The man who engineers championship-winning teams

He used to be Jose Mourinho's associate at Real Madrid, a man who would oversee transfers for the biggest club in the world. These days he's just a grumpy and eccentric man who is proving to be a stinging thorn In Paris Saint-Germain's side. Luis Campos, the only person who can assemble teams to stop the Parisians from establishing total domination in France.

LOSC Lille are the champions of France. It's a remarkable achievement for a team competing with Paris, probably the wealthiest club in the world right now. Not even Neymar and co could top the battling Dogues, the unlikely champions. It's a title masterminded by the 56-year-old technical director.

Neymar and Mbappe are not enough for PSG, Lille wins the title

Using his extensive networks, Campos has already performed a miracle in Ligue 1. Monaco's unlikely title win of 2017 was his undertaking. During his time in Monte Carlo, he set about assembling a squad of up-and-coming young players, all of whom had significant resale value. Bernardo Silva came in from Benfica for $17.33 million, Tiemoue Bakayoko from Rennes for $8.8 million, Fabinho from Rio Ave for $6.6 million, Lemar from Caen for $4.4 million and Benjamin Mendy from Marseille for $14.3 million. All would later be sold for vastly higher fees.

Campos had left for Lille by the time Leonardo Jardim's Monaco team romped to the title and reached the Champions League semi-finals in 2017, fired by the goals of Radamel Falcao and youth-team graduate Kylian Mbappe. Still, his fingerprints were all over their success. The players he brought to Stade Louis II would help the club to generate around $1 billion from incoming transfer fees.

As L'Equipe author Regis Testelin puts it, Campos is a tough but faithful man, very rich, demanding and competent, sometimes angry and not always easy to get along with, at work and in his clubs. A man of power who rarely considers sharing it, a man of networks, of mistrust and therefore of confidence. Because Luis Campos has a lot of enemies and a big ego too, it is sometimes difficult to make allowance for the certain and the possible, in what he claims to be his player, his nugget, his success, his idea, while others, right next to it, claim that the idea in question, precisely, was not his but theirs and that he appropriated it.

Such a man is difficult to work with, and he isn't the one to win popularity contests among his co-workers. But when he gets to the business – nobody comes close.

Campos usually travels 350,000 kilometres per year in search of the player who will make the difference. For his eye for talent, his knowledge of the game and the players on five continents, his way of building teams and allowing the shareholders for whom he works to make a lot of money, Campos probably has no equivalent. The best in the world in his field? It is quite possible, and many European clubs continue to court him, including Real Madrid, where Florentino Perez could soon make him his advisor.

With an unmatched reputation in the game, Campos arrived to Lille in January 2017. He's done some fantastic things, but he also made many enemies with his attitude.

Benjamin Andre, Jonathan Bamba, Tiago Djalo, Jose Fonte, Jonathan Ikone, Renato Sanches, Boubakary Soumare and Burak Yilmaz are all Campos recruits, players he spotted and whose recruitment he conducted from start to finish. The same goes for Rafael Leao, whom he'd sold for $32.45 million to AC Milan in 2019.

And then there are the players who were chased away and spotted by the LOSC recruiting unit and whose recruitment it validated, then negotiated the contracts, with the player concerned and his agent. Here too, the list is long: Luiz Araujo, Sven Botman, Domagoj Bradaric, Zeki Celik, Jonathan David, Reinildo, Xeka, Yusuf Yazici, Timothy Weah, to which we must add, in the recent past, Gabriel, Victor Osimhen and Nicolas Pepe, who Lille has since sold.

Campos' departure from Lille came following a change in ownership and a change in direction in the wake of the enormous financial hit inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic. Lille's best young talent is up for sale, including Boubakary Soumare, goalkeeper Mike Maignan, Renato Sanches, Zeki Celik, Sven Botman, Luiz Araujo and Jonathan Ikone. Average age - 23 years old. Five of them cost nothing, and Lille stand to make a substantial profit in the summer.

But that's not how Campos does things. Selling players for profit is essential, but not at the cost of competing. Winning remains his priority while uncovering and moulding young stars along the way.

Even though he left his post in December 2020, before he could see the club power to Ligue 1 glory, there is no doubt that Luis is happy and proud today because he knows very well that he's done the business again.