Luis Binks: From Montreal Impact to Scotland's Defense

Luis Binks sits in the shade of the palm trees at La Manga, Scotland’s temporary base this week, and laughs at the sheer weirdness of his own journey. Every player has a backstory. His sounds like something out of a football fever dream.

He is 25 now, captain of Brondby, and on the brink of a first Scotland cap. Slovenia await on Saturday, and with Grant Hanley and John Souttar ushered out of the picture since Sebastien Pocognoli replaced Steve Clarke, there is a vacancy at the heart of the defence. Binks is one of eight uncapped players in this new, reshaped squad. Eight fresh faces. Eight fresh tales.

His begins in earnest in North America, just before the world shut down.

Back in early 2020, Binks left the comfort of Tottenham’s academy for Montreal Impact in MLS. He was only 18, but he knew he had to get out.

“I'd been at Tottenham since I was very young, but I just wanted to go and play first football,” he recalls. “That was my biggest thing, to not get caught up in the whole youth system. I feel that if you get caught in that, it's not real football. I wanted to test myself.”

So he crossed the Atlantic. New country, new league, new manager. Not just any manager either. Thierry Henry.

Binks signed in February. By March, Covid had shut the doors on normal life.

“I'd signed in February and then we went into Covid lockdown in March,” he says. “I hadn't yet found an apartment. I was in one hotel and Thierry was in another. The one I was in was then shut down.

“He was staying at the Ritz on his own. They wanted to move me to a hotel by the airport and I didn't want to go because there was nothing there. It felt like prison, almost. One day I get a call from him, saying: ‘Do you want to move to where I am? You can go on the other floor’.”

The Ritz-Carlton in Montreal is a five-star sanctuary, 129 rooms of polished luxury. During that strange slice of lockdown, only two people lived there.

Henry. And a teenage centre-half from England with a Scottish grandparent from Dunbar.

“I'd go for runs in the morning and he'd be sat in the reception on his own,” Binks remembers. “When I'd get back from the run, he'd still be sat there. I'd spend a few hours with him, just trying to pick his brains.”

The scenes sound almost comical now. One of the greatest forwards of his generation, killing time in an empty lobby. A kid desperate to learn, circling back from training runs to soak up every scrap of knowledge he could.

Then there was the pizza run.

“I remember one night I was sat in my room just playing PlayStation and he rings me and goes, ‘Do you want to get a pizza?’ There's me and him driving around Montreal looking for a pizza. It's a bit surreal, but that was how it was.”

He tells it casually now, as if sharing a car with Thierry Henry is no different to a lift from a team-mate. But it wasn’t like that at the time.

“I'm saying it now like it's just anybody, but there's a big aura around him. I was nervous at the time, but I asked him who's the best defender he's played with and against and why and it was a good time.

“It's a bit of a blur now, but I always remember him talking about Sol Campbell and just saying what made him great and how I could improve as a defender.

“I owe a lot to him because he gave me my first chance in senior football.”

From that empty Ritz-Carlton to the edge of a Scotland debut, Binks has carried those lessons with him. The aura of Henry, the standards of Sol Campbell, the hunger to escape the academy bubble and find “real football”.

Now he stands in La Manga, one of the new era’s unknowns, waiting to see if Pocognoli will hand him another first chance – this time in dark blue.