Lunchtime beckons at Huddersfield Town’s attractive, canalside, training ground, and a tableau capable of turning Arsène Wenger, José Mourinho, Pep Guardiola and company apoplectic is fast unfolding.

David Wagner’s players are happily queuing up alongside members of the public as they wait to be served by cheerful cafeteria staff.

While the play-off finalists select healthy options, workers from nearby local businesses frequently favour the speciality thick-cut fries, sometimes lubricated with a pint, and have few inhibitions about exchanging polite small talk with footballers.

Although first-teamers eat in a separate room, the complex serves as a rebuke to those clubs whose obsession with privacy verges on paranoia and that operate from hermetically sealed HQs. Such rare openness is part of a deliberate strategy and a principal reason why the club remain radically different from the majority of their rivals.

Before Dean Hoyle, Huddersfield’s owner and the Card Factory founder, bought the £700,000 training facility it was a members’ club for employees at the old ICI plant across the road and a commitment to keep it open to all for “food, football, fitness and functions” endures.

Jonathan Hogg has no complaints. “It doesn’t bother me,” says the influential midfielder, who has become accustomed to sharing the gym with “civilians”. “They’re here every day and it feels normal. It keeps us connected to the town, to the fans.”

While Wagner tightened such ties by insisting players live within 15 miles of the club, Hoyle has done his bit in freezing prices for existing season-ticket holders at £199 next term.

Taking advantage of an unusual heatwave in Pennine West Yorkshire, Hogg is talking on an outside terrace, burnishing a tan acquired during a five‑day trip to Portugal, which followed their semi-final success against Sheffield Wednesday.

In yet another striking departure from convention, Wagner invited the players’ partners and children along too, instructing them to have fun in the afternoons and evenings after morning training. “Portugal will certainly help if it’s hot at Wembley,” says Hogg. “It helped everyone relax, the boss had a good bit of banter with the wives.”

Big on humour but refreshingly low on managerial cliche speak, Wagner is a 45-year-old bundle of bearded, bespectacled, Germanic energy, sporting a blue and white “on the way to Wembley” wristband.

Whatever happens on Monday, Wagner has made the transition from managing Borussia Dortmund’s reserves to taking a team with one of the Championship’s smallest budgets to the brink of the top flight look seamless. It has rendered him a hot managerial property.

Considering Huddersfield’s record transfer fee is the £1.8m paid for the former 1860 Munich defender Christopher Schindler last June, there is a distinct sense of a coach capable of turning water into wine.

There seems something of his great friend Jürgen Klopp about Wagner, Liverpool’s similarly charismatic and, sometimes, slightly left-field manager. Last July, Wagner replicated one of Klopp’s old templates, by depositing his squad on a remote, uninhabited, Swedish island, lacking running water, electricity, toilets and conventional food sources for three nights.

After signing 11 new, largely cut‑price, senior players, including five Germans, for a collective £3.8m, he knew bonding was imperative and his policy of demanding they make fires, fetch drinking water from the lake and take rotating turns in two-man canoes, duly paid dividends.

“We don’t socialise that much off the pitch but our interesting pre-season trip gave us a stronger bond than other Championship teams,” says Hogg. “We got dropped off on an island with no phones, no internet, just a sleeping bag and a tent. That was all.

“It was the experience of a lifetime. It got the lads out of their comfort zones, made them mix and put the bond we’ve got together in place.”

Wagner’s Huddersfield represent quite a culture shock, albeit a welcome one. “The boss is certainly different to my previous managers,” says the former Middlesbrough, Aston Villa and Watford midfielder – currently relishing a reprieve after initial fears he had broken his neck following a collision with his captain, Mark Hudson, in March proved unfounded. “He’s drawn so much confidence into everyone, made us properly believe in ourselves.

“There’s a large majority of Championship players whose abilities are all the same, really. The margins between winning and losing are so small, it’s how you get the ability out of people that makes the difference. Our manager’s found the right formation, the right way of playing. He brings strength out in players. I think the potential was always there in me but you need someone to get it out of you.”

Wagner’s fluidly energetic gegenpress-suffused twist on 4-2-3-1 (2-4-3-1 when attacking and 4-4-1-1 in defensive mode) has certainly ruffled some celebrated Championship feathers.

“Of the managers I’ve worked with, he’s second to none tactically,” Hogg says. “He doesn’t leave any stone unturned. He’s always in the office studying videos and preparing presentations. He works out any little weakness in the other team.”

Such diligence has defied the unwritten rule whereby budgets broadly determine league placings. Wagner believes Huddersfield’s to be the division’s 19th lowest, with a wage bill of around £13m and a top-earning player commanding £10,0000 a week. In contrast Newcastle United, who won the division to return to the Premier League at the first attempt, pay Jonjo Shelvey £80,000 a week.

“Newcastle’s strength in depth was always going to shine through,” says Hogg. “But when you play big clubs like that, you can’t think about how much money their players are on. It’s whether you can be better than them on the pitch – and we believe we’re good enough for the Premier League.”