By Zach Lowy
It has been a ground-breaking 2025 for Jeyhan Bhindi. After spending the entirety of his life in Canada, Bhindi made the move south to Omaha, Nebraska in January, joining USL League One side Union Omaha as an assistant coach, where he has quickly found his niche in the Midwest.
Born in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, Bhindi grew up in a multicultural background and quickly fell in love with football. He also got in touch with his Turkish heritage, which would prove to be the inspiration for him learning and eventually becoming fluent in Turkish.
“My mom is from Turkey, and my dad is from Uganda, and when I was really, really young, from when I was born all the way up to the end of elementary school, my mom’s family raised me.
My mom worked nights, my dad worked a lot, so my Turkish family raised me. I’m very much connected to that side of my culture, and I learned the language growing up,” stated Bhindi in an exclusive GBC Ghana interview.
Bhindi enjoyed success in the local amateur leagues before deciding to hang up his boots at 21 and pursue a coaching career.
He balanced his time between his 9-5 HVAC job with volunteering as a coach for his local side Ottawa Fury, joining in 2012 and working with both the boys’ U-17 and U-19 sides as well as the girls’ U-19 side, as well as an interim video analyst / opposition scout for the first team.
Whilst he has spent the bulk of his coaching career coaching boys and men, he hasn’t written off testing his skills in women’s football management.
“It’s definitely something that I would be open to. They launched the women’s first division in Canada this year – the Northern Super League – starting with six teams.
Obviously, women’s football is booming, like, astronomically, everywhere in the world right now, and the investment is growing like crazy.
Even in Türkiye, I’m seeing stuff that nobody talked about three years ago, and now there’s all these teams. It’s something that I’ve opened my mind up to a bit more, in the last couple of years ago.
Maybe I was a bit more close-minded, I don’t know why, but I definitely feel like where football is going today, I asked myself, ‘Why be close-minded? You know, be open-minded.
That’s something that I’ve adopted and said, ‘In my own country, in my part of the world, it’s definitely booming, and also everywhere in the world, so there’s a lot more opportunities there.”
He took a massive leap of faith when he decided to leave his high-paying heating and air conditioning job, for which he had received an academic degree, and pursue coaching full-time, but it’s safe to say that it has paid off for Bhindi, who’s emerged as one of the most promising coaches in North America and earned praise from leading MLS pundits like Taylor Twellman and Kevin Egan.
After spending five years with the Fury, he joined USL Championship side Austin Bold, working remotely as a video analyst and scouting their upcoming opponents, before deciding to make the move to the newly formed Canadian Premier League side FC Edmonton as an assistant coach in 2021 as well as a video analyst.
“When I got the Edmonton offer, a week after I signed the paperwork, another team in the U.S. reached out to me and put out a feeler out and said, ‘Jay, would you be interested in having conversations about coming to be an assistant? I said, ‘No, I already committed to another CanPL team, but that showed that I’m a guy of my word.
I committed to the project in Edmonton. Obviously, this was the early days in the CPL, you know, really only Year Two due to the pandemic, teams didn’t have staffs of 7-8 people. Everyone had to wear a lot of hats, and having already had experience doing video analysis, in contrast to the other assistant coach who didn’t, so I just took on that hat.”
“It was good because I like to do both jobs and because every head coach I’ve worked with fuses video analysis in a different way, so once I get to know how they worked in terms of what types of videos they need, what do they classify as priority, what do they don’t need, it really made my job easier.
From that point on, I just knew that every week, I need to prepare this, this, this, this, and this for the coach. That’s all he needs. He doesn’t need anything else, he just needs this. And once I was able to get into a rhythm of that, it became just going through that and being able to be a part of the trainings and running exercises and post-training videos.”
It’s a mid-September afternoon in Nebraska as Bhindi discusses his life story whilst preparing to board a flight to Westchester, New York, where Omaha won 2-1, before drawing 2-2 in their next two matches, followed by three wins on the bounce and a 0-0 draw at Greenville Triumph.
At 34 years of age, Bhindi isn’t just living outside of Canada for the first time in his life, but he’s also getting the chance to travel across the United States on a regular basis.
“One thing I learned is that travel is just part of the job, you know? Moving to different cities is also part of it for the job, and that’s something that, working with experienced coaches that have mentored me in the past, and they said, ‘Jay, people only see some of these parts of the job on the outside, but they don’t see everything.
Part of it is, moving from place to place, traveling a lot, making a lot of sacrifices, missing a lot of birthdays, weddings, and things like that, but it’s part of the job that you get used to it. It’s something you have to accept if you want to be at the professional level, you know?
This move to Omaha also allowed me to go to different places that I’ve never been in the U.S. A lot of these USL markets are in smaller markets, so it’s allowed me to go to different places. Working in the Canadian Premier League, I went coast to coast, so it was also a lot of travel.”
After one year with Edmonton, Bhindi made the move to Winnipeg and joined Valour FC in January 2022 as a First-Team Assistant Coach and Video Analyst, where he spent three years before deciding to make the move to Omaha, where he has garnered the attention of a number of top commentators like Brian Dunseth.
But whilst he has not lived outside of North America, Bhindi has nevertheless spent time overseas by conducting one-week-long coaching internships in Türkiye with Manisaspor, Beşiktaş, and Fenerbahçe, returning eight years later to complete another week-long visit with Fatih Karagümrük, whilst he also spent time in Portugal between 2017 and 2018, completing internships with Académica de Coimbra, Porto, and Vitória F.C.
“These coaching visits were super important because they allowed me to see the authentic day-to-day structure of what it is to be inside of a professional football club, and how they develop players, and how they take their methodology and transfer it to the field, and the authenticity and genuineness was really important for me to see and learn.
One that sticks out to me from my time was going to FC Porto, because I worked in the Ottawa Fury with two Portuguese-Canadian head coaches who were very big on the tactical periodization methodology.
This was back in 2015/16 that they were starting to introduce me to it, and I really started to take a fascination with this coaching methodology that derives from Portugal, and Jose Mourinho making it very famous.”
“I started to study a lot, theoretically, but a theory can only take you so far. So I said, I need to go to the source. I need to go where it came from, and see how they apply it, and ask questions, and when I went to FC Porto, they opened their doors to me.
They were very open, they allowed me to be in the trainings, ask questions to all the age groups and see how it’s applied in the U-15s vs. the U-19s, and this was really important to me because I I did a lot of theory before.
I saw some application with it when I worked within Ottawa Fury, and now I saw the application in its truest form at the source. Obviously, FC Porto being a place that’s produced a lot of coaches and players, so this was also a big motivation for me and why I went to Portugal.”
“When I was 23/24, I asked, ‘Where in the world is producing the best coaches?’ and I started to look, and at that time, Portuguese coaches were winning all these championships in different parts of the world.
I saw this graphic of a map, looking at every single champion and where their coach is from, and I saw a lot of Portuguese flags, so I said, ‘Okay, I need to go to where they produce the best coaches.
I want to go and learn from them and see why their coaches are the best. Growing up in Canada, there weren’t a lot of professional footballers, so it was important for me to go and extract things from other parts of the world.”
