Southampton Officially Open The Markus Liebherr Pavilion Training Facility

Five years in the making, Southampton finally opened the doors of the club’s brand new training centre yesterday with tribute being paid to late owner Markus Liebherr in the naming of the new Staplewood centre.

The Markus Liebherr Pavilion, as it will be known, is a state of the art training facility that should give Southampton the platform to build on their successes since 2009 and safeguard the historic development of top-class footballers for which the club has become renowned for.

Markus Liebherr took over Southampton in 2009 and embarked on a mission to make the club self-sustaining as well as entertaining on the pitch. When you look at the situation now compared to when Liebherr walked into the club, the honest assessment is that he succeeded on both counts.

The training centre will look to further enhance the reputation Southampton carry for producing excellent young players with Head of Football Development Les Reed stating, “It has been very important that we designed a facility that works, that met our needs, we talk a lot about our pathway to the first-team for young players coming through the system so we designed a facility that reflected those aspirations.”

The actual design of the building is interesting, the very young players playing for either the U/18 or U/21 teams start training at the very bottom of the building on a number of pitches with the first-team players training right at the other end of the centre.

It is the idea that as players progress from the age of 16, they will progress forwards through the building until eventually the goal of training in the first-team area is achieved when the player becomes part of the main squad. The ‘development pathway’ as Les Reed calls it, that young players take to the first-team has been reflected in the architecture and layout of the new building to ensure young players have a focus and a visible target to aim for.

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In the early stages of last summer Southampton endured a difficult time with clubs targeting and successfully signing a number of key first-team players. There was a real concern amongst supporters that the club wouldn’t be able to replace the quality lost, particularly as the budget wasn’t going to be fully representative of the financial income made by sales.

Jeremy Wilson of the Daily Telegraph suggesting that the club still had sizable financial worries, “Southampton are adamant that they have no need to sell their best players, despite having £22 million outstanding to pay on players from previous transfer windows, as well as a training ground bill that has risen to £30 million.”

However, the club was able to reinvest around £60million into signing players, despite Chief Executive Officer Gareth Rogers having today confirmed that the total cost of the new training facilities is likely to be around £40million. Again, further evidence that the club is in a financially strong position.

Southampton club legend and former academy graduate Matt Le Tissier has been one of a number of former players to have praised the new training centre today claiming, “The training facilities here at the club, and the staff that they’ve got now, are absolutely incredible. This place [the new training ground] must be right up there as one of the best training grounds in Europe. If you can’t develop yourself as a football player here, then you won’t develop anywhere else.”

There is still further plans to improve facilities in the near future with another building set to be constructed to support much younger footballers, fully kitted out with educational resources, gymnasium areas and offices.