The Subtle Art of Giving A Shit – How Arise are giving Sheffield Wednesday legitimacy again
I remember one former Sheffield Wednesday player laughing at me when I asked him about his first impressions of Middlewood Road…
We all know the limitations in place for Wednesday at their training base in Hillsborough. We know that space is limited, and that without moving there’s no room to change that. That doesn’t mean you should just leave the rest of it to fall into disrepair, though.
‘When we reach the Premier League’ was always Dejphon Chansiri’s response. That’s when he was going to improve the stadium. That’s when he was going to fix things at the training ground. Improving the matchday experience of the fans could wait – indefinitely – just like the players’ need for a professional-looking place of work.
Not all of you will have had the opportunity to wander through the entrance at Middlewood Road, even fewer of you will have seen inside the buildings that reside there. It’s safe to say that they’ve needed a bit of tender love and care for quite some time.
Chansiri always said that he didn’t care about PR, about what people said about him, but what he didn’t seem to get was that it wasn’t just him that he was making look bad. He did make some slight improvements to the TG, but they were few and far between - and never purely for aesthetic purposes.
Within a couple of months of taking over, Arise have moved to freshen up almost every single element of this battle-worn football club of ours. Pictures of the training ground upgrades were the latest to be released, and though – in the grand scheme of things – it won’t have cost much, it makes a world of difference.
Put aside the new gym facility that David Storch has confirmed that they’re working on, Middlewood Road now looks like you’re stepping into a proper facility again. You’d speak to players from the 80s, and they’d tell you how little the place had changed from their time there. Old photos of the place confirm it.
Arise, meanwhile, do give a shit about how things look. They care how the club is perceived, they care what new signings see when they first pull into the entrance. They aren’t going to wait until the international glare of the Premier League shines on them to make sure the club looks and feels like a proper outfit.
There’s an old adage that says, ‘Dress how you want to be addressed’. It feels like Arise and Co. are taking that very seriously.
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Anyone know why Grainger didnt play?