No knowledge of Turkey would be complete without an introduction to our greatest national obsession: Futbol!
We have a saying that only three things matter to us Turks: horses, women and guns. The guns and women still hold true, cars can be substituted for horses, but a fourth factor must be thrown in: football. Here are twenty things you should know about us and our football:
1. The numbers
A worldwide multi-billion dollar business that enables billions of TV viewers in hundreds of millions of households to watch on as tens of thousands of fans, hundreds of journalists, scores of club officials, and dozens of sponsors encourage 22 grown men to kick a bouncing ball around a field for 90 minutes.
2. The clubs
Football clubs are old-boys’ networks where freemasons and shady contractors with Peter Pan syndromes and cigar fetishes extend their profiteering cronyism to the lucrative flesh trade of buying and selling grade-A athletes. There are two types of clubs in Turkey: the three Istanbul clubs (Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe, Besiktas), and the rest (the ones that mostly end in ‘-spor’). The former compete for the Turkish league title each year, while the latter compete for fourth place and below.
3. The fans
An agglomeration of sloganeering primates who seek to vicariously experience success, triumph and joy through their team’s performance on the pitch, and who regularly declare that they are willing to die and/or kill for their club. Unfortunately, the players on the pitch actually playing for the fans and the club are generally NOT willing to die and/or kill for their club, leading to a permanent discrepancy between the zealous expectations of the former and the overpaid complacency of the latter.
4. The stadiums
Referred to as ‘stadia’ by smug smartypants who also say ‘octopi’, stadiums are Apollonian edifices that act as congregating arenas for aforementioned fans to satisfy their Dionysian urges as they scream, shout, fight, hug, cry, insult, praise, curse, and chant in a sustained dithyrambic frenzy for 90 minutes, all while collectively consuming about a ton of sunflowers seeds and a hundred cartons of cigarettes amongst them. The main stadiums are Inönü (Besiktas), Ali Sami Yen (Galatasaray) and Sükrü Saracoglu (Fenerbahce).
5. The players…
…are beasts of burden that are bought and sold as potential cash cows on a regulated market dominated by a plutocratic web of managers, lawyers, club officials, and shady businessmen. They occupy one of four main positions – goalkeeper, defender, midfielder or forward – and are expected to eat, play, do, and say as they’re told by their owners.
6. The uniforms
The outfits are shiny identical garments with easily identifiable colours that help players and fans alike keep track of who ‘us’ is and who ‘them’ are so that the players can know which way to kick the ball during the match and the fans can know who to beat up before and after it. Galatasaray is red/yellow, Fenerbahçe blue/yellow, Besiktas black/white, Trabzonspor maroon/blue, while the other teams’ colours are who/cares? It’s interesting to note that before the advent of colour TV everyone was a Besiktas supporter, mainly because nobody liked the dark grey/light grey colours of their opponents.
7. The referee
This is the most important person on the pitch in Turkish football. He’s the one you try to trick into giving you a foul, the one you constantly argue with even though you (should) know it’s futile, the one you blame when your team loses, and the one you praise for having refereed ‘exceptionally and objectively well’ when your team wins. As a result, referees come in two types, depending on whether your team has won or lost: balanced and fair arbiters OR evil satanic warlocks plotting the destruction of your entire universe and everything you hold dear.
8. The offside
A very simple rule which states that a player with possession of the ball cannot pass the ball to a fellow team player if that receiving player happens to be behind the back-most player of the opposing team at the moment that the player in possession first makes contact with the ball with the purpose of passing it unless it is clear that the pass is not intended for the player who happens to be offside at the moment of contact but to another fellow team player who is onside instead. Could I be any clearer? While some think this rule has been introduced for the sake of bettering the game, it has actually been designed to keep women confused about the game, and thus disinterested, thereby granting married men some valuable alone-time once or twice a week when their team’s game is on TV.
9. The mascots
Many clubs have recourse to totemic animal mascots which indicates a residual vestige of cult worship that has been passed down to modern times. Galatasaray’s is a lion, Besiktas has an eagle, Denizlispor and Bursaspor have a rooster and a crocodile respectively… and then there’s Fenerbahçe, which is represented by a proud, tough, fearsome… yellow canary. Seriously.
10. The defence
Turkish league football has one characteristic that defines the general poor quality of the game: terrible defense. Be it the desultory and inconsistent manner of marking opposing players, the chronic inability to deal with side-angle free-kicks, the sloppy manner of holding a linear defensive line, the lack of good goalkeepers, or the gaping chasm that makes feeding the ball from defense to midfield such a Herculean task for Turkish defenders, this unfortunate fact makes for a league full of low-quality goals and a national team devoid of any experienced and permanent defensive players.
11. The business
Turkish football reflects the economic disparity between Istanbul and Anatolia. Here’s how it works: An Anatolian club puts together a good team before the big three rich Istanbul clubs muscle in and buy out the star players. This leads to a glut of talent in the Istanbul clubs where those newly acquired players who could otherwise gain the experience and consistent match-play needed to develop at a lesser club, instead find themselves rotting away on the reserve bench. After succumbing to Istanbul’s temptations and the stress of success posed by overzealous fans and a vitriolic press, the players lose spirit, fall out of form, and are sold back to Anatolian clubs for less money than they were bought for, which the big clubs can afford for the sake of the few young stars who do manage to make it through and who can be sold on to bigger European clubs. So everybody wins… except Turkish Football.
12. The politics
We Turks aren’t actually interested in the sports, we’re interested in the politics of it, of the war of words between club bosses, coaches, players, referees and journalists, the fights, the taunting of rival fans, the defeating – nay, the sadistic humiliation – of the Other and the feeling of empowerment this brings. All these factors appeal more to our Byzantine character than do the aesthetics, camaraderie, sportsmanship, or strategy of the game itself. That’s why on every sports program you’ll see very little actual football and a whole lot of old men in suits talking about football instead.
13. The talk
We love talking about football because it’s the easiest thing to sound erudite about. That’s because football is full of could’ves and would’ves. E.g: “Terim should have started with a 4-5-1 line-up with Tugay as sweeper and Hakan sole striker, then switched to a 4-4-2 formation by bringing in Ümit in the second half and replacing the sweeper with an attacking midfielder like Emre.” That sort of postgnosticating sounds impressive because nobody knows if it would’ve worked or not. Women can meet and instantly talk about love and relationships, whereas men can meet and instantly lapse into discussion over the finer points of guys in shorts chasing a ball around a pitch. Basically, football is like horoscopes for men.
14. The identification
At a conscious level, the cult of football provides a solidly identifiable ‘us’ and ‘them’, replete with respective emblems, colours, uniforms, flags, heroes and villains with which to define ourselves both ‘with’ and ‘against’ others. At an unconscious level, it provides a solidly identifiable ‘Us’ that emerges as a sort of dialectical super-identity, which is synthetically defined by the process of differentiation at the conscious level. Thus, merely interacting within the discourse of difference that defines ‘us’ and ‘them’ (i.e. affiliating with a specific team) creates the unconscious feeling of an ‘Us’ on a higher level as ‘Men’ or as ‘Turks’… or as prats like me who use terms like ‘dialectical’ to describe football.
15. The impatience
We want success and we want it NOW. This impatience is another major reason why the quality of Turkish football remains low. It takes time and a lot of match play for a group of players to form a solid team. Instead of learning from past long-term projects (such as the Turkish Football Federation’s excellent youth program in the early 90s which produced two European youth titles and formed the core of the Galatasaray and Turkish national teams that won the UEFA Cup and gained third-place at the 2002 World Cup respectively), our clubs often change nearly half their teams every year and fire coaches like they’re matchsticks.
16. Galatasaray
The most successful Turkish team by far. Although they’re one Turkish league victory short of Fenerbahce, they’ve competed in the Champion’s League nine times (with a quarterfinal result in 2001) and they’re the only ones to have won European Cups – the UEFA Cup and the Super Cup in 2000-2001. They were actually the top ranked club in the world that same year, with Real Madrid in second place. Everything went downhill after that due to the chronic incompetence of their club’s management. They sold all their star players and have been in debt ever since. They still play in a rickety neolithic stadium and have notorious trouble paying their players’ salaries.
17. Fenerbahce
They have the most supporters, the best stadium, the best finances, and usually the best players. In fact the only thing Fenerbahce lacks is success. They have never won anything except Turkish league titles. They haven’t even won the secondary Turkish Federation Cup in twenty years. But it’s the enmity with Galatasaray that defines the essence of being a Fenerbahce supporter. It’s a rivalry that borders on hatred. A derby match between the two is one worth seeing simply for the level of tension and competitiveness that it evokes, even though it usually makes for bad football for pretty much the same reason.
18. Besiktas
With fewer league titles than their other two rivals, Besiktas nevertheless has a solid fan base. It’s generally the most respected Turkish club in terms of its tradition as a solid middle-class team with a history of sportsmanship, camaraderie, and good management (which has only recently been marred by their ultra-radical Çarşı group of supporters). Nevertheless, they remain famous for their legendary line-ups of the ’80s in which the teamwork, sportsmanship and quality of their players both on and off the pitch earned them the respect of all. It’s important to note that despite their lesser success, Besiktas is in fact the best club in Turkey, because they’re my club.
19. Trabzonspor
The only team besides the Istanbul triumvirate to have ever won the Turkish title, Trabzonspor have a fearsome reputation both for the consistent quality of their team and also for the fanaticism and volatility of their supporters, who do not shy from threatening their own players and setting their own stadium on fire if things aren’t going their way. They have won six league championships, and are the only team to have won four in a row. That said, they haven’t posed a serious challenge since the ’90s.
20. The National Team
The unpredictability of our national team is famous. Back in the ’50s we were one of the only teams to have beaten the legendary Hungarians, and despite only playing the World Cup Finals twice, we have one of the best win-loss records in them, notching a third-place in the 2002 finals. But then we lost to Latvia to be knocked out of the European Cup the following year! We’re currently top of our Euro 2008 qualification group with important matches coming up against Norway and Greece.
