Off-Season Update: Ryan Sparks (26 June 2021)

I can't ever remember the club ever having their own training facilities, maybe @Park bantam or @wetherbywhaler can remember and correct me if I'm mistaken.

 

The old training ground debate never gets old, I’ve probably given my opinion on it 100 times before but may as well again as it’s come up.

Sparks as CEO I hope would be looking at the long term growth of the club, that would surely include plans to own our own ground and training facilities. That’s the job of any CEO in business, to grow the company through assets and profit.

For now though it has to be a long term plan rather than something round the corner, unless we can get funding either privately (unlikely in Bradford, feel it’d have happened by now if it was going to) or the always unhelpful Bradford Council again they haven’t exactly been that over the years.

That leaves the funds to come out of the club, how much would new championship plus standard training ground cost? I think most would rather extra funds be put into the squad until we actually get to the championship, when extra revenue generated could go to higher quality facilities. Either that or we get a very rich new owner who’s going to invest in the clubs infrastructure, which hasn’t happened since Richmond even then he didn’t bother with training facilities.

 

Their training facilities don't seem to have held them back

 

Or put new owners off buying the club.

 

Agree with all you say but as we're a PLC, I don't think Bradford Council are able to help.

 

You sound somewhat surprised that between the end of last season and the start of this new one we haven't built a new training facility and purchased VP from Gibb.

 

To be honest in these present times they shouldn't, can you remember the club ever having our own training facilities being an old timer like me.

 

Didn't we own that piece of land behind the old main stand where the players "trained". Top class facilities there you know.

 

Didn't we used to train at Bradford Uni? And watch who you are calling an old timer!

 

Accrington have a local lad as owner, he sees his role as securing the future of the club for the next generation. What do City have? A presumably reluctant owner who has probably been to Bradford a dozen or so times on his life and a council who are disinterested at the very best.

 

Many years ago there were terraced houses there and they did knock the ball about in that area when they were pulled down, mindst you back in those days those who smoked had a fag at half time.

 

We have trained all over Bradford and even at times in Leeds but I don’t think we have ever owned anywhere. I f we were going to own our own training ground the time to do it was when we we were in the premiership and even then we would have had to sell it to pay off debts. We have perfectly good training facilities yes in an ideal world we would have sole use but we don’t live in ideal world

 

oop:

 

I remember us training at Scholemoor

 

Ideally, we'd own more of our own assets. But the quality of the training facilities we have are absolutely fine for this level. A good standard training pitch, a gym, a swimming pool, a canteen area, an office for the management team. What more do we we need?

I think Sparks is doing just fine right now. We seem much more professionally run than we have been in the past, we're working to a plan, the ground has seen investment for the first time in years, thought has been given as to how to improve the customer experience, and the approach to comms management has improved markedly.

We need to be better on the pitch, but hopefully that's a natural consequence of upping our game across many facets of the club.

 

You could be right, again Marley Stadium rings a bell, I'm sorry if I offended you just going by your details .

 

Between the grave stones.

 

Wetherby is the property man, but I see McLaren F1 recently sold their factory and leased it back arguing they’re a racing team not a property company.
Without an owner prepared to dig deep, using the school helps the club by not having capital tied up in a training ground. If Rupp is going throw a few million around I’d rather he did it getting promotion to L1 and the championship before he built a training ground .

 

I mentioned the Council more as a sports hub idea as others were saying earlier, naturally we wouldn’t own the facilities. I believe Hull and Swansea have done similar with their grounds in the last 15 years or so.

 

Almost, it was at the old sports centre that backed onto the cemetary