Gazzetta in “Braga Strategy”: this is how the players and coaches of tomorrow are created!

We started our tour from the restaurant which is on the left hand side for anyone entering the training center and facing the reception desk. On the right side are the team offices for other sports, such as beach soccer and futsal. Today their offices are all together. With the completion of the second phase of the projects, each sport will have its own character.

And a little next to it is a room for children who go to school to read. It is noteworthy that the schools are located outside the training center and the team buses transport the children after the lessons to the club facilities. K14, K15, K16, K17 and K19 players go to school. This also applies to Greece.

Coming down the first staircase, our eyes fell on some of the paintings hanging on the wall. Braga has been awarded the Five Star Award by the Portuguese Football Federation for its academy facilities for five consecutive seasons. The scale in this rating is from one to five stars. It is an assessment conducted on all teams competing in the country’s first through third professional categories.

“We give everything to the children, all we ask is that they come here, work hard and play.” These were the words of a staff member in the Braga Academy’s press office when we saw the awards.

We had to go down the stairs because the entrance is at the highest point of the hill on which the training center is built. Turning left at the end of the stairs, one first passes through the main screening room, where the coaches of all teams, from K14 to II, have the opportunity to talk to the footballers and analyze matches for them.

Then we saw two gymnasiums as well as recovery rooms in the infrastructure departments, before moving on to the analysts’ offices. Braga, in addition to football players and coaches, also selects analysts from within. It is noteworthy that the first group today includes four analysts, three of whom are from the infrastructure departments. Each age group has its own doctor, psychologist and analysts. Along this corridor were written the words of the club’s anthem.

We went into the locker room to see that each team has its own team. They are all located along a long corridor with pictures of many players who excelled with the first team and then were sold for large sums of money. Among them is David Carmo, who was awarded in the summer of 2022 to Porto. By the time we got past the point, the second team had just finished training. Football players passed us and everyone said hello. It is also an example of the right mentality that clubs abroad seek to pass on to young children.

Arriving at the place where the players’ kits are kept, we saw that it was decorated with the banners of the teams that Braga’s infrastructure departments had played against. In this way, our tour of the interiors is complete and now it is the turn of the courts.

We started on the main pitch made of artificial turf. K23, K19, K17, and only the second stage of the tournament, K15, compete in it. The second team does not play in this center, but in another sports center with two stadiums and located a 20-minute drive from the “Cidade Desportiva”.

As the club members specifically told us, this very stadium witnessed a very beautiful moment in last season’s final when the Braga U-16s won the league and the team’s fans filled the stage and celebrated this success.

We took the road to the city’s Municipal Stadium, the stadium where the match against Panathinaikos was played. To our left we saw the K23 and K19 drills. We noticed that there was another artificial turf field and two more natural turf fields.