbreaking.
Feng shui zealots, the architect Charles Deacon and even former Chicago Bulls head coach Phil Jackson have long espoused the ostensible functional and spiritual efficiency of curves and circles. The intended message is roughly the same: Within this cylindrical sanctuary, all is and are equal. As with anything, of course, there are exceptions.
Like, for example, when Greenwood turns to look into the eyes of the player next to her before heading out to train ahead of City’s final Women’s Super League match of the season on Saturday away to West Ham United, it is not into those of Jade Rose, who wears shirt number four, who should, if following mathematical proofs, precede Greenwood’s No 5. Instead, Greenwood stares into the eyes of City’s No 9, Khadija ‘Bunny’ Shaw. That City’s equal-style, numerical-order dressing room has an exception allowing for Greenwood and Shaw to have side-by-side spots is not a problem for anyone.
Emma Deakin, the club’s head of performance services, laughs when it is pointed out on a media tour of the facilities. Greenwood and Shaw have been here since the beginning. They have always sat by each other.
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