Celta will soon announce the incorporation of a full-time sports director after the failure of its experience with an “external sports advisor”, the Portuguese Luis Campos, with whom it announced a separation agreement after a year and a half of collaboration. The team is in relegation positions and won only 13 games of the 56 it played while paying Campos' salary. The entry of a new management team with Marian Mouriño taking over the presidency held by Carlos, his father, has led to a return to a more classic model.
In the spring of 2022, Celta believed they had found a pillar on which to base football growth. After years of anxiety and indefinition, the idea of thinking big was established in the club with an eye toward the centenary that was going to be celebrated in the year that is now ending. So the departure of Felipe Miñambres from sports management was understood as an opportunity. And that was when the club wanted to get closer to the elite through contact with Campos, a guy on whom the label of guru fell, builder as he had been of squads that experienced astonishing growth and benefited from lucrative capital gains thanks to his expertise in he scouting and football marketing.
Between 1993 and 2005 Campos accumulated fleeting and unsuccessful experiences as a coach in Portuguese clubs such as Esposende, Leiria, Desportivo das Aves, Leça, Penafiel, Gil Vicente, Varzim, Vitoria de Setubal and Beira Mar. With the last three he was relegated. But in the middle of the first decade of this century, with Jorge Mendes as the introducer and Jose Mourinho as the advance guard, Portuguese technicians and strategists became a trend and flag of a new football that valued training, study and adaptation to new technologies. . Portugal became the vanguard and the Sports Faculty of the University of Porto became the academy of new knowledge.
Campos was there and rode that wave, which took him to the big stages of the continent involved in the development of training and scouting software. He offered Mourinho a customized application, the Mourinho Tactical Board, and in 2012 he ended up joining Real Madrid, but after just a year he flew to become a team architect. In Monaco and Lille he revalued, sold and won. Lemar, Bernardo Silva, Fabinho, Anthony Martial, Rafael Leao and Victor Osimhen are in his portfolio. He received the label of discoverer from Kylian Mbappé. That a sports director with that resume was going to work for Celta raised expectations.
But there was a condition. Campos was clear at that point what his method should be. “The external vision allows us to obtain good results,” he explained in Vigo. And so he reaffirmed his profile. Campos would operate as an advisor who would point out or bring profiles of footballers to whom Celta supposedly did not even dream of accessing. And it would be the leaders, headed by president Carlos Mouriño and general director Antonio Chaves, who would later close the contracts. To complete his ancestry, Campos appointed a valid person in the person of Juan Carlos Calero, a man from Albacete who worked at Iniesta's football school in Japan and who settled in Vigo as a sports coordinator, in reality a link between club and guru.
Because Campos warned that it would come and go. When he closed his agreement with Celta he also worked for Galatasaray. But he did not take long to break his relationship with the Turks, a detail that generated even more expectations in Vigo. Until in June 2022, even before being presented in the Galician city, the hiring of him by Paris Saint-Germain was announced and an unexpected ménage à trois. “We couldn't have it alone,” President Mouriño justified then.
Campos then insisted that we were facing a revolution: the arrival of consulting that drew up sports structures serving clients from different backgrounds. The only condition is that they were not direct competitors. “PSG and Celta are very different, they have different economic conditions, salary masses and market niches,” Campos clarified in the only press conference in which he has been presented in Vigo, thirteen months ago now. Nobody asked him to turn Celta into PSG, but in some way he was already setting a limit for the team's growth.
By then his first operations had already raised doubts. The sale of Brais Méndez to Real Sociedad for 14 million euros seemed first a bargain and then a waste, considering that Strand Larsen and Willot Swedberg immediately arrived for 18 million. The summary of the season was made by Iago Aspas after saving the category on the horn. “We lack quality, I said it in August and January and it was not corrected,” he lamented. Campos had put together a worse team than the one he had received and along the way he killed the coach Chacho Coudet, well regarded by the heavyweights in the booth, to recruit his compatriot Carlos Carvalhal, who saved the ballot. This summer's work also does not seem to have covered the needs that Aspas claimed. Bets without experience in the League such as those of Douvikas, Starfelt, Ristic or Bamba have not raised the level of the team to what was expected given the recruiter's resume. The economic gain was achieved thanks to the sales of Brais Méndez and Gabri Veiga, the last two jewels of the quarry.
Campos' lukewarm commitment to the club was ruined in Vigo, even though Calero insisted that he had “all the dedication in the world.” This season he barely attended a team game, in Girona, and the last time he was seen in the city was in mid-August. By then, confidence in him was already undermined and even more so after a market closing in which at the last minute all the options of incorporating a piece for the center midfielder requested by coach Rafa Benítez were blurred. A few days after that fiasco, the president of PSG, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, assured that he had been working 20 hours a day with Campos for two months, who was in fact based in Paris and attended most of the team's matches, even home. So Celta felt like second course.
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