The day before, several hours were spent tagging footage of a previous encounter in preparation for a video analysis session held during one of the five training evenings he oversees every week. Looming large is the final match of the term, so tactics have also been at the forefront of the head coach’s mind.

Sounds professional, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. The 40-year-old was last month made a full-time employee of Glasgow City Football Club, the first time a Scottish women’s team has ever had a salaried coach. After three titles in three seasons – the latter clinched last Sunday in the final campaign before the switch to summer football – some might question the need to alter Wolecki’s established role but this is an organisation determined to continue their remarkable rise.

Ever since winning promotion to the Premier League in their debut season of 1998, they have maintained an upward trajectory. However, several cup wins and the title in 2004/05 were deemed insufficient for the self-proclaimed perennial bridesmaids, who tasked the former Lochee United and Montrose manager to take them to the next level. Domestic domination and a last-16 slot in the Champions League were duly delivered but far from being sated, success has instead been accompanied by an appetite for more.

“This lot leave me bewildered at times by the way they make things happen,” admits Wolecki, for whom title success was his eighth in eight seasons at various levels. “For me to become the first full-time coach specifically for women is phenomenal but they said they’d do it and now they’re talking about a stadium and mark my words, they’ll get it.”

Having his expectations confounded is something Wolecki has grown used to after years amid the drab familiarity of the men’s game. After a playing career in the lower leagues, he coached at Dundee United under both Jim and Tommy McLean as well as at Brechin City and Arbroath before being appointed manager of the ambitious Dundee junior side Lochee United, where he began to develop not only the club – including establishing a ladies team – but also his reputation.

Yet he remained unfulfilled. Visits to Arsenal and Barcelona exposed him to new ideas and convinced him to quit his job as an electrician and enrol in a sports coaching and development degree course. “It was fabulous,” he enthuses. “It didn’t teach me how to set up a team but it taught me the other side of the game; fitness, nutrition and physiological stuff and I used it at Lochee with ice baths.

“It was a big gamble financially but if people in Africa can live without a wage then I can. You need to make sacrifices but the good thing was that as a mature student I wasn’t involved in the social side. Had I been younger I’d have done what the rest of them did and spent Friday to Sunday on a different planet.”

Instead, he entered what seemed like another world. After a short stint at Montrose was ended amid boardroom upheaval, he was asked to attend a seminar where he met Anna Signeul, the national coach. Impressed by his ideas, she invited him on a research trip to Sweden where he experienced an epiphany.

“The first night we watched the national men’s team and I thought ‘this is not bad’,” Wolecki recalls. “Then we went round the clubs and what astonished me was that the women – who were part-time – were training five days a week. A month earlier at Montrose I had players on £300 and when I’d tried to introduce a third night I almost had a revolt on my hands.”

Also on the trip was Peter Caulfield, the manager of Glasgow City, who on their return probed Wolecki for his thoughts on a cup final defeat by a then dominant Hibernian before asking him to assume the formal role that led to his recent appointment. The duo continue to operate as a management team, with the Dundonian assuming responsibility for coaching and coach education as the club attempt to impose their fluid 4-3-3 template throughout the various age-group squads.

That has proved much easier away from the closed environs of a men’s game that is suspicious and at times even outright hostile towards any deviation from a 4-4-2 or the acknowledgement that players are, in fact, supposed to be athletes and live accordingly.

“I never really had the chance to use a lot of my degree until now,”
admits Wolecki, who has been sounded by a couple of clubs recently about a return to the men’s game. “The women have allowed me to because they’re so open to things like wearing heart-rate monitors and analysing matches to death and because they’re making themselves available five days a week.

“It would take a really good package – one a part-time club couldn’t match – to tempt me back. Where else am I going work 
full-time in this country and have the opportunity to take a team into the Champions League? It ain’t going to happen.”

Continental competition holds unfinished business. After reaching the last 16 of the Champions League last season, Wolecki is convinced Glasgow City are on the verge of making a real impact.

“This year against Bayern Munich we equalised with 10 minutes left 
to make it 2-2 and they were there for the taking,” the coach insists. “We opened up and went for it but made fatal errors and it cost us. I told the girls we’d missed an opportunity to take out a big name and make people sit up and take notice but I honestly believe that with the group we’ve got and the quality coming through we can really make an impact.”

And with their track record and increasing professionalism, it would take a brave man – or woman – to doubt them.

It was a big gamble 
financially but if people 
in Africa can live without a wage then I can