CEO Mark Ashton says work at the Blues’ Playford Road training ground, both on the pitch and to the building, will continue in the summer before a pause to consider longer-term developments, while he reveals the club has been offered land on the Colchester side of town.
The big summer project is the new hybrid surface at Portman Road but Ashton says similar work has already been undertaken at the training ground.
"We’ve put three new pitches in and we’ve stitched two of the pitches in the last two months, so in essence two of the three pitches are now hybrid,” he said.
"I think we probably drove the neighbours mad up there because they’ve worked 24-seven, night and day. I’m really appreciative of their support, actually. Those three pitches will be first class, again that’s a multi-million pound investment.
"There will be work undertaken on the other pitches, the tops will be taken off, Bent Lane really needs some work this summer.
"And there will be internal works to the building, canteen, changing rooms etc. Then what we’re going to do is breathe and look at a longer-term development on that site - what do we build for the longer term?
"You would have seen the building that I left at Bristol City, the training ground, we spent five years on it and I left the week we opened it. I didn’t even unpack my boxes.
"I think the training ground environment is really key because that’s where we do our work. We’ve just been to Brighton and seen what they’ve done, have been to Tottenham, which is unbelievable, have been to Manchester United recently, have been to Leicester recently, have been to Arsenal recently.
"And whilst, for League One and for the Championship, we’re not bad, you’re at a point now where when you have a Kieran McKenna type of manager, who is a developer, you’ve got to give him the tools to do that.
"We’ll have debates because I designed and we built the Bristol City training ground, we designed it pre-Covid, started to build, then went into Covid and finished at the end of Covid.
"I think even now, two or three years on, there is now a debate on whether you build academy and first team as one building or two, purely on the ability to segregate people should you be required to in a pandemic or whatever, something we’d never thought of.
"We’ve got a lot of work to do on that, which I think is quite exciting because we’ve got a unique location for recruitment around the academy and I think that comes into three points for me.
"Nines to 16s, let’s call that academy, that’s pure academy, and I think we can be much more effective at that and we’re starting to put some resource and some energy into that again now.”
Previously, Ashton has said that a separate set-up on the Essex side of Ipswich might be a possibility for easier access and to move the Blues’ catchment area for young players towards London.
Ashton says Town haven’t been actively been looking for places to build such a set-up, although they have been offered sites.
"No, people keep offering us land, but we’re not looking, I promise you we’re not looking for land,” he said.
"You could do that, people have suggested that from day one, but I’ll be honest, with everything we’ve got going on right now, it’s not a project we’re active on. There’s too much going on.
"But I would never say never to that because there is a logic to it, but right now it’s about planning how we get nine-to-16s recruitment right, U21s recruitment is very important to us because they either come through and play in the first team or we trade them, and we’ve been very successful at that. We then have first-team recruitment.
"Whether you’re signing a nine-year-old, a 21-year-old or a Leif Davis, they need an environment in which to develop. They need the facilities in which to develop.
"They either come through and play for your first team and you win games and you’re successful and/or you’re trading them out for 10s of millions of pounds.
"I go back to this, I think the prime example of that is Adam Webster. We bought him for £ð‘¥ from here to Bristol City [understood to be £3.5 million rising up to £8 million], that was all on the plan.
"We had the facilities, we had Andy Rolls [who followed Ashton to Portman Road as director of performance], we had the expertise, this was the plan, this was the data - if we did this, this and this, we’d take him from here to here.
"And we did it in 11 months [Webster moved to Brighton for a reported £20 million]. But had we not invested in sports science, medical, data, strength and conditioning, coaching, it wasn’t one person, it was a whole investment piece that delivered the development of Webby.
"And he’s now gone on again. I think there’s no reason why we can’t do the same sort of stuff here.”