David Friio is playing a key role in helping his former club Nottingham Forest build for their return to the Coca-Cola Championship.

Friio became part of Forest's scouting network after retiring from playing two years ago, concentrating largely on sourcing players in his native France.

Forest are scouring the continent as they look to strengthen their squad after clinching automatic promotion from League One.

And manager Colin Calderwood revealed: "David has been doing a sterling job for us in France and we recently viewed five or six players over there.

"Our advantage with David is the fact that he knows what it takes to make the grade in football in this country - he has been there and done it and has the badge and the ticket to prove it.

"He understands and finds out about the temperament and the mentally of the player as much as possible because any money we spend we've got to be confident we're buying good people as well as good footballers."

Calderwood added: "We're not talking about having a world-wide scouting network because we're not at that level but it's a bigger spectrum that what people would imagine.

"There are a couple of games left in France and Spain that we're going to have a look at and then there's tournaments like Toulon, where we very nearly took a couple of players from last year.

"We're looking in that market-place as much as teams who have just dropped out of the Premiership or teams who are already in the Championship."