Luis Binks: From Thierry Henry to Scotland Debut

Luis Binks leans back among the palm trees in La Manga and laughs at the madness of it all. At 25, the Brondby captain is on the brink of a first Scotland cap, yet the story that’s brought him here feels closer to a football fever dream than a conventional career path.

He is one of eight uncapped players summoned by Sebastien Pocognoli, the new man in charge who has cleared space at the heart of his defence by moving on Grant Hanley and John Souttar. A vacancy has opened. Binks, with a grandparent from Dunbar and a growing reputation in Denmark, is sprinting towards it.

But his route to this point runs through a deserted five-star hotel and one of the greatest forwards the game has seen.

It’s early 2020. Montreal. An 18-year-old centre-half who has just walked away from Tottenham’s academy in search of something more real, more raw.

“I'd been at Tottenham since I was very young, but I just wanted to go and play first-team football,” he recalls. That itch to escape the cocoon drove him across the Atlantic. “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.”

Montreal Impact offered that test. So did the manager: Thierry Henry.

Binks signed in February. By March, the world had shut down.

He hadn’t even found an apartment when Covid hit. One hotel, then another. Then nothing. “I was in one hotel and Thierry was in another. The one I was in was then shut down,” he says.

Henry, meanwhile, was holed up alone in the Ritz-Carlton, a five-star sanctuary turned ghost ship. The club wanted to move Binks to an airport hotel. He wanted no part of it. “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.”

Then his phone rang.

“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’.”

So the teenager and the World Cup winner ended up as the only two residents of a 129-room luxury hotel, living on separate floors in a locked-down city.

The scenes were bizarre. Runs through empty streets, then back through the silent lobby to find Henry exactly where he’d left him.

“I'd go for runs in the morning and he'd be sat in the reception on his own. 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.”

Football education doesn’t usually look like this. One night, the lesson started with a craving.

“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?’,” Binks says. Suddenly it’s just the two of them, driving around a locked-down Montreal in search of a takeaway.

“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 now almost casually, as if sharing a car with Thierry Henry is a normal rite of passage. It wasn’t. “I'm saying it now like it's just anybody, but there's a big aura around him. I was nervous at the time,” he admits.

Nerves or not, he asked the questions that mattered. Who was the best defender Henry had played with? And against? Why? What separated the great from the good?

“It's a bit of a blur now,” Binks says, but one name cut through the haze: Sol Campbell. Henry talked about what made Campbell special, the details that turned a defender into a wall, and how a young centre-half could build those qualities into his own game.

Those conversations stuck. So did the opportunity.

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

From a deserted Ritz-Carlton with Thierry Henry to the edge of a Scotland debut under Pocognoli, the journey has never been straightforward. It rarely is for those who walk away from comfort in search of “real football”.

Now, with Slovenia looming and a new era beginning for the national team, Binks stands in the sunshine of La Manga with that surreal past behind him and a very real chance in front of him.