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Patrick Vieira has road-tested Manchester City’s spanking new training ground and declared “It’s a dream!”

The Blues’ elite development squad manager has taken his young charges to the Etihad Campus this week, to try out the new facilities, believed to have cost around £100million.

And he told his youngsters that the minute attention to detail at the Etihad Campus means one thing: “No more excuses!”

Vieira was last night one of nine footballers inducted into the National Football Museum’s Hall of Fame, as recognition of his silver-laden career in England and Italy.

But he said he has never seen anything that comes close to the new City facility: “It is a dream come true for a player, fantastic,” he told MEN Sport. “Everything is there for a player to challenge themselves.

“When you are a football player you need to want to spend time in training, so a good training ground needs everything you need to keep you there.

“This facility has everything. Maybe at other places there are certain things you don’t have, but here you have everything.

“The quality of the pitches is unbelievable, and from the moment you come in, even if it early in the morning, there are people there to look after you until five or six pm.

“So you come in and do your preactivation, go to training, then lunch, then maybe a treatment. If you need a sleep, there is a place to sleep.

“Everything tells the players that they can stay from early morning to evening and have everything they need to look after themselves. It means no more excuses!”

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Members of City’s first team have already visited and trained at the facility, but the switch across from Carrington is going to be staged, and the new facility is not expected to be fully functional until December.

Vieira’s youngsters were willing guinea pigs to try out the facilities in a bid to iron out potential problems before Manuel Pellegrini and his first team squad move there permanently.

Some might call it pampering, especially players of yesteryear who trained on threadbare pitches and tatty gyms. But Vieira says the game has changed, and today’s players need the kind of fine tuning the new facility offers.

“Today you need facilities where players can challenge themselves,” he said. “Today’s players are quicker than 20 years ago, better technically, and the game has physically changed.

“You need facilities that reflect that, and bring a new way of training.

“The first team will be able to stay there on the night before a home game, instead of going to a hotel. I think it’s an advantage to stay – when I played in Italy we had a place to stay after training.

“Normally, after training you want to go straight home so you don’t end up stuck in traffic, but here you can stay and have a treatment, and leave much later. It is more professional.”

Vieira himself is heavily tipped to one day be in charge of the City first team at the new facility after an impressive start to his new career in charge of the EDS.

He has drawn praise from chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, who tipped him to be a top coach one day – and there are already whispers that he is being groomed to be the main man down the line.

Vieira, who has also attracted admiring glances from his former club Arsenal, refuses to look any further than his current situation.

“I am in the right place because I have people who believe in me, and who give me the tools I need to improve certain aspects of my coaching, people who want to see me succeed,” he said.

“I have a massive way to go and I am in the first few steps. You don’t become a Manchester City manager from one day to the next, and that is not how I would want to do it.”