“Cut off from everyone. Delete all apps. Be around nature.” No, this is not the trailer for a new Bear Grylls series. Rather, it’s the routine a leading football performance coach advises his players to follow during the close season.

“What I encourage them to do is have a break where they are with their loved ones and that’s it. They’ve got no communication with anyone or anything else. And they’re not thinking about football.”

The coach in question, Simon Clifford, mentors around 30 players while also working as a performance coach for Blue Sky Sports, a football agency. In his view, a complete break of ten days is the minimum requirement given the demands on elite footballers throughout the rest of the year. Even during the summer recess, there are club fitness programmes they must follow, then come the season there is simply no let-up.

It is not just the busy match calendar. As Clifford explains, the physical demands of football in 2025 – the kilometres covered, the high-intensity runs – mean training, in turn, is “far more demanding” than ever before. More recovery time must be factored in too.

And there is more. “The microscope that footballers are under is not only from the public but within the club,” Clifford notes. “You’ve got that many touch points every day, with sports-science staff and with technical staff. In the wider sense, it’s a very, very demanding existence. You’re being judged every day, you’re being evaluated every day. Also, there are constantly players coming in, and managers changing too. You’ve also got media commitments, you might have sponsors, and in the midst of that, you’re supposed to be able to maintain family relationships, relationships with friends, normal things like everybody else.”

This brings us to the crux of the question for this column: how do footballers find those moments of peace, of detachment even, during the season itself with the constant, 24/7 clamour it brings?

I ask this question to Danny Donachie, an experienced mental performance coach. Donachie runs a high-performance consultancy, Stable, and his clients include Premier League side Burnley. He concurs with Clifford that “it’s difficult to find space for anything other than being a footballer”.  

“Everything they do is so prescribed and monitored and measured, and so they lose that spontaneity and freedom,” adds Donachie, who considers it crucial that a player’s identity is not wholly football-centred. In the past, he says, players would be encouraged to marry young and have families, which helped give them a focus away from their clubs – something he knows all about as the son of former Manchester City and Scotland defender Willie Donachie.

“A lot of my work is trying to help players find that identity,” he adds. “You work on strategies to create an inner space where there’s freedom from the noise.”

Donachie, a longstanding yoga practitioner, recommends meditation and breathwork. He also gives the example of a player who began playing tennis one day a week last season to reconnect with the pure joy of playing sport.

“The importance of recovery is drilled into players now and obviously it is important, but it means that many players, after a game or leading up to a game, just go home and lie on the couch after training. With the player I was working with, I encouraged him to play tennis, which he loved to play but which he’d completely stopped doing.

“When he did that, he started to feel a lot freer in his game. That’s the thing with identity. When you define yourself as one thing, it feels even more important and psychologically it can be hard to bear this burden.”

Simon Clifford takes a similar approach. Football can bring extraordinary highs, but those highs can become addictive. He uses the term “dopamine detox” as he explains: “You’ve got to pull them back from it all and, as much as possible, help them see that the world that they’re in is not actual reality. Reality for them is going to come afterwards. It’s their reality at the minute.

“I work on attachment a lot and not being attached to things – whether that’s a win, a loss, a person, a place or a thing. Attachment can bring misery because we’re fearful of losing something. What if we lose this? What if we lose the contract? What if we lose the match?”

On a day-to-day basis, Clifford recommends that his players begin the morning with a “golden hour”. He elaborates: “It might be prayer, it might be meditating, it might be visualising, it might be stretching, it might be prehab activities.”

Interestingly, he feels young players are more open than their predecessors to exploring their spiritual or inner selves. Keeping a journal is a helpful practice too. As with Donachie, he recommends spending the least time possible on social media and stresses the benefit of having something – relationships and pastimes – to take players away from football. “I talk to them a lot about movies. I’ll ask, ‘Have you seen this?’ I’m always suggesting films for people and the life lessons that come through films.” Escape to Victory, anyone?