Last week two more pieces of infrastructure were added to the growing body of Major League Soccer buildings dotted across the US and Canadian landscape.

There was no doubt which was the more celebrated one – LAFC’s Banc of California Stadium is a transformative addition to one of the top two media markets in the country, and with its dramatic framing of downtown LA, and the fashionably steep rake and standing areas, it adds to the burgeoning narrative of glamorous MLS expansion that the league office is keen to promote.

Yet the other venue that opened last week – New York City FC’s Etihad City Football Academy in the town of Orangeburg, roughly 20 miles north of Manhattan – may prove to be just as significant in the long run. What it lacks in glamour it may make up for in strategic significance, as representing the first steps in NYC FC and City Football Group establishing a meaningful physical base in the United States.

When New York City FC had yet to play a competitive match they traveled to Manchester as part of their first ever pre-season, to train at the then newly completed City Football Academy. That academy is laid out so that each pitch invites a progression – the next pitch a young player should be aspiring to play on is always visible, right up to the mini-stadium where the reserves play in full view of the Etihad Stadium across the street.

That layout created a small irony that became apparent later, as Patrick Vieira coached Manchester City’s Elite Development squad on a field adjacent to Jason Kreis coaching NYCFC. A year later, Kreis would be gone and Vieira would be coaching in New York.

But in fact that was no quirk. The whole academy was laid out with progressions in mind from the proximity of the reserve team and first team dressing rooms right through to the way every desk in the main building, from technical staff to accountants alike, would have a view of a football field, as a constant reminder of where energies were to be focused.

New York City FC’s Etihad City Football Academy in Orangeburg, New York. Photograph: NYCFC

And now as the NYC FC training center opens, it becomes apparent that that focus extends to the way City Football Group wants all its buildings to feel familiar to all its staff, and that as much as being a training center for a team, the New York building is also an outpost for a multi-national football organization, whose technical staff are used to moving around, skill-sharing and scouting, between Manchester, New York, Yokohama and Melbourne.

Chief infrastructure officer Jon Stemp has been involved in all the major building projects the club has undertaken, including the retro-fitting of the Etihad, and the various academy projects around the world. At the New York launch, he spoke to the Guardian about the thinking behind the centers and how they function in connection with each other:

I feel like a parent and this is my third child. Manchester, then Melbourne and now this one. Jon Stemp

“I feel like a parent and this is my third child. Manchester, then Melbourne and now this one. Each facility is different, but the same in many ways. Different, in that each one is bespoke for the club that it serves and in the role that it serves within the group.

“Each one is unique but they’re all connected with the philosophy and functionality of helping elite athletes. We have an obsessive, nerdish attitude towards every aspect around the basic question of ‘How do we design the built environment so that the human pieces work better?’ It’s not by chance that the guy who runs the laundry bumps into the players on a day to day basis, or that the medical rooms are quiet and separate but still connected to the flow of the building.”

The idea is that even though the various academies function on very different scales and for different purposes, the syntax is familiar enough so that a staff member from Manchester, say, can arrive in advance of a US summer tour, and start working in the New York center straight away, knowing where everything is because of the familiar logic of the layout.

In many ways its less reminiscent of traditional sports training centers than of outposts of tech companies, where a campus might be both idiosyncratically focused on a particular software application, but also bear all the generic hallmarks of a parent company.

“I hadn’t really thought about the influence of those organizations,” says Stemp, “But it’s a good point. I have visited their campuses. We’ve looked at Nike, and we’ve looked at Google, and looked at different organizations that touch on our sector, but eventually it’s still about making a locally focused place of work for players.”

City Football Group’s unique structure is in effect creating a blueprint for what a 21st-century footballing start up would look like. Photograph: NYCFC

Local, but virtual too. Beyond the nuts and bolts of the new building Stemp is perhaps most proud of the technological aspects of the new building that connect it to City Football Group’s other outposts:

“Where we’ve really moved on as a group and a club here is the virtual connectivity. We’ve got a significant infrastructure connecting information about all of the players we have contracted or registered in our academies. And it also has our global scouting network, which is looking at hundreds and thousands of players across the world. There’s a room here, where we did the tour for the reporters and I stopped outside the door and said, ‘You can’t come in here, because this is where the Crown Jewels are kept!’ One part of our competitive advantage comes from our analysis and insights on every game being played around the world – our analysis of every training session we have as a global soccer organization. All the data points we want to gather on every player. And we’ve asked how Patrick and Claudio (Reyna, NYC FC sporting director), or Pep of course, can reach into that information and use it to their advantage.”

It’s a tantalizing glimpse of the organizational logic and thought processes of elite modern football clubs, though Stemp is cautious about putting too much weight on the idea that City Football Group’s unique structure is in effect creating a blueprint for what a 21st-century footballing start up would look like:

“If you build something from the ground up now, compared to industrial England or whatever that time was that influenced and shaped most football clubs, there are still a lot of common threads between that time and this, and I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t understand what those ingredients were. And they are basically all about community. It was something people could hold on to outside work, a source of local passion and pride, that brought people together. We just have to understand how that sits in a modern world, where people have so many choices for their time and attention. How do we create that community?”

Of course, one way to create community is in that point where a fan base and a team come together – a stadium. City Football Group’s attempts to find a stadium site in the notoriously difficult New York real estate market have been well documented. Stemp has been involved in that search and experienced all the frustrations of a city where no square inch is without a dozen competing and apparently incompatible claims. But he doesn’t feel the time has been wasted:

“We’re thinking a lot about how stadium designs reflect and then inform the folklore of a club. What’s been interesting is looking at the different cultural influences on stadium design and operation in different parts of the world. Stadiums in South America are very different than stadiums you’d seen in France for example, which in turn are subtly different from Spanish stadiums while still broadly fitting a European stadium model. It affects behaviors. We think about Kops at Liverpool and Sheffield and how they’ve shaped the folklore of the club, and the same with the supporter sections at Boca Juniors, say, in Argentina. I often see MLS as a fusion between European influences and South American influences in a way that’s uniquely North American. So we’re knee deep in thinking about stadium analysis in a way that we hope we’ll be able to apply in the right venue.”

For now, though, Stemp and co must watch LAFC roll out their new home and wait their turn. But what’s fascinating in listening to him and other CFG executives talk is the emphasis on the playing staff as the central focus and resource of the club. The Crown Jewels. Nobody downplays the importance of the stadium as a strategic goal and revenue stream, but likewise it’s not talked about as the be all and end all of the club’s focus. The starting point is institutional expertise, and everything else comes from there. NYC FC may not yet have opened the stadium home their fans want to see, but City Football Group’s American starter home is now in place, and may yet shape NYC FC’s folklore as much as Banc of California Stadium shapes LAFC’s.

