On the eve of Paris Saint-Germain’s trip to Marseille, the gates at Poissy opened not for another tactical session but for the club’s neighbours. Families from five nearby towns were given a close look at the vast PSG Campus during the European Heritage Days, with the scale of the champions’ daily workplace leaving visitors wide-eyed.
Key takeaways
- PSG welcomed 1,500 residents from Poissy, Aigremont, Chambourcy, Orgeval and Feucherolles to its training and academy base.
- Places made available by the five local municipalities were filled within one or two hours.
- The public tours took place on Saturday, a day before PSG’s Sunday evening Classique away to Marseille.
- Visitors saw the academy and women’s-team areas, but not the building used by Luis Enrique and his staff.
- The 74-hectare site includes performance facilities, an auditorium, educational spaces and an organic garden with an orchard and beehives.
A campus revealed to its neighbours
The Saturday afternoon visit began at 3.30pm and lasted a little more than an hour. For 10-year-old Gabryel, leaving the site with a “Back to back” scarf bought at the club shop, the experience had been memorable. Accompanied by his mother Céline and older sister Léonie, he described the tour as “really cool” and said it was striking to think that PSG’s players train there.
The reaction was not limited to the youngest supporters. Alexia, a local councillor visiting with her husband Sylvain, said the pair had wanted to understand what the complex looked like beyond its perimeter. She praised a site she found both highly modern and closely connected to its natural setting.
That contrast was most visible beside the professional pitches, where an organic vegetable garden sits alongside an orchard and beehives. The land already contained fruit trees before the campus was built. In addition to supplying produce for those based at the centre, the area produced 1,400 bottles of pear juice and more than 200kg of honey last year.
From academy history to elite facilities
With Luis Enrique preparing his side for the 8.45pm kick-off in Marseille on Sunday, the route did not enter the professional-team building. The tour stopped at the staircase leading up from the academy and women’s training fields.
Along those steps, displays mark each decade of PSG academy graduates who reached the professional game, tracing a history that began long before the move to Poissy three years ago. The board covering the 1970s includes Franck Tanasi, Didier Toffolo and Franck Mérelle, names more familiar to the club’s longest-standing followers.
Julien, a 26-year-old Poissy resident whose first match at the Parc des Princes was PSG against Rennes in 2007, said he had not expected such a level of infrastructure. “I’m amazed by the quality of the facilities,” he said. “They have done things properly.”
The campus spreads across 74 hectares, with its auditorium, performance areas and education centre all part of the working environment. Guillaume, an Orgeval resident who has supported PSG for around 30 years, attended with his wife Andrea and their children Lucas and Emma.
He said the family had followed the construction from outside without grasping its full size. He also noted that Vitinha is occasionally seen in the local bakery and is always friendly. Inside the gates, however, the visitor was left in no doubt about the magnitude of a complex built for one of football’s leading clubs.
