Turkish football’s season from hell points to deeper societal malaise

Turkey’s football season from hell was epitomised by a game this spring on the Black Sea coast, when the full time whistle blew and bedlam took to the field.

A man donning a demonic clown mask prepared to fight with players from one of the country’s leading football clubs, while across the pitch, another invader wielded a corner flag like a giant spear.

The eruption of violence in Trabzon in March after home side Trabzonspor lost to Istanbul’s Fenerbahçe came only months after the president of a prominent Ankara club punched a referee who was then kicked while on the ground. The president later apologised, saying he only meant to spit in the man’s face.

Displays of passion that morph into violence have long been a feature of the match day experience in football-obsessed Turkey, where supporters often seek to intimidate the opposition in order to gain an advantage.

But allegiances have been taken to extremes across the country, with this year’s problems — which prompted a brief suspension of the league — pointing to a deeper malaise, as football joins the swelling ranks of Turkish institutions in which the public has lost faith.

“Credibility and trust in Turkish football has deteriorated over the past 20 years,” said Ali Koç, president of Fenerbahçe and a divisive figure in Turkish football who is a scion of one of the country’s wealthiest business dynasties.

Koç said that growing mistrust had flared up in ways that transcended even the usually intense rivalries. He sparked controversy last month when Fenerbahçe forfeited the Turkish Super Cup match against arch rival Galatasaray in what he described as a “rebellion” against the current state of Turkish football.

“When people start running on to the pitch, trying to lynch players, [without] being properly punished, they become heroes thanks to the way they’re treated by their club officials,” Koç told the Financial Times at his office in Fenerbahçe’s stadium.

Bağış Erten, a veteran Turkish sport journalist, said it had been “the most terrible season since 2011”, referring to that year’s match-fixing scandal, adding there had been an “unbelievable level” of hate, fuelled in part by senior team officials making vitriolic speeches and accusations about their rivals. 

Mistrust among fans over institutions that are supposed to safeguard fairness in Turkish football — including referees, the country’s football federation and club leaders — lies at the heart of the crisis in Turkish football, according to industry insiders and analysts.

“​​Each week there’s a massive discussion about referee calls,” said Özgehan Şenyuva, a professor at Ankara’s Middle East Technical University who has studied Turkish fandom. “There’s always this search for something deeper, some kind of a conspiracy,” he added. 

The suspicion that shadowy forces are at play in deciding matches reflected Turks’ dwindling faith in politics and society more broadly, according to Şenyuva. It comes amid rising concerns over the rule of law, judicial independence and a crackdown on civic society as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan begins his third decade in power.

Koç’s predecessor at Fenerbahçe, Aziz Yıldırım, was in 2012 found guilty of match rigging and sentenced to six years in jail. Yıldırım was later acquitted, with the government alleging that a group, which it says was behind the 2016 coup attempt against Erdoğan, had initiated a wide-range conspiracy to discredit dozens of leading figures in Turkish football.

“Football is just a magnifier of the general attitudes in the society,” said Şenyuva. “When you don’t trust the judges in the courthouses, you’ll not trust the referees on the pitch.”

Turkish football has long been dominated by the Istanbul trio of Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray and Beşiktaş. But deepening financial woes across the sport have concentrated even more power among the ‘Big Three’ clubs in recent years.

This has played out in the 2023/24 season, with Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray dominating the top-tier Süper Lig. “On the one hand it looks quite good — two teams competing against each other — but what about the other teams,” Erten said. 

One former industry executive who remains involved in Turkish football noted that “everyone financially is in trouble”. Broadcasting fees, a key source of revenue especially for clubs outside the big cities who can have smaller fan-bases, have plummeted in recent years. Qatari media group BeIN agreed in 2022 to pay $182mn per season to air Süper Lig matches, down from a roughly $500mn per year deal agreed in 2016.  

An 80 per cent tumble in the Turkish lira against the euro over the past five years has also ratcheted up costs for clubs to sign deals with international players who expect their salaries to be linked to hard currencies, the executive said. The cost of importing international stars has been compounded by the fact that Turkey has not done enough to foster talent locally, several industry participants noted.

Turkey’s leading clubs posted a pre-tax loss of €310mn in the 2022-2023 season, according to Uefa, which oversees European football. Collectively Turkish teams recorded €1bn in gross bank debt, with 18 clubs in a negative equity position. 

“The current football business model in Turkey is not sustainable,” said Koç, adding that this “leaves clubs vulnerable to outside interference and influence”. 

Erten agreed, saying the spectre of political interference in football had only worsened fans’ lack of faith.

Indeed such was the disillusionment of some Turkish football fans that they had even switched to follow other sports such as basketball and volleyball. “Turkish people are obsessed with football, but there’s quite a big decrease in interest around football right now,” he said.