Meet Manchester's United first Hygiene Director

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. "With 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 'biocore 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