Manchester United appointed football’s first Hygiene Director in August ahead of the new Premier League season.
Just four months later there was a Covid-19 outbreak at the club. United's fixtures against Brentford and Brighton were postponed, Carrington was shut down and players were forced to isolate. It was an unwelcome disruption in the festive period.
There was a staggered return to training and United emerged from their forced 16-day break to play Newcastle.
Across those 16 days, Ecolab's George Olden, now United's Hygiene Director, was tasked with leading the club's response.
Olden is a self-confessed 'hygiene nerd' and he spoke to the Manchester Evening News to discuss how he led the response to the crisis. "W ith COVID cases coming into the team in mid-December, we had to be there as quickly as possible," Olden explained.
"Myself and a small team from our biocore division, we journeyed into Carrington, I think it was even on the same day or within 24 hours of the situation arising and we brought our biocore technology into the training facility.
"That was to perform a very high-level decontamination of the key spaces that the team were using.
"We were effectively able to reset and get things back to a sense of normal as quickly as possible."
The 'bioquell technology' used by Olden might sound like a term from a dystopian world to the ordinary person, so what actually is the technology and why is it important? Olden laughed, agreed it sounded like a term from the future, before he expanded.
"One of the more exciting parts of my role is to bring that technology to the club," Olden added.
"I really enjoy that. It's all about bringing the cutting edge of science, almost a new arena of science into football and being at the forefront of that is really quite a privilege. To give an example, we've brought Bioquell vapour technology to the club.
"Essentially what that does, it fills the room with a vapour of hydrogen peroxide and that deposits an invisible condensation on every single surface in the room. It breaks down and destroys over 99.9999% of the contamination in the room.
"It leaves the space as safe as possible from a Chemical perspective."
That's not the only cutting edge science that Olden and Ecolab, who are now partnered with United, have brought to the club, as there were actually 'UVD Robots' used at Carrington to help control the Covid-19 outbreak in December.
"The UVD technology is fascinating," Olden added. "It's a very cool technology that uses ultraviolet light energies to decontaminate surfaces. So again, it's all about ensuring or removing as much risk as possible.
"With manual cleaning alone, studies have shown 66% of surfaces can remain contaminated."
Olden's remit goes beyond Carrington. Ecolab's expertise was instrumental in dealing with the outbreak at Carrington, however, they've taken on other responsibilities at United, including making improvements to the fan journey at Old Trafford.
"We've installed over 2000 hand hygiene dispensers around Old Trafford," Olden explained. "The logic we applied to do that is actually mapping out a fan’s journey as they come to Old Trafford, almost simulating how a visiting fan would interact with the stadium.
"We mapped this out and found over 380,000 high touchpoints. We took that data and we started to apply our solutions again with the idea of making the stadium as safe and as hygienic as possible for all the visiting fans.
"Studies have shown that if we can increase our use of hand hygiene during key moments, for example, six times or more during a day, then we can actually reduce the spread of infection by about 36%."
While United fans made their full return to Old Trafford this season, the pandemic certainly isn't over and it seems the United Kingdom is learning to adapt to the post-pandemic world, something which Olden was keen to discuss.
"What we can achieve through the partnership with Manchester United is significant," Olden explained.
"We've had over 1.2 million fans come through the turnstiles here now since our partnership began. We've calculated from those 2,000 or more dispensers, that on average, there have been two uses per person each match.
"So we calculate that we've essentially cleaned about 5 million hands here just at Old Trafford already."
While Old Trafford was awash with colour, vibrance and hope on the opening day of the season against Leeds on a warm summer Saturday afternoon in August, there had been logistical challenges to overcome to facilitate that full capacity crowd.
As Olden sat in a conference room at Old Trafford, he identified the return of supporters as the biggest challenge he's faced.
"Playing football behind closed doors for over 17 months was obviously a challenging time for football," Olden admitted.
"It was a challenging time for society as a whole. Bringing fans back into the stadium and wanting to do that as safely as possible, as you can imagine that that task as a whole is incredibly challenging, but it was also immensely rewarding.
"Working with the team here, from the operations team, the facilities management teams, the cleaning management teams and the kitchen teams. The sense of collaboration, what's right for the fan, has been unbelievable, and a pleasure to be a part of.
"We have 45,000 people at Ecolab and we've had dozens of people working on the partnership with Manchester United.
"So whilst it's been challenging, it's been a lot of fun in the process and I think we're in a good place."
