Reviewing Histories of Turkish Football
By Justin Paul
Turkish football has always held a certain mystique to fans outside the country, in large part due to its frenetic fan culture. Turkey made its mark in the 21st century, from Galatasaray’s UEFA Cup win in 2000 to the National Team’s third-place finish at the 2002 World Cup and major runs by all of the Istanbul “Big 3” in the Champions League (Fenerbahce in 2008, Galatasaray in 2013 and Besiktas in 2018). However, until recently there have not been any full-length English language books to evaluate Turkish football. In the past year, two books have come out which have done great justice to this topic, Welcome to Hell? In Search of the Real Turkish Football by John McManus and The Passion: Football and the Story of Modern Turkey by Patrick Keddie. These books cover some of the same ground, but also have many points of distinction. Keddie begins his book by attending a Besiktas ‘home’ game in the cavernous Ataturk Olympic Stadium, a temporary home when Vodafone Park was being constructed. McManus opens his text with a story of being in an Ankara high school dormitory where he was teaching science and having students demand he chooses a “local” team. He also opted to support Besiktas as an alternative to the more widely supported Galatasaray and Fenerbahce.
Keddie is interested in exploring football throughout the country and its political and social intersections. His first chapter begins with an anecdotal gem about left-wing football supporters in the traditionally central right-leaning city of Bursa. Supporters of an amateur club called Meksen were impressed with Dynamo Kyiv’s visit to play Bursaspor in a UEFA Cup match in 1974, they took to calling their amateur team Dinamo Meksen, a name that would get the club shut down by the military authorities in 1980. This sets the tone for a book whose scope is far broader than the just big Istanbul clubs. He moves on to a great chapter about the relative football backwater of Ankara. This includes a detailed discussion of the passion of Ankaragucu supporters, and how a killed Turkish conscript soldier from Bursa was instrumental in forging bonds between their club and Bursaspor. While covering the relegation of the club due to the malfeasance of the son of the of Ankara’s former mayor, Keddie interacts with local supporters, including a Scottish expatriate and traces the socio-economic outsider status of many of Ankaragucu’s supporters. An excellent chapter on the nuances of the 2011 match-fixing scandal involving Fenerbahce has wide-ranging analysis, including a mention of notorious ultra-nationalist underworld figure Sedat Peker, and his friendship with Sivasspor chairman Mecnun Otyakmaz. Otyakmaz’s team rose to prominence this past season with a top-four league finish and led the league early in the year.
This chapter on political involvement in the sport has a vivid discussion of the election for the Trabzonspor Chairmanship, in which Muharem Usta won a very close race over Celal Hekimoglu. Keddie dives deep into a convoluted and chaotic campaign in the football-mad city, discussing an anti-female Twitter rant by Hekimoglu and how Usta received criticism because Medical Park, a company he owned shares in, was a sponsor of Fenerbahce. “Stadium Sagas” is perhaps the book’s richest chapter, as Keddie synthesizes a vast array of information and shows how stadium growth through the Turkish state-building agency TOKI has been real estate driven, with many stadiums placed in far-flung parts of the cities. He describes the soulless area around Galatasaray’s new Turk Telekom Stadium as an example of this trend. He also visits the central Anatolian city of Konya to find how intense civic pride and a sense of history about the city’s Seljuk Empire past led to government support for a range of initiatives for the city including both a Mevlana Cultural Center and a new football stadium.
Keddie is also keen to focus on those social issues of those who feel like outsiders in Turkish society. A chapter on the Gezi Park demonstrations is full of political analysis and has a poignant story of a supporter of left-wing Ankara team Genclerbirligi who was hit in the eye with a police flash bomb during the protests. Another fascinating chapter is on Amedspor’s epic Turkish Cup run in 2016. The small Diyarbakir team from the lower divisions (who use the Kurdish name of the city), would stun Bursaspor on before a highly respectable 4-6 loss to Fenerbahce. Keddie includes on the ground reporting of what the team’s success meant in the city at a time of curtailed freedom of movement and military checkpoints for local residents. The book continues with a very timely discussion of Halil Ibrahim Dincdag, a homosexual referee from Trabzon, who was the subject of abuse after he was outed. Dincdag is candid and says he just wanted to be able to do his job and was not interested in being either a political token nor a symbol of pity. Keddie also turns his attention to other marginalized people, including the story of Firas al Ali, a Syrian footballer now in Turkey who helped organize a “Free Syrian” national football team in Turkey. The struggles of their players just to get equipment, to find opponents, and also to be able to balance training with their jobs are documented in impressive detail.
Keddie’s continues his analysis of social issues with his final chapter is on Women’s football in Turkey. It starts by documenting the travails of a coach in the east-central Anatolian city of Malatya to field a team and the pushback he got from parents who worried the sport would corrupt their daughters. His profile of aspiring female footballer Ikranur Sarigul is particularly touching, showing all she had to do to get her family’s approval to play the game and ends with an account of her defiantly walking out of a shop where the owner asked if girls should play football. The discussion of Besiktas starting a women’s team was also prescient, as in the days just before COVID they drew 30,000 to a friendly against Atletico Madrid, perhaps a sign of a new acceptance of the women’s game. In this segment, Keddie is also able to track down Hande Denziger, a middle-aged woman who played football on a team in the late ’60s on the island of Kinaliada in the Marmara Sea and get insights on a longer history of the women’s game in Turkey. Denziger had to play on a boy’s team as a youth for lack of options for girls’ football. While there is a women’s league today, its diminished status compared to other women’s sports in Turkey shows how much more has to be done.
McManus begins his book by discussing the nuances of what happened in the infamous stabbing of Leeds United fans when visiting Galatasaray for a UEFA Cup match in 2000. This is a useful jumping-off point because for some outsiders in Europe this incident is the first thing that comes to mind when they think of Turkish football. He then analyzes the Istanbul club culture and explains the animosity between the big Istanbul clubs is not based on social class or sectarian origin. A particularly well-conveyed story is his discussion of “mahalle’ (neighborhood) culture of how neighborhood leaders put up banners for the winning league club regardless of whether or not they support it. A chapter called “Reis” balances analysis of President Erdogan’s amateur footballing career with a discussion of his government’s implementation of the controversial Passolig program, which introduced new regulations on fans through an ID system. The book then traverses to Izmir, with a well-written chapter that traces the Aegean city’s cosmopolitan heritage. McManus traces the history of the Levantine origin Giraud family and how they founded local amateur side Bornova Football Club in 1883 and meets local Levantines who have their own amateur club. Analysis of Izmir’s rich footballing heritage is important, even if the city has only one top division team today, Goztepe. McManus also discusses Ankara, with added focus on left-leaning Genclerbirligi supporters being key members of a group protesting Passolig and a discussion of the ultra-nationalist and over the top Ottoman imagery of Ahmet Gokcek’s “Osmanlispor,” a team now relegated.
Chapters in McManus’s book often have a person, city, or theme as a topic. One of the best chapters is on Lefter Kucukandyandis, the Fenerbahce and Turkey legend of “Rum” Greek origin. McManus visits his grave on the island Buyukada, off the coast of Istanbul, and drives home the ironies of representing Turkey internationally while being a member of a community that fell victim to a pogrom in 1955. Lefter faced distrust from nationalists on both sides of the Aegean but is beloved by Fenerbahce supporters with his statue featuring prominently in Kadikoy today. A conversation with a Muslim caretaker at the Greek Orthodox cemetery (where Lefter is buried) is a touching example of religious pluralism. A chapter called “Yabanja” is wide-ranging with its focus on foreign players and managers in Turkish soccer. The tactical success of Gordon Milne at Besiktas in the late ’80s is documented, as is the tradition of euphoric airport greetings, be they for world-famous Robin Van Persie at Fenerbahce and far less famous Darius Vassell at Ankaragucu. As the book progresses there is a cogent discussion of British, German, and French Turks who support the Istanbul clubs abroad at European fixtures. This leads into a discussion of ethnic Turks who play for the nation they were born in and dual loyalties, timely due to the controversies German international Mesut Ozil has been involved in. McManus’s visit to Trabzon offers more historical background about the two clubs that existed before Trabzonspor was created. He highlights the fanatical fan culture of the Black Sea city in how they support their players no matter what. This is illustrated by the story of Salih Dursun, a loanee from Galatasaray who brandished a red card at a referee in retaliation for being sent off and had a street named after him as a result.
Themes of ethnicity, gender, and immigration also feature in McManus’ book. While visiting Adana, the hometown of brash Galatasaray manager Fatih Terim, to see the Adanaspor-Adana Demirspor derby, McManus meets supporters of Adanaspor who proudly say they are from “Zazistan,” referring to the Zaza Kurdish speaking region of Southeast Turkey. Their openness in expressing this playful regionalist sentiment surprises him. McManus’s coverage of football in Turkey’s Kurdish region also covers the aforementioned Amedspor cup run of 2016. Like Keddie, he follows Amedspor in the second division and when watching them in Ankara against small local team Keciorengucu, he tells the story of an Ankara police officer who praised the behavior of the Amedspor supporters and even offered one of them a ride home after the match. This is a heart-warming anecdote that breaks preconceived notions of how we might expect security officers to view these Kurdish nationalist leaning supporters.
McManus also spends time in the southeastern city of Gaziantep tracking the Free Syrian Football team in their three-match tenure before a money dispute with a Qatari foundation finished their existence. Most sobering is how many of the key players in that outfit all dispersed to different parts of Turkey after the team collapsed. McManus’s chapter on Women’s football starts by discussing the Fenerbahce matches, at the beginning of the last decade, where only women and children were allowed in and how the women’s propensity to be as passionate and even as vulgar as male fans defied narrow gender stereotypes. He goes on to address the Women’s professional game in Turkey by profiling the Izmir team Konak Belediyspor, and noting just how far behind Turkish Women’s football is in revenue, even when compared to Women’s Volleyball and Basketball. He notes that even when one major team found a sponsor, it was from a washing detergent company, thus reinforcing gender stereotypes. McManus’ text concludes before its epilogue with a discussion on how football served as a useful escape from the tumultuous year for Turkey in 2015.
“Welcome To Hell?” and “The Passion” both overlap and diverge in their content. Keddie has more explicit political analysis, and covers more of the business side of Turkish football, albeit political subtexts can be found in McManus’s work too. Keddie’s work is heavily end noted, which is useful for compiling further reading. Both complement each other and to read them in tandem was a true joy. The authors revel in unpacking the many paradoxes and contradictions that make Turkish football culture the profoundly multilayered phenomenon it is. McManus ends by discussing what it felt like to cheer for his second team Genclerbirligi over his first love Besiktas in Ankara, whereas Keddie concludes his by text by analyzing ongoing political and economic wrangling, while wryly noting the same year Besiktas was being dubbed a “Turkish Chelsea” (a poor prognostication), Galatasaray were being knocked out of Europe by a tiny northern Swedish team, Ostersunds. Above all, McManus and Keddie both emphasize how football endures as a powerful force in Turkish life, despite the political and social maelstrom swirling around. Keddie calls it “the fixture of Turkish life” in his final sentence, while McManus describes hundreds of bodies on a terrace as “melding into one.” These two books complement each other and offer invaluable insights for both veteran Turcophiles and soccer fans, but also can be enjoyed by those with a more casual interest in Turkish society or just in soccer generally.
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Justin Paul has a background in History, Law, and English Language Teaching. Originally from Milwaukee, he lived most recently in St. Paul, Minnesota, and then in Kadikoy municipality of Istanbul. He is currently based in Columbus, Ohio.
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