Football clubs guard their training grounds jealously, and AEK Athens is no exception. The Spata Training Centre — officially the OPAP Sports Centre since 2014 — sits on 144 acres of east Attica flatland, just minutes from the runways of Athens International Airport, and it is where generations of AEK players have sweated through their drills, rehabbed their knees, and learned the rhythm of the club. It is a place built not for spectators but for the daily, unglamorous work of professional football.
Before Spata, AEK trained at Thrakomakedones, a facility in the hills north of Athens that served the club until 2010. The move to the Mesogeia plain was a statement of intent. Construction of the new centre began that same year, the initial investment reaching 15 million euros, and the result was immediately recognised as one of the finest training complexes in the Balkans. The flat terrain around Spata — vineyards and olive groves pressing up against the airport perimeter — gave designers room to think large. Two full-size natural grass pitches, both measuring the regulation 105 by 68 metres with proper drainage systems, anchor the football operations. A third pitch, laid with FieldTurf artificial surface, accommodates about 280 spectators and serves the academy and reserve sides. The main building behind the pitches houses offices, a large gymnasium, press facilities, two multipurpose halls, dressing rooms, and a rehabilitation suite with mini pools, a jacuzzi, a spa, and a sauna — amenities a generation of players could only have dreamed of.
In 2013, a second phase of investment modernised the site further. The rehabilitation centre was upgraded to be the most advanced in Greece, and the artificial pitch was added for the academy, at a cost of another 5.5 million euros. The following year, naming rights went to OPAP — the Greek Organisation of Football Prognostics — giving the complex its official title. Owner Dimitris Melissanidis also acquired an additional 70 acres of surrounding land at a cost of 5.5 million euros, securing room for the next phase of growth. The total footprint now stands at 144 acres. That is not a training ground; it is a campus.
In April 2022, a new piece arrived: the Serafidio, a compact stadium built within the training complex to host AEK Athens B matches and the first team's friendly games. The name honours Stelios Serafidis, a goalkeeper who became a legend of AEK in the club's earlier decades, and there is a deliberate echo of the old Nikos Goumas Stadium in the design — the same sense of two stands facing each other across the pitch, intimate yet purposeful. At 3,000 seats, the Serafidio is already a UEFA Level B venue, meaning it can host a UEFA Youth League final. Plans to expand it to between 4,000 and 5,000 seats by adding a third stand on the west side are in hand.
In May 2023, AEK announced plans for a broader development called AEK SportCity. Beyond the extra stadium stand, the vision includes additional academy training grounds, parking, a tennis court, a swimming pool, and a five-star hotel of 5,000 square metres. The hotel's plans read like a luxury resort: twenty-four rooms and two suites on the first floor, twenty more rooms above, with ground-floor spaces devoted to a gym, a library, a restaurant, a lounge, and retail. Whether the ambition fully materialises remains to be seen, but the trajectory is clear. What began as a replacement for an ageing facility has become a long-term project to turn a training ground into something much closer to a self-contained sporting village — rooted in the flat agricultural plain of eastern Attica, within earshot of arriving aircraft.
The Spata Training Centre sits at approximately 37.957°N, 23.928°E, on the Mesogeia plain of eastern Attica just west of Athens International Airport (LGAV). Flying into LGAV from the west, the green pitches of the training complex are visible to the left of the approach path at low altitude. At pattern altitude (around 1,500 ft), the complex reads as a cluster of large rectangular grass surfaces against the drier agricultural land. The airport threshold is only a few kilometres east. Nearby reference points include the Attica Zoological Park immediately to the north and the town of Spata to the northwest.