North West England
Premiership Football Team, First Team Training Building
AV and IT design and build
- Premiership football team · Knight Build · Caldwell Consulting
- Project value around £1.5m
- Instructed January 2025, handed over 31 July 2025
Summary
A Premiership football team's training ground has a new First Team Building, designed by a leading architect and built by Knight Build. OKTO designed the AV and IT from RIBA Stage 3 and then delivered it: fourteen Teams rooms, the players' presentation and dining spaces, IPTV to every screen including a touch screen at each player's locker, a new server room for the whole site, and the network the club runs on. Instructed in January 2025, it was handed over on 31 July 2025.
At a glance
- 01Client: a Premiership football team; main contractor Knight Build; M&E consultant Caldwell Consulting; project value around £1.5m
- 02AV and IT consultancy from May 2024 through RIBA Stages 3 and 4, then a design-and-build contract: six months from instruction to handover
- 03Fourteen Yealink and Crestron Teams rooms built to a standard design, proved to the club at OKTOLabs in April 2025 before the site build
- 04Tripleplay IPTV and signage with Sky integration, around 70 players, and 30 ten-inch touch screens at the players' lockers
- 05Q-SYS and JBL distributed audio; Samsung LED walls in the gym and the players' briefing room; Cat6A and single-mode fibre with a 25-year Excel warranty
- 06New server room: sixteen racks, Cisco 9500 core with 22 Catalyst 9300X switches, 63 Aruba WiFi 6E access points, three Riello UPS including dedicated units for the club's television studios
- 07The club's site-wide network kept live through demolition of the old comms room with three planned overnight switchovers
The case study
The project
The First Team Building was rebuilt by Knight Build to a design by a leading architect, with the players' changing, dining, medical, gym, briefing and lounge spaces on the ground and first floors and the club's television studios alongside. OKTO was appointed in May 2024 to design the AV and IT to RIBA Stage 4, and then to build it under a design-and-build sub-contract instructed on 31 January 2025 with completion fixed for 31 July 2025.
The brief
The club wanted the right information on the right screen at the right time of day for each first-team player: messaging, nutrition, schedules, metrics and improvement plans, managed from one platform. It needed meeting rooms that staff could walk into and use, a presentation space for the players, distributed audio, and a new server room to replace the one being demolished, which was the core of the whole site's network, not just the first team's.
What we delivered
Fourteen Teams rooms, from four-person rooms to the twelve-seat boardroom, use Yealink meeting bars and touch panels with Crestron occupancy sensing and handheld remotes so that each room wakes up and shuts down by itself. The players' briefing room has a Samsung LED wall, an interactive display, a PTZ camera and a recorder for the coaches' presentations, and the gym has a larger LED wall. Tripleplay's cloud platform delivers IPTV and signage through around seventy players, with Sky integration, to LG high-brightness displays throughout the building and to thirty ten-inch touch screens, one at every player's locker. Distributed audio runs on a Q-SYS core with QSC network amplifiers and JBL speakers.
What we delivered
Beneath it sits an Excel Cat6A and single-mode fibre infrastructure with a 25-year warranty, broadcast fibre tie-lines to the television studios, a Cisco 9500 core with 22 Catalyst 9300X switches, SonicWall firewalls in high availability, 63 Aruba WiFi 6E access points, and a new server room with sixteen racks, intelligent power distribution and three Riello UPS, with dedicated units for the television studios.
The challenges
The date could not move: the first team was returning for pre-season. Instruction came six months before handover, and the old comms room served every building on the site and had to be demolished mid-project. OKTO wrote the server room relocation process in October 2024: a temporary comms room in a modular building, BT and M247 fibres re-routed, and three overnight switchovers so that the site stayed connected. A proof-of-concept meeting room and the players' locker touch screen were built at OKTOLabs and demonstrated to the club on 16 April 2025, and the racks, programming and commissioning were completed in Lisburn before delivery to site in June.
How we did it
The building was handed over on 31 July 2025. Operating manuals, an asset register and as-built drawings followed, and all snags were closed by September. The club has since instructed further work direct, including the head coach's office and the recovery rooms.
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