Three years ago, Sporting Lisbon’s B-team coach Filipe Celikkaya sat down with Renato Veiga for the first of several conversations about the teenager’s development.
“Renato was a player we identified as someone who could grow to the elite level,” Celikkaya tells The Athletic. “We told him he had the potential to play for a Champions League club.”
Celikkaya and his staff laid out a roadmap for the now-20-year-old to work towards that target. As well as exposing Veiga early to competitive football against men (Sporting B play in Portugal’s third tier), they implemented a clear positional framework influenced by the modern game’s tactical evolution.
“We proposed a methodology for him with the ball and without the ball, so he could work in two different positions: No 6 and centre-back,” Celikkaya explains. “In my team, he played in those two positions. He has a lot of versatility in the game. He’s like a hybrid who can play different positions at a high level.”
It is this tactical versatility, coupled with Veiga’s intriguing blend of physical and technical attributes — he is fast and strong in his 6ft 3in (190cm) frame, with an assured left foot and expansive passing range — that prompted Chelsea to agree a deal worth €14million (£11.8m; $15.2m) to sign him from Swiss club Basel this month.
Veiga, left, playing for Sporting at UEFA Youth League level (Vasile Mihai-Antonio/Getty Images)
Chelsea believe that as well as providing another option in central midfield and defence, Veiga’s skill set makes him a prime candidate to be deployed as an inverted full-back in their new head coach Enzo Maresca’s system. He has been listed in the club’s squad for their ongoing pre-season tour in the United States as a defender, the position where he has won his seven Portugal Under-21 caps, but played most of his minutes for Basel last season at the base of midfield.
A player who turns 21 on Monday remains a relatively raw prospect, though, with work to do on and off the pitch — a reality underlined by the unusual career path that has now brought him to Stamford Bridge.
Confidence has never been an issue for Veiga.
Son of former Cape Verde international defender Nelson Veiga, he was first taken to a football stadium at three weeks old. Renato Veiga has always felt at home with a ball at his feet. In his unveiling interview with Chelsea, he cited his father as his biggest inspiration. “I just wanted to be like him,” he said.
Celikkaya quickly identified Veiga junior as a natural choice to captain Sporting B. “He was the ‘octopus’ of the team, to share my information on the pitch,” he explains. “He was one of the oldest in the locker room, because our B team was very young.” The tall teenager demanded the ball, directed his team-mates’ movements and let them know if standards were slipping.
The serious intensity that would later mark him out, for better and worse, was evident. “‘We don’t come here to play around. We come here to win, to be the best’. That is his mentality,” Celikkaya says of Veiga. “He’s very concentrated, very competitive in training, competitive in games. But a humble person, a fantastic kid. We had a very good relationship because of that.”
Veiga’s ironclad self-belief underpinned his decision to jump at the opportunity to join Augsburg on a 12-month loan deal in January last year, swapping B-team football for a relegation battle in Germany’s Bundesliga. He made 13 appearances in the second half of that 2022-23 season but only seven starts as Augsburg survived by one point, and fell foul of coach Enrico Maassen over his timekeeping.
In August, days before their first league match of the new season, Augsburg announced the loan had been terminated early by mutual decision. “My conscience is clear,” Veiga insisted when asked what had gone wrong for him in Bavaria during an interview with bz Basel, a Swiss newspaper, shortly after joining Basel from Sporting for €4.6million a couple of weeks later.
Celine Feller, the journalist who conducted that interview, has reported on Basel for nine years. She recalls being wowed by Veiga’s debut: a dominating individual midfield display in a 2-2 draw with Zurich on September 3, punctuated by a long-range free kick whipped into the top corner to halve a two-goal deficit.
“His body language was immense, you really felt his presence, you saw how he tries to tell everybody where to go, he always asks for the ball,” Feller tells The Athletic. “He also scored a sensational goal. But that was his best game — he never played that well again.”
Veiga playing for Augsburg after his loan from Sporting in January 2023 (Adam Pretty/Getty Images)
Veiga’s timing was unfortunate. Basel, 20 times champions of Switzerland, went on to suffer their worst league campaign this century, finishing eighth in the 12-club Swiss Super League. He played under three different coaches, with Timo Schultz sacked in late September and Fabio Celestini appointed one month later, following an interim stint by Heiko Vogel.
As the team’s league position declined, Veiga’s demeanour dropped with it. “He was still quite dominant, demanding, loud on the pitch, but the more games he played, it became more about him than the team,” Feller says. “His body language got worse, he wasn’t positive, and he didn’t play that well anymore. He was complaining at team-mates, at the coach, at the referee — everybody.”
Veiga remained a regular starter at the heart of midfield alongside Taulant Xhaka — elder brother of Bayer Leverkusen’s former Arsenal captain Granit — under Celestini, who offered a measured assessment of the Portuguese prospect’s performances in public. “Renato sometimes has a little too much energy,” he said. “Some of his game is still not efficient enough, so he needs to develop. He is always motivated and willing to learn. I’ve never seen him in training without enthusiasm.”
Celestini was less forgiving when Veiga and team-mate Thierno Barry were late joining the squad before a Swiss Cup quarter-final against Lugano in February.
Both players were dropped to the bench, though Veiga was brought on at half-time with his team 2-0 down. His first act was to shoot from the halfway line. Two late goals from Barry, also on for the start of the second half, took the tie to a penalty shootout, which Basel lost despite Veiga converting its opening spot kick with a nonchalant Panenka chip down the centre of the goal.
The final two months of Veiga’s season were marred by an ankle sprain, diagnosed by Basel’s medical team after a match against Zurich in late March and confirmed by doctors back home in Portugal.
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Transfer interest in him this summer was anticipated and encouraged; Basel’s owner David Degen voiced his confidence shortly after Veiga was signed from Sporting that he would be sold for a significant profit.
“Nobody expected that he would leave for a club like Chelsea so early, but nobody is sad,” Feller says. “Not the club, not the fans. It’s just seen as good business to let him go.”
Veiga’s talent is real. So too is his determination to maximise it: he is very religious, and admits he has few interests outside football and his family. “His team-mates (at Basel) say he has no hobbies,” Feller adds. “He trains, goes home, goes to the gym, sleeps. For him, it’s football, football, football.”
His focus on self-improvement extends beyond his play.
Veiga wears an Oura ring that tracks his calorie intake, sleep quality, heart rate and body temperature. The data is sent to his phone, where he can analyse it to ensure he always has an “optimal” day.
Veiga playing for Basel against Bayern Munich (Christian Kaspar-Bartke/Getty Images)
Adapting to life in England should not present as many challenges as might be expected for a young footballer. Veiga’s childhood followed the path of his father’s playing career, taking him to live in Cyprus for four years and Morocco for three. He is fluent in five languages: Portuguese, Spanish, English, French and Arabic. Most of his new team-mates will be able to talk to him in their native tongues.
Making the leap to the strongest domestic league in the world from playing in Switzerland will be more daunting. It is not yet clear whether Veiga will be in Chelsea’s first-team squad this season or sent on loan. The fact he was the only unused outfield substitute in Maresca’s first match as their head coach, the friendly against Wrexham in California on Wednesday (early Thursday UK time) was a further indication his development could be a slow burn.
“Chelsea need to help him on a daily basis so he can improve, because the Swiss League is one thing and the Premier League is another,” Celikayya warns. “You cannot sleep, because everyone wants your position.”
The good news for Veiga is that he’s versatile enough to mean his position is flexible.
“A guy like him: tall, knows how to play with his head and feet, aggressive, knows how to build up, who has a lot of characteristics to play at a high level,” Celikkaya says. “The game is evolving for that.”
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(Top photo: Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)
