FA move with the times

Lancaster Gate, the headquarters of English football for more than 70 years, is to be turned into luxury apartments as part of a project backed by German bankers.

Although the Football Association moved their operation to trendy Soho Square in October they only completed the sale of their traditional base for £7.25 million in the past few days.

Violand, a London-based property developer, and Hong Kong group Sincere have acquired the Lancaster Gate site and plan to turn it into exclusive apartments including penthouses which could fetch more than £1m each. The two companies were brought together by German merchant bank Dresdner.

The developers, who will formally complete on the deal in January, have to apply to Westminster Council for planning permission to switch the buildings back to residential use as the FA had special dispensation to use them as offices.

In a statement, Churston Heard, the commercial agents who handled the sale, said: "The property has been acquired by Sincere Group of Hong Kong in a joint venture with Violand."

Richard Webster, from Churston Heard, who also handled the FA's move to Soho, added: "We are delighted to have found the FA a new home and to have handled what turned out to be a smooth disposal process of their old headquarters."

The sale of Lancaster Gate marks a watershed for the national game as the FA attempt to drag themselves into the new millennium. The move to Soho Square followed the appointment of Adam Crozier, a former advertising executive with Saatchi and Saatchi, to the post of chief executive.

Shortly after he took up his new role, it is reported, Crozier introduced himself to a secretary who claimed she had not spoken to a senior official since she started working there. When Crozier asked how long that was she replied 15 years. The story told Crozier, if he didn't know already, that the organisation had to be brought up to date. For too long football had been controlled by grey-haired men in their prized grey blazers with little understanding of the modern business world.

With the advent of the slick, commercially based Premier League in 1992, the FA knew they had to modernise. And that meant moving to bigger headquarters nearer the media and advertising firms who now provide the basis of the FA's and indeed football's income.

This Sunday the public will be given their first glimpse inside the new Soho HQ when it is used to host the draw for the third round of the FA Cup, presented live on ITV by Gabby Yorath.

It will be a far cry from the days when former FA chairman Bert Millichip was filmed in one of Lancaster Gate's stuffy committee rooms drawing balls from a blue bag.

The FA moved to 22 Lancaster Gate in 1929 from the supposedly haunted offices of 42 Russell Square which were leased, appropriately given the number of ageing blazers who ran the FA in those days, from the British Museum.

They bought their new base from the Association of British Launderers and Cleaners and it was while the FA were based at this address that Sir Stanley Rous put English football at the forefront of the world game.

In his autobiography he recalled how Lancaster Gate in those days was "in many ways a quiet backwater. There was no problem parking my Hillman Minx as there was rarely another car in the road."

In stark contrast to the current FA, he wrote how disciplinary cases were "very rare, not more than five or six a year needed personal hearings".

They moved up the road to 15-17 Lancaster Gate in 1972 and although the offices were badly damaged by smoke following a fire in 1998 they were refurbished and ended up being sold this week for £7.25m, nearly £1m more than the FA had expected to fetch.

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