Populous appointed to design training centre for Birmingham City FC

Populous has been appointed to design a new football training centre next to Heatherwick Studio’s proposed new Birmingham City FC stadium.

The centre will house the club’s men’s, women’s and academy teams in “elite level” facilities including gyms, treatment spaces, offices and training pitches, the scheme’s developer Knighthead said.

Populous secured the job following a competitive tender process with the project set to form part of Knighthead’s wider plans for a ‘sports quarter’ in east Birmingham.

At its centre will be Heatherwick Studio’s 62,000-seat stadium, unveiled in November, which will replace Birmingham City FC’s current 29,000-seat home ground at St Andrew’s.

The club’s head of infrastructure Nick Smith said the appointment of Populous to design the training centre was “another important step as we press ahead with the delivery of the sports quarter”.

“We are convinced that Populous will help us set new standards in sports infrastructure. Together we can create a beacon of excellence that will inspire and support our local communities as well as setting the club up for success on the pitch,” he added.

Populous senior principal and global director Declan Sharkey said the practice was aiming for a “bespoke” approach to the scheme which would provide the club with an “innovative, sustainable performance training environment and holistic environment for all of its teams and the staff who will use it.”

Knighthead, the US firm which owns Birmingham City FC, has previously said it wants the new stadium to be finished in less than five years, in time for the 2030/31 football season.

The club’s chairman Tom Wagner has described the accelerated timeline as “lunacy” but said in November that the plans “reflect our ambition to compete at the highest level”.

The stadium, designed in collaboration with US stadium specialist Manica and film director Steven Knight, the lead writer on the next James Bond film, would be ringed by a set of 12 towering brick chimneys intended as an homage to Birmingham’s industrial past.

Wagner has previously estimated the scheme and its wider mixed-use campus will cost between £2bn and £3bn, with the project estimated to contribute £760m annually to Birmingham’s economy by 2035.