Built to perform

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Almost 150 years into the life of the Football Association (FA), English soccer has a new place to call home. The National

Football Centre, built at a reported cost of around UK£105 million and now known as St George’s Park, was inaugurated by FA president Prince William in October as the base for all 24 of England’s national teams and the organisation’s evolving technical and medical staff. Set amid a forest of goalposts in leafy Burton-upon-Trent and opened by a future king, it would be all too easy to dismiss the National Football Centre as the country

pile to complement the FA’s lavish pied-à-terre at Wembley Stadium, but that would do a disservice to a facility that has been years in the planning but many decades in the making.

The FA first secured the 350-acre site in 2001 with the aim of replacing its Lilleshall centre of excellence – essentially a finishing school for some of the country’s best youngsters until its closure in 1999. For a time, the land looked like being a graveyard for misplaced English ambition. The project was delayed and then mothballed as the rebuilding of Wembley Stadium fell victim to infighting

and spiralling costs. Time has been kind to it, however. Since its resurrection in 2008, its purpose has been reframed as that of a campus for coach development. Working on the principles of The Future Game scheme launched by the FA in 2010, St George’s Park will become a hub for the country’s best footballing minds to work towards a progressive, coherent, but suitably English approach to the game. A major title or two might be the ultimate aim but breaking loose from a long national history of insecurity and muddled thinking would prove a welcome start.

Such an aspiration is to be admired

St George’s Park, English soccer’s new national centre of excellence, opened in October amidst much fanfare and genuine hope that it can nurture future generations of stars. Spire Healthcare’s Perform brand is set for a fundamental role in the success of the Football Association’s bold new project.

Built to perform

By Eoin Connolly

FEATURE | SOCCER

The full-size Sir Alf Ramsey indoor training pitch at St George’s Park, the new base for England’s 24 national soccer teams

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from an organisation sometimes accused of insular short-sightedness but it does not mark the limits of St George Park’s potential. In a coincidence that rings with quirky symbolism, a plot that once belonged to the estate of the Bass brewery is now the site of what it is hoped will become England’s first Fifa F-Marc Medical Centre of Excellence.

Last year, with the grand opening approaching, the FA began to seek external expertise to manage its on-site training and medical centre. At the same time, Spire Healthcare, a company with over three decades’ experience in managing private hospitals, was in the process of developing its Perform brand – a concept combining expert medical consultancy with top-end training facilities and techniques. Pilot tests were already being ramped up at four Spire Healthcare hospitals across the UK when the FA arrived with an ideal opportunity.

“Physiotherapy is a competitive market,” explains Perform’s Ruth Paulin, “and we wanted to see whether

having something that was more than just physiotherapy – so looking at a total, multi-disciplinary approach to the performance, rehabilitation and sports medicine – would benefit us. We’ve been running hospitals for over 30 years and our bread and butter is surgery but what we want to do is to see whether by expanding our offering we can draw more people in to be treated some way with better healthcare.”

The National Football Centre seemed the perfect vehicle – a high-profile case study, at the very least – for Spire Healthcare to burnish the Perform brand with “an identity to compete in an external sports medicine, sports and physiotherapy market that perhaps just being part of the hospital didn’t give us the opportunity to have recognised.” In November 2011, the partnership was formalised: Spire Healthcare would become the official healthcare provider of the National Football Centre and help the FA create Perform at St George’s Park.

Paulin, who has since become the

business director of the facility, is speaking to SportsPro at the end of a September week in which Perform at St George’s Park opened its doors. Three days previously an assortment of journalists – running the gamut from sports reporters at daily newspapers to lifestyle and fitness specialists and even those from the technology press – had submitted themselves to a test of their own questionable physical mettle and of the world class equipment on offer.

Early on that day, the group had assembled in supplied gym kit, looking not unlike an oversized PE class, to hear FA head of physiotherapy Gary Lewin recall an exploratory discussion he had had with the FA about the role of sports medicine in a national soccer centre as long ago as 1988. It would be fair to say, then, that the FA had a reasonable concept of what its medical facility would look like by the time Spire Healthcare joined the project.

“They had a very strong idea,” confirms Paulin. “[St George’s Park chairman] David Sheepshanks had spent probably the previous two or three years visiting similar centres worldwide – some of the best centres in terms of football development, sports medicine, integrated centres in far-flung places of the world – with some of the medical team working at the FA, to come up with what they wanted to create, a centre of excellence. So that was fairly well defined by the time we came on board, and very, very well researched to make sure that everything had already been proven elsewhere plus new things would then be built in St George’s Park to allow a real centre of excellence to be created.”

With its extensive private sector experience, the Perform team has

“The FA have designed something that gives them what they want at the forefront of sports medicine.”



Set within extensive soccer training facilities, Perform at St George’s Park aims to become England’s first Fifa F-Marc Medical Centre of Excellence

FEATURE | SOCCER

basically been tasked with running the centre in such a way that it can exist on its own terms.

“We’ve brought delivery,” says Paulin, “we’ve brought implementation of an idea into reality. It was a building and it was an idea and the FA needed a healthcare partner to be able to deliver healthcare services in an integrated manner. So we have been involved in getting policies, processes, design, operational kit, and bringing in sports medicine expertise and sports science expertise to make an operational facility that not only supports the 24 England teams but is commercially viable.”

There will be boundaries between Perform’s activities and those of the England medical team led by Dr Ian Beasley, particularly when it comes to the care provided to the national teams. In some areas, though, the levels of cooperation will grow in line with the expectations of the partnership.

“What we’re doing is providing facilities for them to use when the England team are in but also supporting them through some of the joint

appointments so that over time there’s a broader range and a bigger access to experts in football medicine for clubs to contact,” explains Paulin.

“At the moment, if Ian’s not there, there isn’t an easily known football doctor apart from the clubs’. So with our clinical director Charlotte Cowie, working partly for us and partly for the FA, there’s much more scope for supporting clubs through the centre when they need it – and some of them will need it more than others, clearly. A lot of clubs have got an excellent set-up. So we want to try and work in partnership with all the football world.

“The FA have designed something that gives them what they want at the forefront of sports medicine, sports science and rehabilitation for their players but we have added expertise in taking it to a bigger audience.”

There are 100 million blades of Desso Grassmaster fibres on a single pitch at St George’s Park – a faithful replica of the one at Wembley Stadium. To borrow a metaphor from footballing parlance, the FA and Perform want to show they have covered every last one. Built into the core

of the National Football Centre, the 30,000 square foot Perform at St George’s Park comprises three gyms – the ultra high-tech biomechanical gym, the strength and conditioning gym and the rehabilitation gym – along with a hydrotherapy facility, sports massage rooms and a host of physiotherapy and consultation suites. Small details abound which give an idea of the kind of comprehensive, holistic thinking that has gone into its planning. The rehabilitation gym, for example, overlooks the Sir Alf Ramsey full-size indoor training pitch: players recovering from injury are constantly reminded where their hard work will lead them.

High-tech solutions have been imported from all over the sporting world. WattBike cycles have been brought in from British Cycling. The gravity-bending Alter-G treadmill – which helps athletes recover from injury by allowing them, almost literally, to run on air – has been adapted from a NASA model designed to help astronauts find their feet after bone-thinning stints in space. The hydrotherapy facility boasts a version of the HydroWorx underwater treadmill made famous by



American distance-running coach Alberto Salazar and his Olympic medal-winning duo of Mo Farah and Galen Rupp, while the reflex-testing Batak Board, popular throughout Formula One, graces the rehabilitation gym.

FA equipment supplier Technogym has provided its pulley-based Kinesis resistance training stations, designed to offer a more flexible range of options than traditional fixed weight machines. Technogym staff on hand at St George’s Park proudly share stories with their media guests of how the system came into its own when used by Britain’s Paralympians, with their various shapes and sizes and ranges of motion, at London 2012. It sees the machinery having a natural role in rehabilitation and in training for team sport. Although there is no formal relationship between Perform and Technogym at present, beyond Spire Healthcare’s acquisition of Technogym equipment for some of its gyms, Paulin can see room for collaborative development.

“We’re working closely with Technogym at the moment and it may

well be something that we work on with them more closely in the future,” she says. “But it was an FA relationship, predominantly, at the start.”

Technogym’s presence is an example of how the FA, even in designing St George’s Park in search of sporting rather than commercial success, has still managed to parlay many of its wider sponsorship deals into partnerships with the National Football Centre. Outgoing kit supplier Umbro had been its headline sponsor and it has clad an impressive if somewhat puzzling array of mannequin torsos with classic England shirts and original designs in the main lobby. Parent company Nike, which is selling up, will assume the Umbro role at St George’s Park once it begins providing England teams with apparel in the new year; the fate of the torsos has not been disclosed. Hilton Worldwide is operating two hotels on the site – both a luxury model and a budget Hampton by Hilton – while Vauxhall, the FA’s lead sponsor, has recently agreed to become the automotive partner of the centre.

Spire Healthcare’s relationship with the FA also has a commercial element

but in the immediate term Paulin is most concerned that it shows it can run Perform at St George’s Park effectively. “Clearly the PR that we get out of that will establish our name,” she says, “but we’ve got to actually deliver the outcomes and we’re confident that we will. So we will work to get outcomes, to get results, and that reputation will then build and attract people not just to St George’s Park but to other Performs and even to Spire Healthcare, other parts of the organisation.”

Perform will also hope to benefit from the FA’s desire to foster a view of St George’s Park as a community resource. In keeping with that goal, the centre will operate in a fashion that allows members of the public – at least, those with the means or with private health insurance – to make use of its elite-level facilities. The benefits on offer for those who might attend are undoubtedly extensive.

“So for a simple thing they might want to come for a physiotherapy assessment,” suggests Paulin, “they might come for a long-term intensive rehabilitation, they might come because they might want

The FA hopes St George’s Park can be an academy for coaches and an advantage for its national teams but Perform will take it “to a bigger audience”


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FEATURE | SOCCER

to train on a specialist bit of kit. So if you are training to walk up Kilimanjaro then you may want to come up and do some training in the altitude chamber. But you don’t have to be unwell or injured to come. You can come to test yourself at the base level as you all did and think, actually, I’ve got some metrics here, some key performance indicators, and I want to see if I can improve them.

“Also,” she adds, “you’ll be able to have access to specialists such as orthopaedic surgeons. Because we’ve got an integrated network of hospitals this is something where if you find or if you have a problem they’ll be able to suggest somebody else that you could go and see.”

The vision for Perform goes even further than that for the corporate community. “They could come and have performance assessments and take the improvement that we could give them just to see how they improve their performance in our laboratory back into the workplace and perform at work and perform for life, not just perform for sport,” Paulin says. “That’s our strapline; trying to get everybody to achieve their personal best.”

Perform essentially has two routes into such a market. The first is a direct one – appealing to high-earning individuals in high-pressure jobs through products such as its Bodyguard service, a 72-hour consultation which employs a sophisticated heart-rate monitor to record stress levels and sleep patterns. The second is to look to companies who might

want to treat their employees to something other than paintballing or white-water rafting for their next team day out. “They might think, well, this year we’ll actually spend our leadership budget on getting some baseline measurements and looking at performance,” says Paulin, “having a motivational speaker in, having a bit of team building, so that’s a market for us that we’re looking to get into.”

Such initiatives carry the promise of growing the Perform brand, even if, Paulin admits, “things have happened incredibly quickly in the past year” and Spire Healthcare is still in the process of reviewing, rather than redoubling, the efforts of its new brainchild. More to the point, for Paulin and Perform at St George’s Park, soccer and the rest of the sports industry will provide the staple customer base in the early stages.

Paulin makes no secret of the fact that teams from other sports have shown considerable interest in the facility – with some paying an extended visit – but is understandably somewhat more coy when it comes to who they are and what has so far been discussed. The prospect of establishing replica Perform facilities at training centres for other sports is one that Paulin can see life in, though it remains “very early days”.

“This is a unique opportunity and it’s a first,” she says, by way of tempering speculation. “I think everybody’s going to stand back and hopefully watch it succeed. But we have got the capability to work with other sports and I think the proof of

the pudding will be in the eating. I suspect that no one’s going to rush to replicate it until it’s been proven. But we already, across our various hospitals, work with lots of sports.”

In any case, for Perform at St George’s Park to work as a commercial proposition, it must live up to its billing clinically. For all its assets to the public or the wider sporting community, it is to soccer that it will naturally look to make its biggest contribution. Anonymised performance figures will be collected on every player to train at Perform at St George’s Park, with staff hoping to amass the first truly comprehensive set of normative data for professional soccer. The applications of this kind of information for research are manifold, and it is the expectation of the staff that it could be disseminated to other organisations in the sport, not least the world governing body, Fifa.

For Paulin, such an initiative not only builds the credibility and status of the flagship Perform centre but also the profile of the brand as a whole.

“Healthcare generally,” she says, “and therefore the market we’re talking about, sports science and rehabilitation, needs to be based on facts and getting more people through and collecting that data, researching it, analysing it, publishing it, being involved at conferences, presenting results, is going to be, for us, raising the profile of St George’s Park but also hopefully taking sports science further forward.”

Ruth Paulin (right), St George’s Park managing director Julie Harrington (centre) and Gary Lewin (left) The Duke of Cambridge opens St George’s Park


Built to perform

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