With the new season just over two weeks away, Charlton have been busy making serious improvements to the facilities at the club's Sparrows Lane training ground.
“This is a new start, really,” explains Charlton's Head of Football Administration Ron Dangerfield. “Everybody’s aware of where we’ve been, but we’ve got new ownership in who are investing a lot of money into improving and making the environment and facilities better.
“All around the club we’re just making things better. We’re trying to create environments which make sure we can get the best out of the players. We’ve put a lot of investment over at The Valley at the moment, and we’re mirroring that over here at the training ground.
“So as much as we can put a lot of money into that pitch up there, if we haven’t got the facilities here it’s kind of worthless, because this is where all of the work is done. We’re trying to mirror what we’re doing over at The Valley so that we can make sure that we’ve got elite environments both at The Valley and the training ground.”
Much of those improvements at Sparrows Lane centres around the pitches used by the men’s first-team.
“We’re reconstructing a brand-new pitch for the first-team, which is the main show-pitch, and also a big reconstruction of one of the pitches down at the bottom [of the training ground]. So there’s lots of work with regards to drainage and new irrigation - everything is being ripped up,” says Dangerfield.
“And then we’ve done reconstructions on the rest of the pitches around the site, which basically involves taking top layers off, getting rid of all the dead stuff, and then putting new stuff down and regrowing and everything else. So there’s been a lot of work going on, especially with the reconstructions - they’re big bits of work and they’re taking their time but they’ll definitely be worth the effort."
One of the key reasons the work is being carried out is to allow Nathan Jones’ squad to train hard without suffering significant consequences.
“The new pitches will also help with injury prevention,” explains Dangerfield. “The drainage will make sure they’re not as heavy as they can be when there’s a lot of weather. It will make sure that it will also take a lot more water, so that in the summer they’re not as hard as they could have been.”
This is an aim echoed by Director of Performance Services Dr Will Abbott. “As a football club we’re really aligned in terms of how we want to play and approach the game,” says Abbott.
“We want to be a physically dominant team, and in order to do so we need to train a certain way. Playing surfaces and pitch surfaces specifically have significant effects upon injury risk. Not only that but also the speed and intensity at which we can train and play. The ambition is that the changes to the new pitches - both at The Valley and here at the training ground - will allow us to firstly reduce our injury burden risk for training injuries, and secondly increases the intensity and the speed of the work that we conduct on the pitch.”
Key to all the pitch work is the appointment of a new member of staff. “Alex Green has been appointed as our new Head of Grounds, and he’s been brilliant since he started,” says Dangerfield.
“He’s got a great deal of history in football environments - he’s been an Assistant Groundsman at Arsenal and he’s been Groundsman at Tottenham - top-quality clubs. We’ve already seen a massive, positive impact in what he’s done with the [grounds] team, how he’s got them organised and together to help with the growing in and make sure we get these pitches back as quickly as possible but in the best position possible as well.”
But the work has not been limited to the playing surfaces. The men’s first-team gym has also seen a complete overhaul.
“In terms of the gyms, we’ve been really, really well supported by the football club,” says Abbott. “We’ve had a full refurbishment in the off-season to our men’s first-team facility, so every single piece of equipment within the facility has been replaced and renewed - lifting racks, cardiovascular equipment, everything down to the dumbbells is brand-new.
“We’re doing the same with our boys’ academy gym later on this month, so that will be every single piece of equipment in there refurbished and renewed. That will be followed by our space in the women’s facility as well. The thought process is that this technology and this equipment will again allow us to develop the physical qualities to play football in the way that we want to here at Charlton Athletic Football Club.”
The club has also invested in equipment which allows players to recover faster after a match.
“With the number of games that players play per season increasing, and the length of those games increasing, players are stretched to their absolute limits and asked to do that on a Saturday and then recover, do it again on a Tuesday and then recover, and then do it again on a Saturday. Being able to recover as quickly as possible to be at your best more often is incredibly important,” says Abbott.
“The club have been fantastic in terms of the investment they’ve provided in this area, so we now have 10 new cryotherapy and compression units that the club have provided us with that we’re able to utilise across the programme to help with that recovery process. These devices are portable, meaning that if we play at The Valley we’re able to utilise them, but also if we’re playing away from home we’re able to utilise them on the travel and the way home, and ensure that time is spent as productively as possible to ensure that we’re turned around for the next fixture.”
According to Abbott, new additions to the staff will also help the club’s general efforts to physically dominate the league.
“We’ve recently recruited a Performance Nutritionist and Performance Psychologist to our Performance Services department,” he says. “So in addition to strength and conditioning, sports science, physiotherapy, medical, we’ve now got discipline-specific expertise in the areas of nutrition and psychology. So the thought process there is that we leave no stone unturned in terms of how we prepare our players both on and off the pitch.”
Seven months into his position at the club, Abbott has already played a key role in the changes at the training ground. Technical Director Andy Scott explained the influence that Abbott has had: “All of those areas that we wanted to improve, Will has had a huge impact. We appointed Will in January and it took a while to get there, but as with most good people, they take a while to get here because they’re wanted at other clubs and at the club that they came from.
“He’s had a really good impact on the staff, on the players, on the environment and the culture, driving the processes. He’s very professional and extremely knowledgeable. I’ve worked really well with him and I’ve enjoyed working with him - we’ve worked very closely together. We’re building a department that should be the envy of the league and will be capable of going to the Championship as well.”
Recruitment is another area that the club has looked to strengthen. “We’ve been very, very busy in the summer,” says Scott. “Getting seven signings before we went away to Slovenia was really important for Nathan, and we’ve done everything we can to make sure we had those players in.
“We’ve expanded the recruitment department. It’s the first time we’ve been able to do that properly. We’ve now got five video scouts, we’ve brought Alistair Clarke in, who is our Senior Player ID Analyst, we’ve brought in a data scientist who is working with all of our data providers to give us an edge and give us more information that we can then use to direct the scouts.”
Clarke, who began his career at Middlesborough and then went on to Rangers, is highly rated having joined Lincoln City last summer ahead of an impressive campaign for the Imps.
“We’re really getting to the point now where we’re working extremely well and diligently, and the information that we’re getting back is more specific to the way Nathan wants to play,” says Scott.
“It’s proved in the players that we’ve signed and the players that we’re looking at now, so we’re really confident that moving forward it will be a very strong department.”
The club are leaving no stone unturned during the off-season. “There’s also been a significant amount of investment in our club restaurant over the summer, both in terms of the facilities and the equipment,” says Abbott. “The thought process is that will allow us to increase the quality of the food that we provide across all of the programmes - men and women.
“We know the influence of nutrition upon physical performance, fuelling for physical performance, but, in addition to that, recovery. We hope that by investing in those areas, we’re able to see the benefits in both physical performance, and from a recovery perspective.”
Dangerfield says the new set-up will also create a more unified club, with men’s and women’s first-team players able to sit together and with other staff.
“With our restaurant, we just needed to make that more of an environment that mirrors where we want to be as a club,” he explains. “It had a very functional feel to it, and now we’ve created more of a restaurant feel to it. It’s definitely a more comfortable place to be, it creates a good environment for people outside of training to be able to get together and not only eat but collaborate, talk about stuff and everything else.”
Changes have also been made with regards to the appearance of the training ground.
“It was important that we put an identity on the environment that we’re working in,” says Scott.
“We wanted to make sure that we made it ‘Charlton Athletic’. We’ve done a lot of inside. We’ve done a lot of work outside - with the branding, the colours, the pictures of the players, the achievements of the club - just to make sure everybody realises that they’re playing for Charlton, what’s expected of them, what the history is. It brightens the place up, gives us identity, and makes everyone realise the levels they’ve got to work to everyday.”
Dangerfield agrees: “With the new ownership, the new Manager and the new players coming in, we felt it was really important to also make the place look different so that everybody was coming back to something that looked a bit more up-to-date, a bit more modern and fresher, and really give everyone a real good attitude and feel-good vibe when they came back into training - which I think has gone well so far.”
Finally, the club has taken efforts to allow the men’s and women’s first-teams to work more closely alongside each other.
“We’ve also managed to align the women’s and men’s team in their schedules, so that we can have more cross-departmental meetings and alignment in those conversations. Karen’s team will now train on the same day’s as the men’s first-team,” says Scott.
“So there’s a lot that’s happened, and it doesn’t just get put together, but hopefully we’ll see the fruits of that labour throughout the season.”
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