Put the Phone Down: PSG Academy’s Digital Detox for Football’s Next Stars

Paris Saint-Germain have introduced what they are calling a digital detox at their Campus de Poissy academy, restricting around 140 young players and players to just one hour of phone use per day. The measure, which came into effect at the start of the new school term last week, targets players aged 11 to 15 most strictly. From Sunday evening through to Friday afternoon, phones are handed over to residential staff and locked in a case. Players only get them back between 7:30pm and 8:30pm each evening, and only if their rooms are clean and tidy.

Older academy members face a lighter version of the same restrictions. The PSG education director, Medhi Rahoui, said phone addiction is harmful for any young person, and for a high-level young athlete, the damage is more.

The club confirmed that phones will travel in the same locked case during away trips. PSG have also installed pianos at various points around the campus to give players something else to do with downtime. A first review of the programme is already scheduled for mid-September, when medical staff and psychologists will assess the response and adjust where needed.

This means a controlled environment around performance.

The link between heavy phone use and poor sleep is well known. Health studies confirm that young athletes who use screens after dinner sleep less deeply and recover more slowly. For a 13-year-old at a football academy who is training twice a day and sitting exams, that is not a small concern. Poor recovery directly affects their development on the pitch and their focus in the classroom. PSG’s data from their own medical team drove the decision, according to Rahoui.

The 97% pass rate in the French Baccalauréat among PSG academy students in June is not a coincidence. The campus at Poissy was built around a philosophy that academic and sporting excellence are inseparable, and the digital detox fits that frame. A player who is scrolling social media until midnight cannot train at full intensity the next morning. A player reading abuse about himself online minutes after a difficult training session absorbs that noise in a way that affects his confidence over time.

Gareth Southgate noticed this with senior professionals. In his 2021 letter to England fans on The Players’ Tribune, he wrote about watching players reach for their phones the moment the final whistle went and thinking, quietly, whether that was really a good idea. He said he would never impose a rule but that reading abusive comments at a tired and vulnerable moment was one of the genuine risks of modern football. He was talking about grown men with Premier League experience and strong support systems. PSG are dealing with 11-year-olds.

When the former England manager took the senior squad to a Royal Marines training camp in Devon ahead of a World Cup qualifier against Scotland in 2017, phones were confiscated as part of a team-bonding exercise designed to strip away outside noise and force the group to connect with each other. Southgate framed it as a deliberate discomfort. Take away the distraction, and players have to be present.

Thierry Henry deleted all of his social media accounts in March 2021, telling sponsors and the public he would not return until platforms regulated abuse with the same seriousness they applied to copyright violations. He described social media as something that creates tension for no reason, and referenced France’s 1998 World Cup winning camp, where the squad had no newspapers, no external media, no noise. That team won the tournament.

A major study published in the Lancet Regional Health Europe in February 2025 found that restricting phone use during school hours did reduce daily in-school usage, but did not automatically improve mental wellbeing or sleep when students simply moved their usage to evenings and weekends. The researchers saw that the link between high screen time and worse outcomes is real and consistent, but a blunt ban without broader support does not close the gap on its own.

PSG appear to have read this. The programme includes psychologists, scheduled reviews, alternative activities, and a gradual structure rather than a total prohibition. The pianos are not an accident.

Football is now producing players who have grown up entirely inside the attention economy. Lamine Yamal, 18, has more Instagram followers than some mid-table Premier League clubs have supporters. Endrick, 18, built a global commercial profile before playing a competitive minute for Real Madrid. The generation moving through PSG’s campus at Poissy will face the same commercial and social media pressures within a few years of leaving it. The question PSG are answering now is whether their academy can give those players enough distance from that world, early enough, to build habits that last.