City Football Academy: A New Home for Women’s Champions
The gates swing open on the City Football Academy campus and, for the first time, the women’s team keeps going past the familiar academy buildings and shared spaces. Their new home sits a little further on – still part of the same football machine, but unmistakably, unapologetically, theirs.
It has taken almost four years to get here. Plans, consultations, tweaks, delays. Now the doors are open, the squad has moved in, and the new WSL champions finally have a base that reflects their status.
A facility built around champions
This is not a rebranded corner of an existing building. City’s women now operate out of a bespoke facility, tailored around elite performance at the very top of the women’s game.
Dedicated medical, rehab and physio rooms. Hydrotherapy and recovery areas. A gym that isn’t shared with teenagers chasing academy dreams. Chefs and nutritionists whose only brief is this squad, this dressing room, this title-winning team.
Until now, the women worked out of the same complex as the academy sides. It was impressive, but it wasn’t theirs. Now it is.
The players and staff helped shape it. Literally. Midfielder Laura Coombs had a hand in the interior design, while the squad chose how their names would appear on the lockers in a circular dressing room modelled on the Etihad Stadium’s. The shape is deliberate – everyone facing in, no corners to hide in, a space designed to feed connection as much as tactics.
Alex Greenwood, who has seen just about every level of the women’s game, from St George’s Park to Lyon, walked in and felt the difference.
“I absolutely love this building,” she told reporters. “I love turning up at the gates every single morning.” She has always rated City’s facilities, but this, she said, “has just gone to a whole different level.”
Asked if it was the best environment she has had as a professional, the 32-year-old – with over 100 England caps and a spell at eight-time European champions Lyon behind her – didn’t hesitate. For a women’s team, she said, “nothing comes close to this,” pointing to the fact it is “specifically for us, in every way.”
Food, fuel and fine details
The building impresses at first glance, but its true power lies in the details. For Greenwood, the game-changer is nutrition.
“We’re in complete control of everything that we do here, the food, the gym, it's all ours,” she explained. In a multicultural squad, tastes and requirements vary wildly. Japanese, Jamaican, Brazilian – different palates, different pre-match rituals, different ideas of comfort food and performance fuel. Now, City can match all of it.
Emma Deakin, the team’s director of performance services, has seen the contrast up close. At the old base, the women shared catering with the academy boys.
Over there, she pointed out, you’re feeding around 200 teenage boys, aged 14 to 19, with very different demands. Volume, not nuance. Here, the approach flips. City can go “really bespoke” with pre-match fuelling, dialling in on the specifics of what each player wants and needs, from culture to position to playing style.
It sounds like a small shift. It isn’t. At this level, marginal gains start in the kitchen.
The beating heart: connection
For head coach Andree Jeglertz, the biggest win isn’t the hydro pools or the slick new gym. It’s proximity.
In the old setup, staff and players were scattered. Meetings had to be booked, conversations scheduled. Now, everything sits within a few strides. Coaches drift through the gym, players are an arm’s length away in the lounge or at lunch, and the sense of separation between departments has been stripped back.
“Connection is the key thing,” Jeglertz said. In this building, he doesn’t have to go looking for it. It’s built into the corridors.
He spoke from the lounge, a space that sums up the philosophy. Sofas, relaxed lighting, coffee in hand – yet this is also where he will flick on the screen, dim the room and lead a forensic tactical breakdown of the next opponent.
The City squad gathered there last Wednesday night to watch Arsenal’s 1-1 draw with Brighton, the result that confirmed them as WSL champions. One moment it was a casual watchalong, players sprawled across chairs, the next it was the room where Chelsea’s weaknesses would be dissected.
“Isn't that pretty cool?” Jeglertz said. A relaxed environment, then “five minutes later, it's a sharp, tactical analysis of Chelsea.” For him, this room is “the heart” of the building – a place where players and staff can be brutally honest in tactical evaluation, then, minutes later, it becomes a coach-free zone where the squad can simply be themselves.
That duality – hard edges and soft spaces – runs through the entire complex. It’s a building that wants to win, but also one that understands the people doing the winning.
A new era, and a new target
City’s investment arrives at a symbolic moment. Chelsea’s six-year grip on the WSL title is broken. The London club’s stranglehold on the FA Cup is slipping too, after City’s semi-final win over the Blues on Sunday ended a run that had brought four trophies in five seasons.
Now, City head to Wembley later this month to face Brighton, clear favourites to add the FA Cup to their league crown. The opportunity is obvious: turn a breakthrough season into the start of an era.
Inside the new building, that ambition is not whispered. It’s baked into the design, the staffing, the resources. As Charlotte O'Neill, City’s managing director, put it: “We’re trying to build the winning machine.” The facility itself, she argued, shows exactly what City Football Group thinks of women’s football and this team.
Yet even in this moment of strength, there is a cloud on the horizon.
The Bunny question
Khadija ‘Bunny’ Shaw has become one of the defining players of the WSL season, perhaps the standout centre forward in the world right now. Reports continue to link her with a move away on a free transfer this summer, with Chelsea strongly tipped as the leading contender for her signature.
Losing Shaw would sting. It would also hand a direct rival a devastating weapon.
Greenwood, whose locker sits next to Shaw’s in the one break from numerical order in the dressing room, did not hide her feelings.
“I would love Bunny to stay at this football club forever,” she said. “She’s an incredible person. I absolutely love her and hope I’m celebrating with her for many years to come.”
Whether that wish comes true remains uncertain. The speculation will not go away. What is clear, though, is the stance from the dugout.
Jeglertz has expressed confidence that, come July, he will have a squad capable of competing for the title again, with or without Shaw. The message is blunt: this is not a one-player project, and this building is not a vanity piece. It is infrastructure for dominance.
City have a new home. They have the league trophy. They have a clear statement from their ownership that the women’s team sits at the core of the club’s future.
Now comes the real test: can this “winning machine” turn a gleaming facility and a breakout season into a dynasty?
