A few days after granting a long and flavorful interview to the Madrid outlet Marca, Luis Campos this time opened up at length to TF1 Info. An interview divided into three parts, the first of which has just been released, with a large section on his passion for scouting, its evolution, and his methods.

PSG has no match this midweek, and Luis Enrique took the opportunity to grant his men two and a half days of rest, which they have earned after the intense last 18 months they have experienced. Quite rare in the press, Luis Campos decided to use this period to speak out. Last week, the PSG sporting director granted an exciting interview to the Madrid daily Marca, which we translated in full in the article below.

At the end of January, the Portuguese also spoke for over an hour at the Campus with TF1 Info, which shared the first part of this conversation in the last few hours. Luis Campos traces his career and talks about his overflowing love for football, "a passion that has always taken up a lot of space."

Having been successively an assistant, coach, observer, recruiter, consultant, and then sporting advisor, Luis Campos has experienced everything in football but is globally known above all for his talent in spotting young talent and continues to be at the forefront in this field, despite heavy competition and a profession that has evolved a lot in recent years.

"I have an anecdote to tell you. That's when I start to tell myself I'm getting old. (He laughs) Elderly people always have stories to tell. A few years ago, I went to see Pedri play. It was the second time I saw him; I was already on him when he played for Las Palmas. It was a Spain under-17 national team match. There were six of us scouts by the pitch to watch him. After matches, we often went to dinner together, and we talked and shared our ideas and impressions. Today, that has become impossible. If you go to an Under-17 World Cup, there are no longer five but a thousand scouts! They fill an entire stand by themselves. It shows the importance scouting has taken in the world of football," Campos recounts.

Despite this increased competition, how does Campos still manage to sniff out the good deals? "The hardest thing when scouting is to succeed in projecting what you see on the pitch. You have to ask yourself if a player you observe in a specific situation will adapt to the context that is ours. That requires not only experience but also sensitivity. I always give this example: I have brothers who love football a lot. When I go to see a match with them, I sometimes ask them, in their opinion, who is the best player on the pitch. They point him out to me, and it's often very accurate. But understanding who is the best player on the pitch is for my team is not the same thing. You already have to know your team and your club very well."

Not against the help of new technologies, which he admits to using to inform his choice, Luis Campos reveals another essential quality for being a good talent spotter: discretion. "It's a job where you have to try to go incognito. No one should notice I'm there. It's the art of concealment. Even though everything is more complicated today. Everyone is on the lookout; people sometimes have access to the passenger list of the flight we boarded. But I continue to travel. It's important for me; it's a way to stay in the loop. At any moment, I can go anywhere in the world just to see a football match."

A way to continue staying in the loop and enriching his famous database: "I developed a super scouting system. It rests on a simple principle: I always have at hand lists of nine players per position at three different prices," explains Campos, before adding: "You know, I don't like to be surprised; I anticipate a lot. Anticipation is one of my great strengths. It's part of the scouting spirit. I like to be able to meet the expectations of the coach I work with. I am there to listen to him, understand the project he wants to implement, and help him find the right players."

Attached to the idea that a football team is a "puzzle of 22-24 players," Luis Campos also believes it is "very important to succeed in the mix between the economic, the sporting, and the operational. Today, we have machines in our kitchens that make all the food. You can have the money to buy the right vegetables, you can have the right vegetables, but you need to know the recipe to make good soup."

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