Walk the grounds at Royal Birkdale this week and you’ll pass two villages that never touch. One is the spectator side, food courts, merchandise, hospitality suites, built for 200,000-plus people who paid to be here. The other is the player village, dining, physio and fitness trailers, quiet lounges, built for maybe a few hundred players, caddies and support staff who are here to work. They sit close enough that you can see one from the other. Operationally, they might as well be different events.
That’s not duplication. It’s the correct answer to a question most organisations never bother asking properly: who is this actually for, and does everyone in the building need the same thing?
One site, two completely different jobs
The instinct in a lot of workplaces is to build one version of everything and let different groups share it, one kitchen, one lounge, one set of facilities, because running two feels wasteful. But a player who’s teeing off in an hour and a fan who’s here for the atmosphere need almost nothing in common. Shared space usually means compromise space, good enough for neither audience because it was designed to be adequate for both.
Birkdale didn’t compromise. The tier of your audience that chose the harder, cheaper option still deserves deliberate planning, not leftovers, and the same principle runs the other way here. The players aren’t a premium tier who get more. They’re a completely different audience who need something else entirely, and the site was built to reflect that rather than pretend one village could flex to cover both.
The infrastructure you’ll never see run twice
Running two parallel operations on the same footprint, separate catering, separate security, separate everything, doubles the planning load. It’s the same logic behind the broadcast operation running invisibly across 199 countries. The best outcome for that kind of infrastructure is that almost nobody thinks about it at all, and the player village is built on exactly the same principle. A player shouldn’t have to think about where their next meal comes from any more than a viewer at home should have to think about which satellite feed they’re watching.
Stop assuming shared means efficient
If your organisation defaults to one shared space for genuinely different groups because separating them looks expensive, look at what that shared space is actually costing you in quality for everyone using it. Sometimes the efficient answer is one well-designed thing serving everyone. Sometimes it’s two things, built properly, two hundred metres apart, that never need to touch at all.
Ben Webb is a Sydney-based project delivery leader and 2022 AIPM Project Manager of the Year. He writes about why most project management is theatre, and what actual delivery looks like without it.
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