Gregory Proment and İlhan Fakılı's Turkey call-up: the left wing is still home

The last one to know

Gregory Proment opened his answer with a confession: he did not know İlhan Fakılı had been called up to the Turkey national team. A coach who once stood on the touchline watching every touch of his player at Clermont, who once devoted private sessions purely to fixing the boy's finishing inside the box, turned out to be the last man in the story to hear the news. In football, such gaps in timing rarely make the match report. Yet they say plenty: when a student steps up a level, the old teacher is left sitting in the stands.

İlhan Fakılı now plays for Beşiktaş. Before that he belonged to Clermont, where Proment — a 47-year-old French coach — worked with him directly. İlhan's familiar station is the flank, where his technique and dribbling come alive. After moving to Istanbul, the young player began the season with goals, and according to Proment, that run of form surprised him not at all.

"I noticed his talent immediately, in the very first match he played under me. Despite being very young, he already had superb technique and a fine ability to beat a man. He has all the sporting and human qualities needed to succeed quickly," Proment said. He insisted the call-up is fully deserved, and predicted the player will soon become one of the national team's key figures.

The most telling part of Proment's answer came when he spoke about Clermont. He admitted his former player once had clear limitations: finishing in front of goal, and the quality of his decision-making in moments that demanded a choice. The Clermont staff had to design dedicated finishing drills for him. "Over time, his decision-making mechanism and the quality of his choices improved visibly. That is why his scoring start at Beşiktaş does not surprise me," Proment added.

That detail matters more than any compliment. A coach who discusses a former player by listing the weaknesses before the strengths is usually more credible than one who reaches only for pleasant adjectives. Proment's answer traces a timeline: talent arrived first, finishing came later, and decisiveness came last of all.

On the player's best position, Proment was direct: İlhan's highest output comes on the left of a 4-3-3, a 4-2-3-1 or a 4-4-2, playing tight to the touchline. He also believes the player has already settled into Vincenzo Italiano's system, and that his tactical intelligence will keep him out of trouble. For a young player who has just changed environment, being judged as having adapted that quickly is no small signal.

Here a current runs against the general tide. Modern football has spent years homogenising wingers: nearly all of them must invert, play off the wrong foot and hunt space between the lines. The purely touchline-hugging wide player is increasingly treated as a relic. Proment points out that his former student's home sits right against the chalk. The touchline is not a refuge for the outdated; it is a classroom where a player must choose in a fraction of a second, where the space is compressed and every action has to be clean. It is precisely that cramped strip that teaches a young player how to finish — something an inverted winger is rarely forced to learn.

On Beşiktaş's attack, Proment rates the side's attacking structure highly. He judges İlhan to be as productive a threat as his teammates, and believes that playing together they will feed one another and keep scoring. A star-studded front line only functions when its youngest member accepts sharing the running lanes.

The notable silence sits in his final line: Proment says İlhan Fakılı still has enormous room to grow, and that on current form, leading European clubs will soon start tracking him. He acknowledges Beşiktaş are a big club, but that will not hold back the wave of outside interest.

In the transfer market, remarks like these usually open a noisy cycle. Agents reinterpret, media amplify, and a young player's value is pushed up by things that never happened on grass. But the finishing drills at Clermont, the months spent learning to decide, appear in no bulletin at all. A good commentator is not the one who says the right thing. He is the one who hears it before anyone else does.

Following Beşiktaş's matches this season, I noticed a small detail in their wide build-up: the distance between İlhan and the touchline barely changes, even when his team push the line high. The name İlhan Fakılı took me several attempts to pronounce correctly, and every mispronunciation was a mirror held up to my own haste.

A pitch breathes through whistles, through studs, through the silence that follows a botched move. A national call-up is a milestone, but what truly measures a winger's growth lies in unpeopled afternoons, when a 47-year-old coach stands on the touchline and repeats the same drill for the twentieth time. What remains to be seen: whether that left corridor is wide enough for a player who has already travelled beyond the reach of the man who taught him.