Exclusive: Arsenal exploring training ground revamp options

Arseblog News has learned that Arsenal have been exploring a significant redevelopment of their training facilities at London Colney as part of a wider look at the club’s infrastructure that also includes Emirates Stadium.

The plans are at an early stage, and their scope could still change. For now, it is believed the Gunners are considering a new purpose-built hub for the men’s team on the Sobha Realty Training Centre site.

The development could bring together the player performance centre, medical and rehabilitation facilities, changing rooms, offices, restaurants and media facilities under one roof.

Arsenal already have all of the above, but the aim would be to bring everything together in a more coherent, modern space befitting a club with ambitions to remain among Europe’s elite.

The current set-up sees Arsenal Women use many of the same facilities as the men’s first team while also having their own dedicated building, one of several additions made to the site in recent years.

It has been suggested to Arseblog News that, should the men’s first team move into a new hub, the existing facilities could eventually be used exclusively by Arsenal Women.

Arsenal’s younger academy players train separately at Hale End in east London. It is unclear whether the project might eventually extend to that operation. Players currently move to London Colney when they reach scholarship level.

London Colney itself owes much to Arsene Wenger.

When the Frenchman arrived in 1996, Arsenal were using University College London’s sports ground in nearby Shenley. Wenger quickly became frustrated by the limitations of sharing facilities and pushed the club to build a permanent home of its own.

Planning permission was secured in 1998 for a purpose-built complex on Green Belt land at Bell Lane, with Wenger heavily involved in its design. The £10 million project was completed in 45 weeks and officially opened in October 1999. Famously, the cost was more than covered by the £22.5 million sale of Nicolas Anelka to Real Madrid in 2000.

Arsenal’s former base at Shenley later became Watford’s training ground, while the Gunners continued to expand their new home next door.

Space is not the problem. The London Colney estate covers more than 140 acres, giving Arsenal plenty of room to rethink how the site is organised.

Planning could be more complicated. The training centre was built largely on Green Belt land, where national and local policies place particular importance on preserving openness and preventing encroachment into the countryside.

The National Planning Policy Framework allows appropriate buildings connected with outdoor sport, provided their impact on the openness of the Green Belt is minimised and they do not significantly conflict with its purposes. Any substantial proposal would also be judged on its scale and location, as well as its effect on the landscape, biodiversity, drainage, access and traffic. Hertsmere’s own policies recognise that established facilities within the Green Belt may need to evolve. Any changes would still have to preserve the site’s open and rural character.

A current planning application shows these considerations in practice. Arsenal are seeking three-year permission for a temporary 30-by-15-metre strength and conditioning gym for the women’s team while their existing facilities are extensively refurbished to fit their specific needs. Arseblog News understands this is a standalone project running parallel to the club’s longer-term ambitions.

The London Colney site has changed considerably over the last quarter of a century. An indoor training centre was added during the 2000s, with Arsenal’s 2006/07 accounts noting that the London Colney base had been completed in 1999 and that the club had “recently added an indoor centre”.

Further work improved the medical and rehabilitation operation before another substantial redevelopment in 2015. That included an expanded main building and a new Player Performance Centre, alongside improved medical, fitness and working areas.

More recently, the partnership with Sobha Realty has led to further changes. Restaurant and dressing-room facilities have been improved, the media centre refurbished and new sauna and steam facilities installed, while a dedicated building has been created for the women’s first team.

The bigger question is whether another round of additions and alterations will be enough, or whether the time has come for something more fundamental.

That makes Arsenal’s relationship with Sobha Realty particularly interesting.

When the Dubai-based developer became the club’s first training-ground naming-rights partner in February 2024, Arsenal explicitly said the agreement would allow them to benefit from Sobha’s property expertise to “explore the development opportunities at the club’s training ground.”

Then-Chief Commercial Officer Juliet Slot was similarly clear about the thinking behind the relationship.

“Sobha Realty is a dynamic business with big ambitions. We’re excited to build on our partnership and tap into their extensive knowledge in property development. Their unrivalled experience will help us understand and explore the opportunities available to us, ensuring we’re always moving forward with world-class facilities for the future.”

Those words look more interesting now.

Arsenal have not publicly confirmed that Sobha is helping to shape a new training centre, and its role, if any, remains unclear. From the outset, though, the partnership has looked capable of extending beyond conventional naming rights.

Arsenal are hardly alone in reconsidering what a modern training ground needs to provide.

Manchester United completed a £50 million redevelopment of their men’s first-team building at Carrington in 2025, part of a wider programme of investment that also included new facilities for the women’s team and academy.

Liverpool (2020), Leicester (2020) and Bournemouth (2025) have opened new training facilities, while Manchester City recently added a purpose-built base for their women’s team at the City Football Academy.

The scale of investment continues to rise. Crystal Palace are currently buying land to expand their operation and last month, Newcastle United agreed to purchase the 260-acre Woolsington Hall estate for a proposed £190 million training complex. Subject to planning permission, the men’s first team are due to move there for the 2029/30 season, while the masterplan retains the flexibility to add bespoke facilities for the women’s and girls’ teams. The project is being funded by Newcastle’s owners, PIF and RB Sports & Media.

As Arseblog News saw first-hand in 2018, London Colney remains an impressive facility. Arsenal will know, however, that standing still while rivals invest heavily risks eroding one of the advantages Wenger fought so hard to establish.

If Arsenal press ahead, their owners at least know their way around projects of this scale.

The clearest example is taking shape in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where KSE is developing a permanent headquarters and training facility for the LA Rams. It will form the centrepiece of Rams Village, a 52-acre mixed-use development within almost 100 acres of land acquired by the Kroenke Organisation in 2022.

Plans for the Rams headquarters include more than 350,000 square feet of facilities, two existing full-size grass pitches and an additional 150,000-square-foot indoor practice field with capacity for 2,500 spectators.

KSE have plenty of other experience in this area. Stan Kroenke was behind SoFi Stadium and the wider Hollywood Park development in Los Angeles. In Denver, KSE are pursuing a huge redevelopment of the land around Ball Arena, home of the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, NHL’s Colorado Avalanche and NLL’s Colorado Mammoth.

A major redevelopment at London Colney would not be new territory for Arsenal’s owners.

At the same time, Arsenal are considering the longer-term future of Emirates Stadium.

Opened in 2006, it has the seventh-largest capacity in the Premier League, but demand for tickets considerably exceeds supply. Arsenal have engaged original architects Populous to explore a capacity increase and ways to modernise the facilities.

With the arena penned in by railway lines and housing, expansion is far from straightforward. Squeezing additional rows into the stands may be feasible, but any major increase in capacity would need to take into account transport capacity, crowd movement, safety requirements and the surrounding infrastructure.

Speaking to BBC Sport last month, CEO Richard Garlick said:

“We are looking at what the options are around, not only increasing capacity, but what we can do in terms of optimising the current structures. It is 20 years since the Emirates was built, and it’s something we would look at on a season-by-season basis. It needs to make business sense, if there’s a good business case for doing it, but we’re currently actively exploring those opportunities.”

A clue to the scale of the problem came during a Greater London Authority Economy, Culture and Skills Committee hearing in February 2025.

Londonwide Assembly member and Arsenal supporter Alessandro Georgiou claimed the club had looked at increasing Emirates Stadium’s capacity from 60,000 to 80,000.

“If we are looking at Emirates Stadium – I am an Arsenal supporter – they wanted to go from 60,000 to 80,000, but the response back was, ‘You are going to have to foot the bill.’ We are talking tens if not hundreds of millions to build the local infrastructure in the area.”

Georgiou didn’t explain the source of his information, and Arsenal have never publicly confirmed an 80,000-seat proposal. The figure should be treated as his account rather than evidence of a formal club plan.

Even with those caveats, the exchange illustrates the difficulty of dramatically increasing capacity at the Emirates. It also helps explain why modernising the facilities could be just as important as adding more seats.

What such a project would involve remains to be seen. Improved premium and corporate hospitality would be an obvious area of focus as Arsenal look for ways to increase matchday revenue.

If both projects go ahead, KSE would be taking on a major infrastructure programme. The bill would be considerable, although football’s financial rules treat spending on bricks and mortar differently from expenditure on the playing squad.

From the start of the 2026/27 season, the Premier League’s new Squad Cost Ratio regulates clubs’ on-pitch spending at 85 per cent of football revenue and net profit or loss from player sales, albeit with additional multi-year headroom built into the system.

The Premier League explicitly describes the system as regulating “on-pitch spending”, giving clubs greater freedom to invest elsewhere in their businesses.

UEFA operates along similar lines. Its squad cost rule limits relevant expenditure to 70 per cent of revenue and defined transfer profits. The calculation covers player and coach wages, transfer amortisation and impairment, plus agents’ and intermediary costs. It does not include construction work on a training ground or stadium. UEFA’s financial sustainability regulations distinguish long-term investment in tangible football assets from squad costs.

In simple terms, spending £100 million on London Colney would not use £100 million of Arsenal’s permitted squad spending.

None of that makes infrastructure free. Arsenal or KSE would still need to finance the work, and any significant borrowing would affect the club’s finances.

Committing substantial sums to one project can also influence decisions elsewhere, regardless of how football’s regulations account for it. The rules simply give clubs much more freedom to invest in long-term infrastructure than in the playing squad itself.

More than a quarter of a century after Wenger pushed Arsenal to transform the environment in which their players worked every day, the club are now considering whether it is time to do it all over again.

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