An interview with Filipe Celikkaya, by Callum McFadden for WFi.
Over the last four years, you have been an integral part of the coaching team at Sporting Club de Portugal as B Team manager. It has been a really successful time for the club, winning league titles for the first time in nearly two decades alongside Ruben Amorim. How would you sum up your time at the club as a whole?
“Yes, before I arrived in Sporting, I had almost 15 years of my career working at the elite level.
“The performance of the club when I returned to the club for a second spell in 2020 was one of uncertainty because they were not winning titles for a long time.
“It was 21 years without winning the Portuguese title so it was my challenge to build the B team because we wanted to be able to promote players to the first team as part of a long-term development strategy with the aim to win titles with Ruben on the first team.
“Overall, it has been a very successful four years because of the players that have been able to be promoted to the first team to play their part in our success or sell for to big clubs in Europe.
“It has been a very good time for Sporting and now the club is in a totally different place.”
As an assistant to Luis Castro at Vitória Guimarães, you led the team to qualify for the Europa League. Just how proud are you of that success in your career?
“Vitoria is well respected in Portugal because of the fan base. The stadium is always full, and the fans are very passionate.
“I enjoyed my time working as an assistant coach at that time with Luis Castro – who is now the Head Coach of Al Nasr coaching Cristiano Ronaldo and so many big players in Saud Arabia.
“We felt the same way that the fans felt about the club which is very important because we wanted to create an emotional connection between the players, staff, the fans and the club.
“Our aim was to build a team that was capable of qualifying for Europe so to qualify for the Europa League felt like a title to us given the size of the club and the fact that they are not often playing in European competition.”
While working with Luis Castro at Shakhtar Donetsk, you were able to reach a European semi-final and win a domestic title. How would you sum up your time in Ukraine as a whole?
“Ukraine is a fantastic country. Shakhtar Donetsk is a fantastic club with a very good fan base and a well-respected president. All of the people who work there are amazing.
“They wanted us to promote players from the youth system as well as buy players cheaply to sell them on for big profits in the future.
“Examples of that would be Solomon at Tottenham, Mudryk at Chelsea or Tete at Galatasaray among others.
“During our time there, it was fantastic to win the title by a comfortable margin to Dynamo Kyiv with the biggest distance on points ever recorded in the league.
“Our performance in the Champions League gave us the opportunity to continue in the Europa League and we almost reached the final, but we encountered a strong Inter Milan led by Antonio Conte, so it was very difficult, but we had a very good European season, overall.”
How would you describe your coaching philosophy and the way you want your teams to play?
“When I speak of my philosophy, I have a number of main concepts that are integral to my approach.
“I want there to be a high level of in-training and in-game commitment from all of my players and all of my staff because we need to have that relentless approach to win.
“The players play the game, but as staff, we prepare the players to win the game so it’s very important to have reciprocal exchanges of information.
“Team spirit is also vital because it’s a collective effort and when we are in a difficult time, we need to see the spirit of the team to overcome the tough moments.
“I believe that when you are in a club that plays in front of 40,000 fans every week, you need to have courage. I want to play progressive, attacking football and to do that you need to have courage because you need to be brave on the ball and be willing to take risks.
“You cannot play the ball long all the time and expect to develop players and a winning culture.
“Sure, you need to have defensive organisation as a foundation to build upon but we need to foster courage with the ball from training sessions to matches so that we can have a team capable of playing with high levels of intensity.
“Playing with intensity is vital especially in the top five leagues like the Premier League because you need intensity, speed, agility and a strong presence in order to succeed.
“As a manager, player development is another aspect that you must have because a club needs to buy well and sell well. You need to be able to find players at a young age with the potential to grow, then develop them to play for your first team or sell them on for a profit.
“Finally, it is important that as a coach, my players can learn each and every day from a technical and tactical perspective.
“Even the best players do not know it all about technical and tactical issues. They are learning every day and are always open to learning. So, my job as a coach is to add knowledge so that my players can reflect that learning in training and aim to be better every day.
“When you have a lot of people with ambition, they need to have the desire to win, desire to learn every day and then, success with follow.
“This is something that I have followed throughout my career so far with the players that I have worked with.
“I worked with the likes Taison, Alan Patrick, Stepanenko at Shakhtar, players that had won a lot of titles in Ukraine before we worked with them, yet they still had this desire to learn and to win which I thought was fantastic.
“When I coached Ruben Dias and Rafael Leão at a young age, the process was the same. It is no surprise to me that they have achieved great success in football at the highest level as they still have a big desire to learn and to win just like they had when they were young.
“My aim is for somebody who sees one of my teams play to know that the team is one of mine because there’s a clear identity formed by my principles.”
As a young coach, I wanted to ask you about the importance of sports science because it is an aspect of the game that we hear a lot about in football now. How does sports science influence your coaching and management?
“Of course, sports science plays an important role for modern-day coaches because a coach needs to have knowledge of all departments as they all inform you of the full picture of your squad.
“At Sporting, I used GPS technology from STATSports to gain as much knowledge and data related to the performance of my players as I could, in addition, to the work of my sports scientists.
“You need to be able to understand everything that the people responsible for each department is saying so that you can make the fully informed decisions.”
Finally, Felipe, what do you hope to achieve in the coming years?
“I want to continue my career abroad coaching in different countries, but I understand that I need to be careful in choosing the right club.
“I want to work in an ambitious project, and I desire an opportunity to work at the highest level. Working in England would appeal to me because the level of the Premier League is the highest in world football and I aspire to work there in the future.”
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