Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s sporting career has become part of his mythology, reinforcing
his image as a salt-of-the-earth leader in tune with the
masses. Over the last ten years, Turkish football has
experienced great change. It has become bigger and louder, more commercialised and polarised,
entwined ever more with business and politics. So central has Erdoğan become to Turkish
football that any account of the state of the game
today would be bereft without a study of his role. And yet
the game – and its obsessive, devoted fans – also show the limits of his power.
The man known by his supporters as Reis – the Chief – was born to a poor family in 1954
in Kasımpaşa, a working-class district on the
shores of Istanbul’s Golden Horn. After school, the
young Erdoğan would work selling stale simit, the circular sesame bread that is Turkey’s
most popular snack. But what he really wanted to
do with his free time was kick a ball around. “I loved football. It was my passion. It
entered my dreams at night,” Erdoğan said years later. “But
my father never gave permission for me to play.”
According to the sanctioned narrative, Ahmet Erdoğan – nicknamed ‘captain’ because
of his work on the Istanbul ferries – was fiercely against
his son’s obsession. “Football won’t feed the belly,” he
used to growl. The young Tayyip (as he is known) defied his father, sneaking out to
play, hiding his football boots in the coal bunker upon his
return. Aged 11, Erdoğan won a place at an İmam
Hatip college, one of Turkey’s religious high schools
founded to train imams for the nation’s mosques. He was not particularly hard working
but excelled in religious studies and sport. While still
at school, he began playing for the amateur side
Camialtıspor. In 1974, a year after graduating from high school, he moved to a team linked
to the Istanbul transport authority, IETT, on the
recommendation of the team’s captain, who was one of
Erdoğan’s neighbours in Kasımpaşa. In 1994, when he was on the verge of being
elected mayor of Istanbul, Erdoğan gave an interview
about his footballing career to the newspaper Milliyet. As an up-and-coming Islamist politician,
he went to great lengths to weave a strong thread
of religiosity into his years as a footballer, explaining
that when he played for IETT he used to lay out his prayer rug and pray in the changing
rooms. The same interview also sees Erdoğan discuss
the most fiercely disputed claim about his footballing
career: that he was almost signed by Fenerbahçe. He reports that he was on Fenerbahçe’s
transfer list in 1977 but that his hopes evaporated
with the departure of the team’s manager, the Serbian
Tomislav Kaloperović. Erdoğan is a Fenerbahçe fan and some writers believe there is some
burnishing of the historical record. But the claim that he could have played for the Canaries
would be repeated again and again throughout the
course of his political career. Turkey is a deeply polarised nation and Erdoğan’s
supporters trumpet his footballing experience. A
2017 biopic of his life, for instance, shows him as a child coming on to score the winner
in the closing minutes of a 9-9 game with a stunning
overhead kick. But sceptics have lined up to cast doubt on
Erdoğan’s footballing career, part of a wider mistrust of
his story that also includes a disputed university degree. Mustafa Hoş, a journalist, who mockingly
describes the 2005 account as “the Holy Book”, compares Erdoğan’s footballing
days to trying to uncover evidence about events that took place
almost 100 years ago, describing the events as
'ambiguous and contradictory’ Soner Yalçın, a journalist who has written
a 400-page take down of Erdoğan, makes no effort to
conceal his contempt. He believes that the entire Fenerbahçe story is fabricated. Yalçın
also claims Erdoğan spent his first two years at Camıaltıspor
as assistant to the kit man, and maintains that he
only got on the pitch because of “Kasımpaşa pressure” exerted on the coach by a neighbourhood
friend. In the present day, under Erdogan’s rule,
Turkish football is much changed. Over the last ten years,
greater commercialism has manifested in electronic advertising boards, the stadiums being named
after corporations and the broadening ranges of club merchandise, from beer holders to
baby-grows. But Turkish football also has additional features
that even the hyper-commercialised English Premier League has yet to implement. On team
shirts, the players’ names are relegated to below the
squad numbers. The more visible spot across the shoulder
blades is given over to adverts. During live games on
television, the screen periodically shrinks to allow a banner advertising a petrol brand
to flash across the bottom. The Super League has become the
seventh wealthiest football league in Europe by
revenue and many people are grateful to Erdoğan personally for that development - many, including
Yıldırım Demirören, the president of the Turkish Football Federation (TFF), who in
2017 thanked Erdogan specifically for allowing the game
in Turkey to “gather the fruits of” his leadership.
Erdoğan is of course not solely responsible for all of this. Perceptions matter, though,
and many across Turkey view the transformation of the
country as not simply presided over by Erdoğan but
having stemmed directly from his words and actions. Football remains a central part of
Erdoğan’s Big Man persona, the political conception
in which a leader is both a father figure and a hero. In a
country in which the game is entwined with notions of virile masculinity it is the ideal
tool with which to bolster a reputation2. He was still
taking part in games well into his sixties; at a charity
match in 2014, he scored a hat-trick with some surprisingly decent finishing.
Erdoğan’s displays of sporting prowess are reminiscent of those of Russian president
Vladimir Putin. Erdoğan frequently descends to the
dressing room after matches to congratulate players and
he is forever taking penalties at the opening of new stadiums or football conferences, which
are always widely documented. “The first goal
from Erdoğan,” the sports newspaper Fotomaç reported
at the opening of the new Trabzonspor stadium in December 2016. Next to the picture, the
newspaper placed a star that read “a master stroke”.
Perhaps the largest change to sports in Turkey under the AKP has been the surge in sports
construction. From neighbourhood AstroTurf pitches to world-class stadiums, every level
of the sports pyramid has seen huge investment in
infrastructure. Many thousands now have affordable and accessible sports amenities close to their
homes and schools. New sports facilities are part of a wider
construction boom that has swept across the cities of
Turkey. The restless movement is not a consequence but a cause – in a country in which
construction and its affiliated industries make up about 20 per cent of the economy,
permanent building keeps the economy afloat. Pride of
place in the building spree has been given to Erdoğan’s
beloved mega-projects. They include a third bridge across the Bosphorus and a road tunnel
and metro line that run under it. In 2015, construction
began on a third airport, due to be the world’s busiest with six runways. Football stadiums,
too, are an important example of the policy in action.
Turkey has become Uefa’s leading builder of new stadiums. Between 2007 and 2015, 18
new grounds were built. The cities of Bursa, Eskişehir,
Trabzon, Diyarbakir, Gaziantep, Samsun, Antalya, İzmit, Adana, Adapazarı, Antakya
and Konya all have – or in 2019 are soon to get – a new
stadium. Nearly all follow the same pattern: an old stadium, built in the 1940s or 50s,
is knocked down. It will have been part of the republican
project, located in a central area alongside a park or
some other recreational space and named either after Atatürk himself or key dates from
the Turkish war of independence.
By contrast, the new stadiums are named after sponsors or the municipality. They often stand
on the outskirts of the city and are mostly owned
by the government and leased to the clubs. Consequently,
the old city-centre plots can be sold off by TOKI, the government housing agency, to
developers for a lucrative price.
In many ways Turkey is going through a process that the UK underwent in the 1990s, when the
governance and infrastructure of the game was rapidly overhauled. But safety and comfort
were not the only motivations. Stadiums are seen as
a vital source of revenue. According to Kazancı, the sale
of boxes at the new Galatasaray stadium, plus 2500 VIP seats on a three-year contract, earned
the club US$80 million.
Some go as far as to say that the stadium’s existence is solely due to the opportunity
to award a construction project and enrich friends. Turkey
isn’t Russia. There is no culture of everyday minibribes
to traffic police or civil servants. But business is riddled with conflicts of interest and
corruption. In Turkey many construction companies are part of a wider portfolio of business
interests. It has been alleged that in return for contracts, they have been asked to acquire
newspapers and TV channels and ensure that they turn
out obsequious coverage. Local politicians jostle to have the ‘best’
projects built in their patch as a way of showing their
power and influence. Stadiums are constructed less as community facilities and more money
makers and status symbols. Bestowing a new stadium
on a town is one of the gifts that Erdogan, the Big
Man, can dole out in exchange for support. But there is also a flip-side. Erdoğan was
subjected to his first ever large-scale public booing at
the opening of the new Galatasaray ground in January
2011. The team’s fans are convinced that this act has had repercussions, insisting
that the horrendous traffic problems around the ground
are caused because a second access road was denied
planning permission – supposedly an act of punishment for the fans’ behaviour.
The changing physical landscape of Turkish football has been accompanied by a parallel
development: a remodelling of the profile of those who watch the game. On 14 April 2011,
the Turkish parliament passed the ‘Law to Prevent
Violence and Disorder in Sport’ - or 6222 law -
which was aimed at stamping out problems at sports events by establishing a brand-new
framework of regulations.
In Turkey in 2018, it is no longer possible to buy an old-fashioned ticket to a football
match, at least in the top two leagues. Every person in the
stadium must have what is known as a Passolig card.
This holds the fan’s name and surname, their ID number and a photo. Tickets for games are
purchased online and ‘added’ to the card. On 10 April 2016, Erdoğan stepped out onto
the turf of the Vodafone Arena – the brand new
Beşiktaş stadium, three years in the making. Lessons had been learnt from the opening ceremony
from the Galatasaray game five years earlier. This time, the stands were empty.
The Beşiktaş president Fikret Orman made a speech in which he addressed Erdoğan as
“dear president”, “venerable president” or
“the people’s president” no fewer than 13 times, angering many
Beşiktaş fans with his obeisance. But Orman knew his football club had to exist in Erdoğan’s
Turkey. Famous players, including the then-Barcelona star Arda Turan, took part in an online
campaign backing Erdoğan and prior to the 2018 World Cup, Mesut Ozil and Ilkay Gundogan
invited controversy by posing for pictures with him. In a political landscape divided
starkly into friends and enemies, many influential companies
and organisations know on which side they want
to be. But football in Turkey is not completely cowed.
At a time when Erdoğan is accused of controlling all aspects of life, from the judiciary to
the media and the business world, his reach into the ‘Big
Three’ football clubs of Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe and Beşiktaş is perhaps more limited. With
their enormous cultural clout and vast numbers of
fans, they are difficult to conquer. The AKP has
thrown its weight behind efforts to create new teams, such as Istanbul’s Başakşehir
and Osmanlıspor in Ankara. On the pitch, Başakşehir
have been giving the more established sides a run
for their money – they finished second in 2016–17 and narrowly missed out on qualifying
for the Champions League. But the club is a long way
from rivalling the broad appeal of Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray and Beşiktaş and, for Erdoğan,
stepping out onto the pitch in front of the rowdy,
unpredictable fans of the Big Three teams remains politically risky.