Football

Fandom, Protest and Democracy

Football Fandom, Protest and Democracy offers an in-depth and inside

approach to the socio-political history of football in Turkey, where fandom is
often revered as part of the national identity, presenting the historical context for
football events in the country.
Based on original research, the book explores the complex political processes
at play in modern Turkey and deepens our understanding of fandom, fan
activism and protest movements, questioning all presuppositions about the
society and football fandom in Turkey. In particular, it examines the role of
football fans in the pro-democracy Gezi Protests of 2013, the history of football
in Turkey, the sociology of the middle classes and the transformation of football
in the country.
Interdisciplinary in nature, this book is a valuable resource for scholars and
students of sports sociology, popular culture studies, Turkish studies and media
studies.

Dağhan Irak is a Lecturer-Researcher at Aix-Marseille University, France

teaching Geopolitics, History, Media and Popular Culture. He is also a Research
Fellow at the Médialab of Sciences Po Paris, France. He previously worked as a
live commentator for Eurosport TV channel.
Critical Research in Football

Series Editors:
Pete Millward, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
Jamie Cleland, University of Southern Australia
Dan Parnell, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Stacey Pope, Durham University, UK
Paul Widdop, Leeds Beckett University, UK

The Critical Research in Football book series was launched in 2017 to showcase
the inter- and multi-disciplinary breadth of debate relating to ‘football’. The
series defines 'football' as broader than association football, with research on
rugby, Gaelic and gridiron codes also featured. Including monographs, edited
collections, short books and textbooks, books in the series are written and/or
edited by leading experts in the field whilst consciously also affording space to
emerging voices in the area, and are designed to appeal to students, postgraduate
students and scholars who are interested in the range of disciplines in which
critical research in football connects. The series is published in association with
the Football Collective, www.footballcollective.org.uk.

Available in this series:

Fan Activism, Protest and Politics

Ultras in Post-Socialist Croatia
Andrew Hodges

Football, Fandom and Consumption

Oliver Brooks

Football Fandom, Protest and Democracy

Supporter Activism in Turkey
Dağhan Irak

For more information about this series, please visit:

https://www.routledge.com/sport/series/CFSFC
Football Fandom, Protest and Democracy

Supporter Activism in Turkey

Dağhan Irak
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Dağhan Irak
The right of Dağhan Irak to be identified as author of this work has been asserted
by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-367-24971-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-28528-8 (ebk)
Annem’e
Contents

List of figures
Foreword
Acknowledgements

Introduction
1 A socio-historical context of football in Turkey
2 Football in the Ottoman Empire
3 Football in the new Republic of Turkey (1923–1960)
4 A new political paradigm (1960–1980)
5 Hyper-commodification of football in Turkey
6 Football during the AKP period (2002–)
7 Gezi matters
8 Virtually among the fans
Conclusion

Index
Figure

7.1 Political axes and positions represented by political parties in Turkey

Foreword

Dr Dağhan Irak, a former sports journalist at Eurosport, connoisseur of football

and doctor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg, proposes an original
book to the reader, with a dual context of the undying passion for football in
Turkey and the mass movements that took the country, especially Istanbul in
2013.
Football fandom is a phenomenon that the sports sociologists have been
studying for half a century, initially in its radical form (hooliganism or ultras) in
a context of football’s transformation in Europe and also the crisis affecting the
lower classes from where those fans mostly came. With the 1970s, in all of
Europe, professional football came to fruition, was mediatised and the clubs
were bureaucratised as the cleavage between executives and the public
deepened. In the 1980s, this transformation was accelerated and amplified,
firstly in England, and then everywhere else in varying degrees. The increasing
security measures in the stadiums, the segmentation of spectators, the emergence
of multifunctional stadiums with VIP sections (the prototype being the
Amsterdam Arena, opened in 1996), the explosion of transfer expenses and
broadcasting revenues were indicators of this massive process. This mutation has
had deep repercussions on the football spectators, especially on their more
militant groups, the supporters. They were deemed to be undesirable, and were
threatened by executives; therefore they took matters into their hands, with
actions like protesting against the all-seater stadiums, the ticket prices, the
distribution of games into different time slots, security checks and restricting
laws. By these actions, they started to oppose the state or the government,
directly or indirectly. Football fandom has witnessed a wave of politicisation
which has caused a paradigm shift in fandom studies. Dr Irak’s book contributes
to understanding this shift with a certain twist; he does that in a country where
almost all people considers themselves as avid football fans and even express
political views through this identity.
Football fans have shown up in different political protests all around the world
recently. Two cases were especially remarkable: the revolutionary movement in
Egypt which ended the Hosni Mubarak rule in 2011, and the movement against
Vikto Yanukovich in Ukraine in February 2014. In Turkey, especially in
Istanbul which is the centre of gravity of the country, the protesters firstly
gathered to protest against an urbanisation project threatening the last remaining
recreational areas of the city, and then the autocratic tendencies of the emerging
Erdoğan regime. In the international press, the visibility of football supporters
was mentioned frequently.
The originality of Dr Irak’s research comes from his choice to stray away
from the traditional fandom analysis treating the fans ‘organically’ attached to a
club, and to analyse the ‘ordinary’ independent football fans who attend the
games and write a lot about football and other things on the social media.
Contrary to the European examples, in Turkey fandom practices are not reserved
to the lower classes. As a matter of fact, a lot of supporters in Istanbul come
from the middle classes and have a rather high cultural capital. Therefore Dr
Irak’s research contributes to a new understanding of football fandom in
connection with social media and new social movements. The fans appear to be
supporting the insurrections with subtle, albeit incoherent, ideological references
that cannot be deciphered at first glance.
In his empirical research on the Stambulite football fans, the author brings
sociological responses to these social and political phenomena. This type of
‘online’ fandom constructs a shared identity and also a sense of virtual
community that stems from the sports field. The research establishes bonds
between the politics and the fandom practised in locations other than the
stadium. The book questions the social and political logic behind these fans
gathering online, first to express themselves about football, and then to defend
an urban and ‘modern’ lifestyle that revolves around a set of principles that Dr
Irak conceptualises as the ‘Republican Doxa’.This concept explains the values
which make possible the expressions and consensus that he observes through his
digital ethnographic work, which enters the working field of an anthropologist or
an ethnographer, but with a corporal invisibility that limits the morpho-
psychological inference effects of the daily life with carefully crafted research
protocols.
In that respect, with its originality and empirical data that it creates, Football
Fandom, Protest and Democracy: Supporter Activism in Turkey brings out new
information and several untouched avenues for research in relation to football
fandom and social movements.

William Gasparini
Sociologist and Professor at the University of Strasbourg
Holder of the Jean Monnet Chair in European Sports Sociology (2015–2018)
and researcher at the ‘Sports and Social Sciences’ research lab
Acknowledgements

This book is a product of an ongoing journey. Way past my 30s, I decided to end
my journalism career to follow my long-sought academic endeavours. Who
would have thought that it would become a tumultuous journey through most of
which I faced all sorts of obstacles (mainly political ones), and practically live in
a suitcase? This book, written in two countries and six cities, includes all the
scars and shortcomings of this journey, as well as my coming-of-age as a
researcher.
It was a long road, but thankfully, not a lonesome one. Through my journey, I
had different people to back me up, admittedly half of whom I managed to
annoy somehow. I thank them all, regardless of whether their names are listed
below or not.
I would like to thank Bağış Erten and all Eurosport Turkish version crew, who
provided me with an honourable exit when I needed to hang up the microphone.
I also would like to thank all my viewers and readers through my career as a
sports journalist. Even today, some viewers still recognise my voice or a funny
remark I made on air. I am thankful for that experience, it was an honour and
joy.
I would like to thank Prof. William Gasparini and Prof. Michel Koebel for
their tremendous support when I was at the University of Strasbourg as a
doctoral candidate. They helped me launch a career in research and teaching,
even when I was doubtful that I could write and teach in French, my third
language. I would like to thank Prof. Christian Bromberger, Prof. Yasemin
İnceoğlu, Prof. Marie-Carmen Garcia, and Dr Samim Akgönül for turning my
thesis defence to one of the best academic experiences I have ever had, to this
day.
Another thank you is in order for Médialab of Sciences Po Paris, and its
director Prof. Dominique Cardon, Collège de France and the PAUSE
programme. They welcomed me with open arms when I needed support to
continue my career. The PAUSE programme, for researchers in exile from many
different countries, makes wonders. If you are an academic working in a French
academic institution reading this, please support this programme.
I would also like to thank IDEMEC research lab at Aix-Marseille University,
and its director Prof. Benoit Fliche. It is a joy working for you. Also, special
thanks for providing me with a job under the Mediterranean sun that I had
missed dearly.
A very special thanks is much needed for Dr Ece Algan, who appeared as a
voluntary mentor in one of the toughest periods of my life, and has never gave
up on supporting me ever since.
When you are in uncharted waters, you need friends to survive. Thankfully, I
just have the right ones. I would like to thank Can, Melek, Işık, Berna, Ceren,
Janet, Deniz, Kerem, Seda, Beril and Gökçe for their endless support, even when
I am whiny (aka all the time).
I would not be here writing this without my family. I would like to thank my
mother for making me believe in myself. She is the best football fan that I have
ever known, of course, except for my grandmother, may she rest in peace. I also
thank my sisters for all those years growing up together.
I would like to thank President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the regime in
Turkey for blacklisting me, just because I signed a petition demanding equal
treatment for all the citizens of my country, along with 1,127 other colleagues.
Thanks to them, I know now what I can rise above.
Introduction

On 31 May 2013, I spent the night crouching on the narrow stairs of a budget
hotel facing the European Doctoral College in Strasbourg that would soon
become my workplace for the next four years, trying to get my share from the
poor Internet connection that would connect me to Istanbul, the city that I was
born and grew up in and getting ready to leave. That was my first visit to the
European capital of Strasbourg, a surprisingly introvert city despite its historical
and actual nature of a crossroads. I was there to showcase my works on the
political tendencies of football supporters in Turkey, a subject that I had been
interested in for years, as a scholar and a sports journalist. Following a
presentation at a conference organised my future research lab, I was hoping to
measure up as a doctoral candidate, which would equally mean that my career as
a journalist would be over. In my presentation, I drew a basic framework of
football fandom in Turkey and why its politicisation would be impossible in the
long term, due to the lack of democratic fans’ organisations and the feeble civil
society in the country in general. On the night of 30 May, at the Gezi Park, in
that small recreational space right at the heart of my home town, some hundreds
of protesters, including football fans from left-leaning groups, resisted the police
and heavy machinery that were trying to force them to make way for an
urbanisation project that would eventually turn Gezi into a shopping centre
under the guise of the historical Ottoman barracks that were demolished decades
before. The project certainly found a sweet spot for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s
populist-Islamist government, as it would serve its agendas of neo-Ottomanism,
gentrification and crony-capitalism. The protests were vivid but rickety, the likes
of which we had seen during the urbanisation project of the Emek theatre, which
eventually demolished the first cinema that I had ever been to for a soulless
shopping mall. The Turkish police, as we had witnessed in the Labour Day that
year, was getting more and more inclined to use violence; during the Emek
protests in April, a friend of mine, a cinema writer, had her hips broken after she
was dispersed by the police water cannons. But still, nobody expected that,
around 5 am, the police would set the tents of the protesters afire, leaving dozens
of young, inexperienced, non-violent protesters under smoke and circled by fire.
Most protesters were independent or members of environmental associations; the
members of left-wing parties who were used to facing police violence were not
there. Perhaps the only crowd who knew how Turkish police could react were
the football supporters, who were quite few at the time. On 31 May, Turkey
woke up to a feeling of shock. The country, since the military regime of the
1980s, was quite inured to police violence against left-wing militants; the silent
majority of the country had even always supported it. However, such a severe
response to hardly political Stambulite kids was unprecedented. The protesters
were typical ‘okumuş çocuklar’, (‘educated kids’ in Turkish) urban, secular,
middle-class youths who had been expected to make great things for the country,
since the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Meanwhile, the coevals
of the protesters, coming from similar upbringings, felt a sudden outrage. That
feeling was abrupt, but it did come out of nowhere. Especially after the 2010
Constitution referendum that eliminated all Erdoğan’s rivals within the state and
practically started the process that would turn Turkey into his one-man rule; the
urban, secular, well-educated middle classes started to feel themselves desperate,
isolated and ostracised. Erdoğan’s attempts to intervene in modern lifestyles and
his quest to create ‘a pious youth’ created an increasing uneasiness among these
young people whom you can find in quintessential secular neighbourhoods of
the city, such as Beşiktaş, Kadıköy and Beyoğlu. The government, passing a law
restricting alcohol sale on 22 May 2013, took its toll on the city’s cultural life as
the prohibition of sponsorship by alcohol producers cut off the financial lifelines
of many events. Moreover, the ever-present fear of Turkey becoming an Islamic
state among the ‘moderns’ was more dominant than ever. The Stambulite secular
youth lost Emek, some of its cultural life, and part of liberties directly associated
with their lifestyle. The Gezi Park, which most Stambulites had enjoyed without
even caring too much about it, somehow became a thread to hang on. And the
violent eviction at 5 am was apparently the end of the rope.
At the stairs of the hotel in Strasbourg, I was experiencing a surreal night. I
was miles away from home, and what was happening there was something I had
never known before. It was like watching a movie taking place in Istanbul –
well, a movie that I was trying to stream with the poor hotel connection. But, the
feelings that made my generation (and the one after that) take to the streets were
not unknown to me. As a journalist, I was feeling myself less and less secure
everyday, and my opposition to Turkey’s candidacy to host the 2020 Olympics
(which was practically a propaganda stunt by Erdoğan) had returned as some
complaints to my editor-in-chief from higher places. I no longer had the appetite
to do my job, and I was eager to get back to the academic world that I had
always kept one foot in.
The following two days, which gathered thousands of Stambulites at the
streets against the government, was a surprise to me in many ways. As a post-
1980 child, I had never witnessed or expected any mass demonstration from the
Turkish public; seeing hundreds of thousands of people chanting and passing the
Bosphorus Bridge was simply unreal to me. Also, I was observing that football
fans were becoming a pillar of the protests, the football fans that I just claimed,
at the conference, were too apolitical to be organised. Actually, here, I should
stop and explain what I mean when I say ‘football fans’. Like most sports
sociologists, my go-to resource on defining football fans is the famous taxonomy
of Giulianotti (2002) that categorises this vast group into four; Supporters,
Followers, Fans and Flaneurs, based on their relationship with the club,
spatiality, solidarity and identity. However, in Turkey, where everyone claims to
be a fan, it is hard to fit anyone into any group. More than 80% of the supporters
in the country follow the Big Three clubs of Istanbul, therefore they have mostly
virtual relations in various places. However, identity-wise, they are often nested,
and their solidarity is as strong as you can find in a nation, which takes these
people into another fandom category. Even though Giulianotti’s dichotomy
works very well with any other example that I know, in Turkey all the categories
are mangled because these three clubs are perceived like micro-nations. These
clubs, born simultaneously with the Turkish nation, mimic Turkish nationalism
and, like any nationalism, it has imaginary bonds with its members from any
walk of life. Therefore, even the relations are often long-distance and relations
are virtual, solidarity is strong. In my sample group that I picked among
Istanbul-based supporters, again a crossover between different categories occurs;
they are on site, therefore they have a grounded identity, strong solidarity and
they represent the ‘hot’ side of fandom. However, they come from the urban
middle classes who have been conditioned to be customers since the 1980s,
therefore their relationship with their team bounces constantly between supporter
and client. This anomaly stems from a core argument of this book; the fan
identity, class identity and political identity of urban, secular, middle-class
Stambulite fans is interwoven and they function interchangeably. The main
subject of this book, the participation of football supporters in the Gezi Protests,
is a prime example of this situation. Without giving any spoilers, I will quote the
essential question of this book; why do these people from Istanbul wear their
football jersey when they go to political protests or a polling stations?
In Turkey, football is so intertwined with other social domains that it cannot
be separated. In my 30-something years in Turkey, I had only known a handful
of people that I would not identify as a football fan, admittedly most of them in
academic circles. It is a country where most people start to read the paper from
the sports section. Also, in Turkey, fan groups are not really too organised, they
are loose entities around a common identity. You may find tens of thousands of
people who would claim they belonged to Çarşı, Ultraslan or Genç
Fenerbahçeliler; however, these famous groups, to my mind, do not have more
than a few dozen people as a core group. Some of these groups are formal
associations but, as I will demonstrate later, being a member of an association is
exceptional in Turkey, even for religious and regional associations that are more
popular than others. The organised fan groups are entities that can grow in a
culture of civil society which hardly exists in Turkey. Therefore, when I say
‘football fan’ I mostly mean ordinary people. Which is why, in the quasi-
ethnographic work that will occupy a big portion of this book, I deliberately
avoided working with fan groups and chose independent, urban, secular, middle-
class football fans. In a political event that gathered over 5 million people in a
month, restricting such a dominant identity to a few hundreds of people would
effectively miss the mark and quite probably would lead to a selection bias. Gezi
was a spontaneous movement that mostly gathered independent people with no
political adherence or experience. In order to understand the movement, one
should analyse such people.
The story of football and its fandom in Turkey cannot be told without its
relationship with politics. Football in this country was born into politics and has
never been separated from it ever since. Without knowing the role of football in
the emergence of modern Turkey, it is impossible to understand why certain
things happen in football in Turkey. For example, in a country of 80 million
more than 80% of the population are estimated to support three Stambulite
teams: Beşiktaş, Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe. Without knowing these clubs’
roles in the Turkish national struggle, we cannot understand why they have
always been treated as if they were national teams. Therefore, I ask for your
patience, since the story that leads up to the Gezi Park starts at the beginning of
the 20th century. We should first explain why football is interwoven with
nationalism, modernity or secularism, and then we will be able to explain the
reactions of football fans before, during and after the events. That is why I will
start telling the story from the very beginning, when football clubs in Turkey did
not even exist and football was a game played between the British merchants
and their non-Muslim counterparts in the port cities of the Ottoman Empire.
Football in Turkey and the structure of clubs have a unique relationship with
Turkish nationalism. Not only were the clubs born into it, they also took it as a
model to create their own micro-nationalisms. The Stambulite clubs are nations
within a nation, and the identities they engendered are inseparable from the core
principles of the Republic – the Republic that was entrusted to the urban, secular
middle classes of Turkey by its founding fathers, and has been dismantled today
by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The early history of football in Turkey actually sheds
a light on why football has found itself in the middle of this cultural battle that
reached a climax in Gezi.
Thus, football in Turkey has always been political, but it has always been
proudly apolitical. Even though it may seem as a clear paradox, it completely
overlaps everything Turkey was built upon. The country has been constituted
upon a gigantic state that dictates everything in the whole political field, and a
dwarf civil society where feeble democracy takes place. Therefore, politics
around predefined principles (that I will call the ‘Republican Doxa’) occupies a
huge place, but the remaining, democratic political debate is confined to fringes
and is often met with hostility. In other words, as long as you do not cross the
acceptable lines you can be as political as you want; however, crossing the lines
could easily make you an outcast in the eyes of the state and society. The
Erdoğan era is a period when these lines are renegotiated and vastly redesigned.
This transformation lies at the heart of the current political tension. Football
environments (stadiums and any other public place that fandom takes place),
which have traditionally been secular spaces, have been prime examples of the
public repercussions that this transformation created. Football fans that have
very rarely crossed the accepted political lines found themselves as outcasts,
even enemies of the new regime. Their apoliticality became political. Before
analysing how they reacted through my ethnographic work, I aim to explain the
Republican Doxa and those lines that used to define acceptable and unacceptable
politics. This part will require a background knowledge of the core issues that
constitute the political fault lines of the society in Turkey, such as religion,
secularism, the Kurdish question or the Armenian genocide. I am more than
willing to explain why all these and more fall within the Republican Doxa, and
how these will reappear as recurring themes during my ethnographic work.
I used digital ethnography as the principal method in this study. For three and
a half years, I worked with 60 football supporters who individually and
independently joined the protests. That sample obviously brings out a certain
question; is it possible to conduct an ethnography of people who do not know
each other and do not act interconnectedly? My answer to this question is a
certain ‘yes’, since it is a common identity and shared values that gathered
millions of otherwise disparate people in Gezi. In a setting where the lack of
political organisation and experience, as well as an overt hostility against
political entities, dominated, the answer to why and how millions of people acted
spontaneously but harmoniously in this unprecedented social event lies in the
common set of values that were engraved on the perception of Turkish urban,
secular, middle classes. My work takes a sample of football supporters that were
brought to the streets by the Republican Doxa. Therefore, it is impossible not to
consider these individuals as a group. Digital ethnography makes it possible to
work on such a disjointed but unified group. The method also opens the door to
an additional depth of analysis that would be otherwise impossible. Thanks to
this method, we are able to access the expressions of the sample group before the
Gezi Protests to create a timeline that starts one year before the events to two
and a half years after. This presents a unique opportunity to detect continuities
and ruptures in political expressions and positions. To my knowledge, among the
hundreds of works about Gezi, this work is the only one that analyses the
participants before the events.
For this research, I used Twitter messages posted by the sample group. Since
the Iran elections in 2009, Twitter has proven to be an important political tool,
especially during mass protests. In Turkey, Facebook is the most popular social
media platform, as in most countries; however, the semi-private structure of that
platform makes it practically impossible to see all the actors in a network setting.
Twitter, on the other hand, is an agora where all users are interconnected (unless
their accounts are locked, which is a very rare practice); users may be relatively
protected by anonymity, and the tool itself is designed to be used in mobile
environments. As the quintessential social network, Twitter appeared as a
platform of political communication even before the Gezi Protests. However, in
a country where digital divide and unequally distributed cultural capital have had
an important effect, a tardily localised tool such as Twitter was first dominated
by certain groups who were more tech-savvy and connected to the outside world.
Before presenting my research, I would like to explain why Twitter emerged as a
platform vastly dominated by the secular opposition, to the extent that Tayyip
Erdoğan called it ‘the worst menace to society’ and vowed to eradicate it. Also,
the cultural battle in Turkey is actually a struggle between the cultural capital
and the social capital owners in the country; in other words, the educated few
and the organised masses. It is a battle between diversity and majoritarianism.
Technology plays an essential role in this battle, and the Stambulite football
fandom has also been nurtured by its technological capital for decades.
Therefore, it is crucial to explain the complex ties between technology, modern
middle classes and football fandom. Even though they seem irrelevant, hopefully
the reader will realise that they are surprisingly interlacing. As a matter fact, this
relationship, which is admittedly a tough case to crack, is what makes the case of
football fandom in Turkey unique.
For the quasi-ethnographic part of my work, I chose two axes; thematic and
periodic. In the thematic part of the analysis, I will present my findings in
relation to the core elements of the Republican Doxa. In the periodic part, I
divided my research into periods that start and end with important political
events, such as elections or political scandals. The first axis aims to show
political positions that the sample group members take, while the second
attempts to understand when the sample expresses itself politically. The final
objective of the work is equally twofold; firstly, I try to understand to what
extent the sample group is motivated by the restoration of the Republican Doxa
while making a political statement, and whether their positions changed with the
Gezi. Secondly, I try to detect whether their political expressions are part of an
enduring political stance, or mere reactions to political events that somehow
concern them. And finally, there is one other important objective of this
research. The Gezi Protests took place in 2013, not only as an unprecedented
political event but also one without a successor. It has been five years since
Gezi, and society in Turkey has gradually become a society with no political
reactions. Indeed, the climate of fear created by the Erdoğan regime plays an
immense role in this situation. However, I believe that explaining all the silence
with this sole fact would mean overlooking deeper reasons.
This book is not a football book. It is a book about the society in Turkey that
takes football as a lead. As I said, almost everybody in Turkey is a football fan.
It is perhaps the only remaining common interest that all the people are still
invested in. Therefore, I firmly believe that trying to understand Turkey through
football fandom is not a crazy idea. Obviously, this book only covers a specific
layer of the society in the country; the urban, secular, middle classes that are
often referred as the ‘moderns’. In a country with millions of football fans, this
sport may help understanding several other parts of the society. Mine is an
exploratory attempt to show different possibilities, regarding subject and
methodology. In many ways, it is a mere drop in the ocean. I certainly hope it
would lead to many others.
Chapter 1
A socio-historical context of football in Turkey

The first thing to take into account while comparing Turkey with the Western
world in any subject related to modernity may be the fact that in the West,
modernity is mostly a consequence of social changes such as the civil wars and
the scientific discoveries that have changed the modes of production, which
influenced all layers of society differently but all at once; whereas in Turkey, the
notions of modernity were imported by a small elite who sought to impose them
on the other strata of society mostly without questioning whether the social
infrastructure was ready to absorb the changes that modernity would bring along.
Therefore, in the Western world, the shift from traditional structure to modernity
took place in a much more homogeneous and fluid manner, while in Turkey
there has always been the clash of traditions and modernity.
In Turkey, modernism appeared to be a project of the elites and it has not been
backed with a participative democracy where the citizens had their share in
decision-making process. While the structure of the state was shifting towards
modernity, the lifestyle of the people remained mostly traditional. Indeed, at this
point, it should once again be remembered that modernity in Turkey is imported
and it is usually aimed at overthrowing the old system entirely instead of
reconciling with it. The modernists in Turkey, starting with the Committee of
Union and Progress (CUP) in the late Ottoman era, aimed to make a clean break
with the traditional period. In the early years of the Republic of Turkey, this
approach was reinforced by revolutions which even attempted to change the way
the citizens dressed, spoke and behaved. However, the state rarely gave a reason
to the citizens to change the ways in which they lived. Briefly, most of the time,
modernity in Turkey has happened in a sphere which has not included the
people. The Turkish people have mostly struggled to position themselves
somewhere between the modern and traditional spheres. Thus, while comparing
Britain and Turkey in a topic related to modernity like the one at hand, it should
be recalled always that the modernities in these two countries emerged and took
place in different conditions and gave different results.
One of the complex tasks while comparing football fans in Turkey with their
European counterparts is how to classify these fans. In order to facilitate the
comparison, I will use the British example. When one is talking about the British
public, it is convenient to classify them according to the social classes to which
they belong. For instance, some English football clubs are often described as
‘working class clubs’ as they were founded by trade unions or religious
organisations which were frequented by groups of people with same working
and living conditions. However, in Turkey it is difficult to talk about social
classes in the same way as is done for Britain. Here, it should be stressed that the
reason for that is not the lack of social classes themselves but rather of class
consciousness. Even if it seems possible to classify the lower strata of society as
the ‘Turkish working class’, it is not possible to support this nomination with the
evidence which proves these strata acted together to defend their common
interests.
A similar dilemma also exists for the upper classes. In Turkey, the ‘elite’ is a
complex group of people which includes military and civil bureaucracy as well
as the bourgeoisie. It is also difficult to say that these groups necessarily share
the same goals and interests all the time. On the contrary, the clash between
traditionalism and modernism appears here as well. So, even though it is
possible to talk vaguely about ‘elites’ and ‘lower classes’, they do not refer to
the classic definition of social classes as they do not usually have a common
agenda and they have long-lasting internal conflicts. Hence, whereas there is the
conflict of interests between social layers, it is difficult to consider this to be a
real class struggle as both parties more or less lack class consciousness. This
blurred picture also can be explained by the fact that the clash between
traditionalism and modernity frequently overshadows the clash of social classes.
In Turkey, the intensity of the conflict between modernist bureaucracy and the
traditional bourgeoisie or the Turkish and Kurdish lower classes can easily
surpass class agendas. Also, as I will discuss throughout this book, as a result of
the incomplete Turkish modernity and the failed Kemalist social-engineering
project, the urban, secular, middle-classes that used to be the prototype for the
society ‘without classes, without privileges’ transformed into a privileged social
fraction that was destined to be the flag-bearers of modernism and exclusive
cultural capital owners of the society. Their relationship with the Turkish
modernity (and its products, including football) still remains key in
understanding matters related to Turkey.
Regarding the emergence of football in Turkey, this complicated picture of
social classes appears to be clearer. Just like modernity, football as a modern
game was imported into Turkey (or the Ottoman Empire) by the elites of the
country. The port cities of Thessaloniki (today in Greece), Istanbul and Izmir
were the first cities where football was played and the British living and working
there (mostly as merchants) were the first to play it. So, the first locals to play
football in these regions were the ones who had interaction with the British. In
addition, during the quasi-paranoid oppressive regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II,
it was virtually impossible for regular Muslim-Turkish men to get involved in
sports, as he suspected social gatherings among these groups might have led to
revolts. As described in the foundation of the first football (or sports) clubs, one
had to be quite privileged to avoid investigation by the Hamidian administration.
Therefore, the first local footballers in Turkey were either the non-Muslim
merchants or the Muslim elites who were powerful enough to face pressure from
the administration. The first football clubs in the late Ottoman period were
founded under these circumstances. A working-class football club was virtually
impossible.
After the declaration of the Second Constitutional Period in the Ottoman
Empire in 1908, many sports clubs were founded simultaneously and some of
them, like Fenerbahçe, succeeded to attract a large popularity from all walks of
life. However, even though they were popular clubs, they hardly belonged to the
people. Most club boards were composed of elites and some of them, like
Fenerbahçe, Karşıyaka and Altay, went directly under the CUP protection during
the Second Constitutional Period. Similar political inclinations also happened in
the Republican CHP and DP governments. Until 1960, the popular sports clubs
always had close relations with the political power. This also explains how club
boards were socially different from clubs’ supporters. Politics and sports
belonged to the same sphere where the people did not. The lack of access to the
high ranks of political bodies was parallel to the lack of access to club boards.
The lack of the Turkish equivalents of the British working-class football clubs
does not depend solely on the fact that football was an elite sport. The working-
class football clubs were just as absent in the country as trade unions and
working-class associations. It would be unfair to say that during the late
Ottoman and early Republican periods there was no labour movement. However,
these movements did not have an organisational interconnection. Most of the
labour unrest or strikes were not organised by the trade unions, even so, the
labour unions were mostly constituted for a particular strike and did not have an
enduring existence (Karakışla, 1995: 29). Even the most lasting ones did not
represent a meaningful number of the Ottoman-Turkish workers. As Ottoman
(later Turkish) labour was unable to form strong organisations in the most
crucial topics for years, a working-class organisation for recreation would have
been hardly realistic.
Also, differences between religious practices in Turkey and in Britain affected
the way that the sports clubs were founded. In Britain especially, the Conformist
churches acted as a gathering point for the working-class, and most of them
produced football or sports teams. The majority of the English football clubs of
today that have a blue colour on their chests had affiliation with a religious
organisation in their founding years (and the reds had a similar relationship with
trade unions). In Islam, the clergy is by definition less visible and the social
functions of the mosques are less apparent than those of the churches. In
addition, the religion and secularism has always been a delicate subject in
modern Turkey, so probably even if a religious football club were to have
existed, it would not have received a good reaction from the state. To sum up, in
Turkey the lower classes did not have the same organisations as in Britain that
would create ‘blue’ or ‘red’ football clubs. The ironic part is that the only club
founded by the working-class in the early years of Turkish modernity in Istanbul
was founded the British. The ‘Telephone Club’, founded by the English
technicians and the workers of the Istanbul Telephone Company in 1914, was
shut down by the Ottoman government shortly later (Türk Futbol Tarihi, 2013:
19). I should also note that the Ankaragücü club of today is based on a club
founded by the workers of a military equipment factory in the 1910s, and in the
1980s, Zonguldakspor had ties with the miners’ union. Especially, football in
Ankara has an interesting history; however in this work, I prefer to focus on
Istanbul as it has always overwhelmingly been the focus of football in Turkey.
Nationalism is another subject which distinguishes football in Turkey from
that of the British. The most popular football clubs in Turkey were founded by
modernist elites who were also nationalists. As in almost all topics, the Turkish
modernists aimed to employ football in order to overcome foreigners with their
own modern tools. The strong notion of rivalry and competition in football
helped them to create a popular way to convey their envy of and hostility
towards foreigners. By playing football, they would prove equal with their
European counterparts, and their superiority by winning. The famous quote of
Galatasaray founder Ali Sami Yen is the perfect expression of this mentality:
‘our objective is to play football like the English, to have a colour and a name
and overcome the non-Turkish teams’ (Yüce, 2014: 147). Football clubs like
Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray mostly became popular during the occupation
period thanks to the matches that they played with the ‘enemy’, so since from
the very beginning they have had a homogeneous fan base.
The fans of Turkish clubs were defined solely by fandom and by no other
affiliation. Today, the well-known habit of a regular football fan in Turkey to
support the rival team when it plays in international tournaments shows that this
nationalist notion in football in Turkey is still very important. It should be
remembered that the strong nationalist tendency in Turkey has always been a
factor which has prevented the emergence of class consciousness. Probably the
biggest success of the Turkish modernist elite was to make nationalism a
primary concept for the Turkish people. The threat that could supposedly come
for the nation usually united the different strata of Turkish society, surpassing
their own agendas, especially in the last half-century of the republic.
This perception of threat also can be seen as an extension of the nation-
building agenda of the early republic. It is no coincidence that the discourse of
Turkish nationalists today usually refers to the early days of the nation when
there actually was a threat. The aggressive nationalistic tendencies in the football
in Turkey can be considered to be a popular expression of the people who sense
an everlasting threat. In these conditions where a very strong nationalistic
agenda is present, it is almost impossible that a football club with a class agenda
would appear.
The major difference between the British and the Turkish examples
concerning the emergence and the expansion of football is that in Britain,
football became popular in an upwards direction, whereas in Turkey the
expansion happened downwards. In Britain, football emerged from the lower
classes, codified and institutionalised by the middle and upper classes, and
eventually was taken over by lower classes again following the acceptance of
professionalism. However, in Turkey, football was imported from Britain by the
upper-middle classes and despite its eventual mass popularity among the lower
class, administratively it has remained an ‘elites’ sport’. The lack of well-
structured social classes and the nationalism reinforcing this blurry picture has
prevented the lower classes from taking over football as in Britain. Therefore, a
dual relationship between the few ones who run the clubs and the massive
number of lower-class supporters appeared.
The fact that the supporters have not been able to access the administration
and the decision-making process in football clubs in Turkey has decreased the
importance of locality. As mentioned, in Britain the clubs were founded and
regarded as local gathering points, and they were built upon principles such as
participation, commitment and localism (Nash, 2000: 469). As will be discussed
thoroughly later, even when working-class fans had to yield the administration to
the upper class executives who brought capital to the club in Premier League
years, they preserved these values and formed bodies like the Football
Supporters’ Association (FSA) and Independent Supporters’ Associations (ISAs)
in order to be included in the decision-making processes. One of the main
reasons that the British football fans could be organised this way was that they
were physically close to each other, they had the same backgrounds and the
same experiences. In the example of Stambulite football clubs, localism plays an
important factor, but in a very different perspective. Even though the Big Three
clubs of Istanbul loosened their ties with the districts where they were founded
(Beşiktaş, Beyoğlu/Şişli for Galatasaray, and Kadıköy for Fenerbahçe), moving
their training grounds or even stadiums away from the city centre, the fandom
practices are still experienced in these districts which are also unmistakably the
strongholds of the Turkish modernity and the urban, secular, middle-class
lifestyle. The fandom practices in these districts, for example the pre-match
rituals, are completely comparable to the European ones, and are very influential
everywhere else fandom is experienced in Turkey. Nevertheless, the fans in
these districts, however influential they are, represent a very small fraction of the
Big Three fans in Turkey. It is estimated that more than 80% of the football fans
in Turkey support these three clubs, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of
fans in the diaspora communities. These clubs are, as I will discuss later, micro-
nations with millions of people from all walks of life. The urban, secular,
middle-class fans in Istanbul are the ones who have access to the core fandom
rituals and they set the tone, but they are a small number. The rest of the fandom
in Turkey is not based on anything but affection towards the same club. They do
not necessarily share the same values with the fans who gather in the very
European districts of Istanbul every weekend to drink and chant before the
games. The fans in these districts create the chants, slogans, choreographies and
other fandom practices; as the social fraction that they belong to, they hold the
cultural capital. But again, as their social fraction, they are an influential yet
small minority in Turkish society. The sports writers in Turkey and the
Stambulite fans alike are very inclined to attribute social class characteristics to
their clubs, but because football fandom in Turkey is not based on common
background but on club affection the fans do not generally belong to a
distinctive social class. Therefore, the football fans in Turkey are homogeneous
socially and the fans of all clubs more or less present the same characteristics.
 The lack of distinctive identity in football clubs in Turkey equally brings out
success as a very strong factor to gain popularity. As Istanbul teams have won
league titles and represented Turkey in European cups over and over again
through the decades, they completely dominate the fandom world, even in cities
with relatively successful football clubs. Only Trabzon and maybe Bursa, two
cities which have clubs with league titles, can be considered to be exceptions. It
can be estimated that only around one-fifth of the Istanbul clubs’ fans actually
reside in Istanbul. Indeed, one of the main reasons that Anatolian football fans
massively shifted to the Istanbul clubs is the fact that the national league was
founded in 1959 and until that year, the Istanbul championship had five decades
of history with semi-professional and professional top-class football. Most cities
could not have instant participation even after the emergence of the national
league and had to wait until the 1970s to have their own professional clubs. This
belated expansion also reinforced the centralist character of football in Turkey
and football turned out to be one of the most unequally diversified fields in the
country where equal allocation in other fields is also rare. This picture shows
that the football fans of major clubs in Turkey are geographically and socially
diverse and they do not have a meaningful connection other than supporting the
same club. The major clubs are more like national clubs which gather popularity
from all regions and strata of the country, whereas the other clubs do not have
the popularity to compete with major clubs even in their own home towns.
In Turkey, the time gap between the emergence and the expansion of
association football to the national level was almost 70 years. While football was
imported into Turkey in the late 1890s, the professional clubs in Anatolia only
mushroomed at the end of the 1960s. Through these decades, football was
played at the local level in most cities, with the exception of Istanbul and Izmir.
Ankara and Trabzon could also have a football tradition thanks to the local
rivalries. However, in big picture the domination of three big Istanbul clubs
could not be contested until the late 1970s when those clubs were weakened by
economic crisis and foreign player restrictions. Even then, only one non-Istanbul
club, Trabzonspor, could win the league. By the 1970s, when football started to
be commodified, there was already a complete domination by Istanbul clubs, in
terms of both success and popularity. Besides, football in Turkey emerged in a
nationalistic context and later continued in that manner. The Istanbul clubs acted
as a Turkish national team against the other ethnic groups, the occupation forces
and eventually the foreign teams. After the 1960s, this national representation
context revived by the foundation of European clubs as Turkey was mostly
represented by these clubs due to their domestic success.
In Turkey, it is also not possible to talk about a continuous class
consciousness as the politicisation of the Turkish public was interrupted several
times by military interventions. The most politicised eras of Turkish history
usually have led to coups d’états. In addition, football clubs in Turkey did not
have a political engagement except leaning towards the political entity in power
in some eras. In major Istanbul clubs that had the majority of the fans, this
inclination happened almost simultaneously. For example, in the 1940s, all three
clubs had CHP-member board members, in the 1950s, they all had DP-member
presidents. After coups d’état, they were more reserved in appointing political
figures; however, their businessmen presidents also had political ties to different
political powers. Besides, the political parties in power usually did not have
conflicts with the business elite and mostly shared common visions. As all three
clubs usually shared the same political tendency, it did not become a part of the
club identity. Except for obvious and short-lived attempts such as İttihatspor (of
CUP) or Güneş (of Kemalists), Turkish clubs did not have consistent political
engagements.
Equally, when the Turkish public was politicised in the late 1960s and the
1970s, football was not affected too much by those currents. Unlike in England,
in Turkey the left-wing tried to keep a distance from football especially during
the late 1970s when the left politics radicalised. The general perception of
football by Turkish socialists was that it was a tool used for manipulating and
stupefying the people, an ‘opium for the masses’; the relationship between
football and the socialists could only warm when all political activities were
suspended and most leftist activists were convicted after the 1980 coup
(Bostancıoğlu, 2004: 242–244). However, in that period, these people were
deprived of their ability to politicise football.
The right-wing political groups in the 1970s were equally distant to football.
For the militant Turkish nationalists of this era, football was considered to be ‘an
event that degenerated national conscience’ (Bora, 2004: 237). However, after
the liberation of the MHP-based extreme nationalism after a decade of
suspension (brought about by the 1980 coup), the nationalists of the late 1980s
began to seek ground to justify themselves and regain popularity. The
nationalists had a similar period suspension in the 1940s with the trial of the
Panturkists. At the period, the Cyprus issue was considered to be a probable
popular case for the nationalists to re-engage themselves into political life.
In the 1990s, the anti-PKK climate and popularity of football in Turkey
appeared to be a generous opportunity and the MÇP-MHP-based extreme
nationalists started to politicise mainstream football fans (Bora, 2004). This
tendency reached its climax with the election of Güven Sazak, one of the key
figures of the MHP, to the Fenerbahçe presidency in 1993. The congress of the
club were also guarded by MHP militants, in case some party members intervene
the elections to make sure Sazak won against the other candidate Ali Şen (who
was also known as a MHP sympathiser). In this period, MHP militant groups
began to appear at games in order to prevent any protest against the president. At
the same period, Galatasaray’s rising profile in European fixtures also attracted
nationalists’ attention. Alpaslan Dikmen, the leader of Galatasaray’s biggest fan
group Ultraslan, was the columnist of the ultra-nationalist Yeniçağ newspaper,
which had very close ties with the MHP. Beşiktaş stands remained rather
resistant to the emergence of ultra-nationalist fans as the leader of the famous
Çarşı group, Alen Markaryan was a Turkish-Armenian with left-wing
tendencies. However, even Çarşı absorbed a degree of popular nationalism in
this era. This fan group, which appears to be more politically engaged than
others, will be thoroughly analysed later.
The nationalism in Turkish stands that reached its peak in the late 1990s
declined in the 2000s, as the MHP faced a major economic crisis in 2001 as the
coalition partner and left of the assembly in the next elections. The 2000s
marked the rise of conservative (former Islamist) AKP, which tried to found
more organisational bonds with football through the TFF boards. Up to now, an
AKP-militant supporter group has not been visible in football stands.
The 1990s can be considered to be the first era in which football fans were
visibly politicised. However, this politicisation mainly depended on the rise of
popular nationalism and it ended with its decline. Even in that era, the politics
could not succeed in altering the clubs’ identity permanently as the fans were too
diverse both socially and physically.
In Turkey, the fans have not had the habit of being involved in club matters
since the beginning. Their general contribution to the clubs’ benefits has been to
support the team in the games or protesting at the referees or the federation when
they feel an injustice. Obviously, these behaviours have been rather spontaneous
than organised. Probably the first relatively organised action of Turkish fans
took place in 1963, during the transfer talks of Birol Peker from Beşiktaş to
Fenerbahçe. Twenty Beşiktaş fans, the self-proclaimed ‘amigos’, (literally
‘friends’ in Spanish) took Peker from his house to the Beşiktaş headquarters to
convince him not to go to Fenerbahçe. While this group failed in their objective,
the ‘amigo’ became the general name for fan leaders in Turkey from then on.
The ‘Amigos’ in different clubs constituted the origins of the organised fan
groups in the 1960s, creating the first mass shows in the stands. While the
‘amigos’ have become a part of the fan culture since the 1970s, many of them
formed relations with club boards based on personal interest. It should be noted
that the ‘amigos’ and their followers constituted self-proclaimed organisations
with no legal status whatsoever. Therefore, even in their strongest eras, they did
not act as an agency between clubs and supporters, and their personal and group
interests usually surpassed the general fans’ interests in their contacts with the
clubs.
In the 1980s and the 1990s, when football reached a wider popularity, the
‘amigos’ turned their followers into ‘casual’ style fan groups. Their relations
with the wealthy businessmen presidents were so solidified that they could affect
board elections’ results. Especially former Fenerbahçe president Ali Şen
established such a relationship with the fan groups to be re-elected in 1994 by
the help of the famous chant ‘Ali Şen Başkan, Fenerbahçe Şampiyon’ (Ali Şen
president, Fenerbahçe champions). In most clubs, facilities like stadium car
parks, public toilets and cafeterias were run by fan groups’ leading members,
and the match tickets and buses to away games were organised by board
members, or people who wanted to climb the steps of club politics. Therefore,
the fan groups had more than enough economic power to finance their banners.
However, this economic power depended on their relations with clubs’ political
figures. They were not independent. Moreover, this dependent relationship of
fan groups with the club boards became more essential as the football scene was
commodified rapidly. The season ticket prices were getting out of reach for a
minimum wage earner as were the television subscription fees. By 2003–2004
season, the minimum wage in Turkey was US$216.95 per month and the
subscription fee for Lig TV, the league broadcaster, was annually US$471.37
minimum. The same season, the major Istanbul clubs sold match tickets up to 20
times more than they reported to the TFF and allied against a possible ban on
selling overpriced tickets. The single match ticket prices were around US$25–30
at the time, more than one-tenth of the monthly minimum wage. For those who
could not afford these fees, joining a fan group was a way out as most fan groups
received free tickets and other benefits from club boards. Therefore, through the
1990s and the 2000s, more crowded and more self-interest-based fan groups
appeared.
The Beşiktaş’s Çarşı group founded in 1982 was the closest to the left-leaning
‘ultras’ subculture in Europe among others. The group managed to create its own
identity independent from the club as a left-wing oriented, anti-racist,
environmentalist fan group that appeared in social protests and Labour Day
celebrations. With the anarchy symbol for logo with, they also appealed to the
left-wing football fans and intellectuals who had been distanced from football
during the right-wing dominated 1980s and 1990s. However, Çarşı also had its
inconsistencies. The first major breakpoint came over in 2000. That year, it was
Süleyman Seba’s sixteenth year as the Beşiktaş chairman. During his reign, the
club completely concentrated on its youth system and tackled its economic crisis
while also winning five league and four cup titles. In the first ten years of his
term, Beşiktaş had been the most successful team in domestic competitions
despite the low budgets it had compared to its rivals. However, Seba was a
conservative president and had difficulties in modernising the club during the
late 1990s. As a result, Serdar Bilgili, his former general secretary, challenged
him for the presidency. Bilgili had a board of wealthy businessmen, and
promised to compete with the rival clubs. Çarşı gave full support to Bilgili while
protesting and insulting Seba. It was like Liverpool fans insulting Bill Shankly
and caused an unresolvable chagrin for Seba, who was soon to became the
honorary president of the club. He left the presidency and Bilgili was elected.
Çarşı’s choice of Bilgili over Seba and his allies was interesting as they defined
themselves as ‘the last fortress against the industrial [commodified] football’.
Serdar Bilgili was aiming at a market-driven club by listing the club shares on
the Istanbul Stock Market, whereas Seba and his candidate Hasan Arat wanted to
preserve the club’s identity. Ironically, one of the prominent actions of Serdar
Bilgili was to replace Çarşı from its usual terrace the ‘Covered Stand’ and build
expensive box seats there. One season later, Çarşı was given limited space in the
same terrace. After this incident, Çarşı diverted its support to Bilgili’s vice-
president Yıldırım Demirören and led to the president’s resignation. During
Demirören reign, Beşiktaş’s debts constantly increased. By 2009, the club had
161 million Liras of debt, 60 million of which was due to be paid to the
president himself. This debt was mainly because of expensive and excessive
player transfers. However, the championship and cup victory in 2008–2009
season silenced protesters including Çarşı who was already criticised of
overlooking club’s current status. The bad start to the 2009–2010 season
triggered Çarşı’s protests. However Yıldırım Demirören supporters sent to the
Covered Stand opened a banner reading ‘Don’t forget the two cups, don’t be
disloyal’ right next to the Çarşı fans. The protests continued while Demirören
declared ‘he would clean up the stands’. The clash between Demirören and Çarşı
resulted in the group’s leader Alen Markaryan being banned from stadiums for
one year due to crowd disorder. Later Demirören, also an energy mogul and
media boss, abandoned the club to become the TFF chairman. He is also an avid
supporter of the Erdoğan regime.
In the Çarşı experience, it is crucial to see that the group, despite its discourse
in the opposite direction, failed to become independent from the club board. The
‘disloyality’ banner was obviously an allusion to Çarşı once being ‘loyal’ to the
president. Interestingly, Çarşı actually had a chance to establish some sort of
economic independence thanks to the popularity of its own merchandise
products. The results of a survey made by Beşiktaş club board showed that only
8% of the buyers of club’s official merchandise were attending games, whereas
the Çarşı products’ buyers were generally match day regulars (Beşiktaş Postası,
2009). This result was mainly due to the popularity of Çarşı and the discontent
of fans against the board. However, Çarşı, instead of using this advantage to gain
economic independence, sought a deal with the club board to sell the products in
club’s official shops. This deal created interesting consequences. In the early
2000s, the group had launched a campaign against Cola Turka, the cola brand of
Ülker known with its conservative-Islamist ties, that became the sponsor of the
basketball team. As the name of the team would become ‘Beşiktaş Cola Turka’,
the slogan of the campaign was ‘three syllables, eight letters, it’s only Beşiktaş’.
However, the slogan of the campaign was adopted by another club sponsor,
Avea. The anti-commodification slogans of Çarşı were commodified and sold to
corporations. Equally, the scarf with the picture of one of the Çarşı leaders Optik
began to be sold in the official club store along with the sponsors’ merchandise
that the so-called anarchist Çarşı once soundly protested against. The Beşiktaş
board later stopped selling Çarşı products in 2014, when the group participated
in the Gezi Protests.
The Çarşı experience shows that even the most engaged fan group of the
country can find itself in inconsistencies and complicated relations with club
boards and sponsors. The commodification of the most anti-commodification
front of football in Turkey reveals the weaknesses in the ‘last fortress’. Whereas
Çarşı was strongly influenced by its English and Italian counterparts about
appearing as an independent and militant fans’ entity, they lacked the common
identity among fans and the tradition to form a durable opposition to the current
trends. Despite their left-wing oriented stances about social issues, such as
racism, the Palestine issue or climate warming, they could not entirely manage to
shift the ordinary fan to their point of view, as most Beşiktaş fans did not share
the same identities and experiences. Also their choice of Bilgili over Seba started
their defeat against the commodification of football. Another weak point of
Çarşı’s battle was their failure in cooperating with the fans of other clubs sharing
the same tendencies. Even though they presented themselves a group based on a
distinctive point of view and identity, they ignored their equivalents in other
clubs and they cooperated with their counterparts within Beşiktaş, such as the
club board, instead. The Çarşı experience is proof of how difficult it is to form a
class-based or identity-based entity in an environment where the class or fan
identity consciousness rarely appears as a key factor.
That is exactly the reason for this book about the independent Stambulite
football fans and the social fraction that they belong to. The fans, who
experience all the fandom rituals in modern Stambulite neighbourhoods, have a
distinctive fan identity shaped by the urban, secular, middle-class habitus in
Istanbul, not by a fan subculture. This fan identity is different from the general
fan identity in Turkey, and intrinsic to the values of this particular social layer.
Paradoxically, due to the anti-political nature of their social layer’s habitus, they
cannot be organised; even the most powerful fan groups, as described above,
succumb to the basic principle of micro-nationalism and desist from their own
interests, in favour of the supra-identity. However, the urban, secular, middle-
class football fan has a political value in Turkey; that value comes from the
privileged status of their social layer, and translates into the political action
through the fan identity which legitimises that action, which is otherwise
ostracised, even by those individuals themselves. That was why dozens of
thousands of individuals felt the need to wear a football jersey to the Gezi
Protests in 2013, the biggest anti-government protest in the history of the
country. That is why you can see lots of people wearing jerseys around polling
booths in strictly secularist districts like Beşiktaş or Kadıköy. The football fan
identity in Turkey is a surrogate to the political expression that is shaped by
certain Republican values.
In this book, I aim to dissect these values to explain this sudden mass
participation of people wearing football jerseys in the Gezi Protests in 2013,
against the regime that was being established by the autocratic prime minister of
the era, and the executive president of today, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Evidently,
this task entails a historical background to politics and football in Turkey,
especially for the reader who is not particularly familiar with the country.
Bibliography
Beşiktaş Postası. 29 October 2009, ‘Kartal Yuvası‘nda Çarşı telaşı’. Available online at
www.besiktaspostasi.com/kartal-yuvasinda-carsi-telasi.htm [1 December 2018].
Bora, Tanıl. ‘Dur Tarih, Vur Türkiye’. In Roman Horak, Wolfgang Reiter and Tanıl Bora
(eds), Futbol ve Kültürü. Istanbul: İletişim, 2004, 221–240.
Bostancıoğlu, Adnan. ‘Taraftar ve Solcu Olmak’. In Roman Horak, Wolfgang Reiter and
Tanıl Bora (eds), Futbol ve Kültürü. Istanbul: İletişim, 2004, 241–250.
Karakışla, Yavuz Selim. ‘The Emergence of the Ottoman Industrial Working Class’. In
Workers and the Working Class in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic:
1839–1950. LondonandNew York: Tauris Academic Studies, 1995.
Nash, Rex. ‘Contestation in Modern English Professional Football: The Independent
Supporters Association Movement’. International Review for the Sociology of Sport
35, no. 4(2000): 465–486.
Türk Futbol Tarihi 1–2. Istanbul: Türkiye Futbol Federasyonu, 2013.
Yüce, Mehmet. Osmanlı Melekleri, 1st ed. Istanbul: İletişim, 2014.
Chapter 2
Football in the Ottoman Empire
Non-Muslim communities playing football in the Ottoman
Empire
In the Ottoman Empire, the expansion of football had a similar process as those
of the vast majority of other nations. The empire’s port cities, such as
Thessaloniki, Izmir and Alexandria, had commercial connections with the
British. It was should be no surprise that the first known football game in
Ottoman territories was played in Thessaloniki (today in Greece) in 1875 by
some British residents of the city.
Even though the date of the first-ever football match in Anatolia remains
unknown, it can be said that football was being played in western Anatolia,
notably in Izmir, starting from the 1870s. Whereas football matches had been
arranged in Thessaloniki years before they were on the Anatolian peninsula, it is
known that Bornova meadow in Izmir was probably the first place to host a
football game in the region. English residents of the city were the pioneers of the
game, and Anatolian Greeks were the first indigenous community to play
football by founding clubs. At the time, the Greek community of western
Anatolia, inspired by the Hellenic Kingdom founded in Greece in 1826, were in
the process of discovering their national identity. The main axes of the Hellenic
enlightenment project were linguistics and antique Hellenic culture (Millas,
1994: 46–47). In this context, cultural clubs for Greek community were founded
in various cities of Anatolia, especially in Izmir (Alan: 2001, 199). Ορφέας-
Orfeas (the Orpheus), founded in 1890, mainly focused on the musical domain.
Even though the functions of Orfeas were exclusive to cultural domains, this
club gave birth to two sports clubs, Apollon and Gymnasio (later Panionios).
Apollon, the first sports exclusive club, was founded in 1891 by Smyrnean
Archbishop Chrysostomos and another important character of the city,
businessman Emmanuel Samios. Here, it should be noted that the first Greek
sports club in Anatolia was formed within a cultural club which was a part of the
Hellenic national movement, and also the initiative for founding this club came
from the Orthodox Greek religious leader of the region. Bearing in mind that
there had been long-lasting tension between the bourgeois-based national
Hellenic movement and the church regarding the leadership of Greek
nationalism since the early 1800s (Millas, 1994: 154), it is interesting that both
parties showed interest in founding a football club. This may show that both
parties, disregarding their conflict, agreed on the necessity of a sports club for
gathering the masses at a popular event.
An important turning point in the sports history of Anatolia was the Panionian
Games. Panionian Games, as the name shows, aimed to gather the Hellenic
athletes of western Anatolia in an Olympic-like competition. These games were
first organised in 1896 by the Gimnasio club, probably inspired by the Tinia
games in which Smyrnean athletes had competed a year ago. This club later
changed its name to Panionios (Panionian in Greek) and had a great rivalry with
Apollon in Izmir.
In 1898, newly founded Panionios club took over the control of the Panionian
Games. In 1904, the club published new regulations, adopted the international
sports system for measuring distances and athletes from Greece started to enter
competitions. The same year, the Apollon club also started its own competition,
called the Apollonian Games, in 6000-seated Apollo Stadium in Bornova
(Izmir). This event included a parade from Basmane to Bella Vista (Belle Vue).
Both the Panionian and Apollonian Games attracted competitors from Istanbul,
Anatolia and Greece.
The competitors included foreigners as well as Greek athletes; however,
Turkish athletes never participated in any of the games (Solomonidis, 1957:
172). This fact can be explained by two things: both the Panionian and
Apollonian Games enjoyed their most successful periods in the Hamidian era
when Turkish athletes did sports in a clandestine manner (whereas the Panionian
and Apollonian Games were organised under the supervision of Kâmil Pasha,
the governor of Izmir), and after the Second Constitution, it took time for
Turkish athletes to prepare for competitions. It is obvious that both the Panionian
and Apollonian Games have Greek nationalist characteristics; however, football
teams in Turkey played many times against Greek teams, so it is doubtful that
the character of the competitions kept Turkish athletes away from these games.
The Apollonian and Panionian Games were organised on a periodical base
until the 1910s. With the start of Turkish–Greek clashes, the Panionian Games in
particular were repeatedly cancelled. The last games to be arranged by Greek
foundations in western Anatolia were the Panionian Games of 1921. With the
end of the Turkish Independence War with the Asia Minor disaster for the Greek
army, the Lausanne Treaty urged a compulsory population exchange and the
Greek Orthodox population of Anatolia was forced to immigrate to Greece.
Starting from 1923, the Panionian Games were held in Athens, but lacked
popularity. The sportive activities of the remaining Greeks in Turkey were
muted, mainly confined to individual successes and minority clubs.
 In 1894, English youth formed a sports club called the Bournabat Football and
Rugby Club. During the Hamidian era, in Izmir and later in Istanbul, the
English, along with non-Muslim communities of Anatolia such as Greeks and
Armenians, hold the pioneership of football. Here, it should be remembered that
England was the country which arranged the first football cup based on
elimination in 1871. At that time, football was on the verge of institutionalisation
in England, and the football players who came to Anatolia from that country
were far more advanced than indigenous footballers in terms of technical and
tactical skills and also equipment. In the 1890s, English teams from Izmir
competed against English teams from Bornova and also against teams of English
battleships berthed in Izmir port (Güneş, 2005: 68).
Izmir, pioneering the sports activities – including football – in Anatolia, also
influenced Istanbul in the last years of the 19th century. In 1897, a selection of
Izmir footballers visited Istanbul to play a match against a selection from the
capital; the following years these two teams played two more matches, this time
in Izmir (Gökaçtı, 2008: 24). 1 Both teams were selected from English residents
and Greek football enthusiasts; neither had Turkish or other Muslim players. All
matches were won by Smyrneans.
The first involvement of the Ottoman Turks in football
Whereas Izmir was the pioneer city of football in Anatolia, the first contacts of
Ottoman Turks with the game mostly happened in the capital city, Istanbul. At
first glance, it seems illogical that Turks could play football in Istanbul, long
before Izmir and other port cities considering that the Stambulite Turks were
subject to the harsh restrictions of the Hamidian Era much more than the
Smyrneans and football was not as widespread in Istanbul as it was in Izmir.
However, when the fact that football was imported to Turkey and played first by
British merchants is taken into account, it is clear that football could only reach a
certain elite among Ottoman Turks as it required personal or professional
contacts with the British and the knowledge of the English language. In that
period, such Turkish elite was virtually non-existent in Izmir, as most Smrynean
Turks dealt with agriculture and commercial activities were generally run by the
Greeks and other non-Muslim communities in the city, hence the contact of
Turks in Izmir with the British was limited. Some Turks, notably the students of
Izmir American College in the 1900s, attempted to play football for their school
teams, but they were suspended from their schools owing to pressure from local
officials (Güneş, 2005).
In Istanbul, football started much later than in Izmir and Thessaloniki;
however, it evolved more rapidly in terms of organisation. This can be explained
by the fact that before football appeared Izmir and Thessaloniki had strong
sports communities. Hence, when football came to these cities, it was included
in local sports organisations (such as Panionian and Apollonian Games) and it
was governed in the way the other sports branches were. This meant that
although the British were the ones to bring football to those cities, they were
unable to establish the system under which the football was played under in the
British Isles. The local sports organisation perception was competition-based,
possibly carried over from very early Greek traditions, and the league concept
was unknown. Nevertheless, James Lafontaine, one of the British pioneers of
football in Izmir, still managed to set up a league system in Izmir before he left
for Istanbul in 1899 and this league system remained in force until the
Republican period. Lafontaine, along with Horace Armitage, succeeded in
establishing a better-organised league in Istanbul. The conditions in Istanbul
were more suitable for the British to set up a brand new tournament scheme;
thus, the first Constantinople Football League was begun just one year after the
foundation of the first Istanbul football club Cadi-Keu (Kadıköy), whereas it
took almost two decades for a league to start in Izmir. Cadi-Keu was founded by
these two men with the participation of the local Greek youth; it was followed by
teams called Moda, Elpis, Imogene and others.
The Constantinople Football League started in 1903, with the participation of
these four teams. The winner of the first league was Imogene, the team of the
British Embassy’s boat. The team was given a shield, imported from England by
Armitage and funded by participation fees of 27 kuruş for each player (Gökaçtı,
2008). It was planned that the shield would be permanently awarded to the team
that had the most titles in ten years.
The Hamidian istibdat (despotism) conditions in Istanbul at the era kept
Istanbul Turks off the football field officially. However, even though they were
unable to join the league at first, Turkish youth were aware of football. The first
attempts to form a football team in Turkey occurred to even before the start of
the league.
As is in British and other non-Muslim clubs, the first plans for a football team
in Turkey came into reality in the Kadıköy-Moda area, on the Anatolian coast of
Istanbul. Fuat Hüsnü Bey, the son of Admiral Hüseyin Hüsnü Pasha, managed to
acquire a ball thanks to his relations with the British living in Moda, and later, he
suggested to his friend Reşat Bey that they form a team ‘to smoke out those
Greeks and Brits in the fields’ (Gökaçtı, 2008: 27). That was how the first
Turkish team, the ‘Black Stocking’,2 was established after a few clandestine
meetings.
The Black Stocking was founded and started training sessions in 1901. On 26
October, they arranged a game with a local Greek team. The line-up of the team
was composed entirely of Turks, under the leadership of Fuat Hüsnü and Reşat
(Türk Futbol Tarihi, 2013: 11). The team lost the game 5–1, Fuat Hüsnü scoring
the only goal. After the game, the Sultan’s detectives launched a raid on the field
after the game and most players were taken into custody. Fuat Hüsnü Bey was
tried in a military court (as he was in military school at the time), charged with
‘wearing the same outfit as Greeks and kicking balls’ (ibid.). He got away with a
minor punishment. The fact that his father was an admiral no doubt played a role
in why he was not more severely punished. He continued to play football later
under the nickname ‘Bobby’ and never drew the attention of Ottoman detectives
again (ibid.). The Black Stocking, however, became history after one game.
Another and relatively less risky attempt to form a football team in Turkey
came from the Sultanî (Sultans’ school) of Galatasaray, the institute which was
founded in 1868 to give modern formation to the palace elite. The school itself
was an attempt to reform the Ottoman administration, especially by creating a
well-educated (mostly Muslim) elite. For this, a secular school system was set
up, mainly based on the French educational system. The majority of the
academic staff were also French. The students that Sultanî produced quickly
learned about modern concepts, including liberty, nationalism and of course,
sports. They took courses on modern sports and they were encouraged to
practise them.
One of these students, Ali Sami (Yen), was influenced by football and
founded a team which would later be called Galatasaray. With the participation
of the Kadıköy player Horace Armitage in the team, they joined the league in
1905, as the first Muslim-Turkish team. It is unknown how Galatasaray got away
with this participation in the Hamidian era. The regime probably turned a blind
eye to these boys from elite families. The reason why the Galatasaray players
never had to face the enquiries that the Black Stocking players had, may also
have been the fact that Turkish nationalism was much more popular among
Ottoman elite comparing to 1901, and the Hamidian era was reaching its end.
Therefore, a team openly competing against non-Muslim teams might not have
been viewed as suspicious as before. Of course, bearing in mind the mission and
necessity of Galatasaray School at the time, prosecuting the prospective Ottoman
elite for some harmless athletic activity might not have been considered a good
idea as well.
Although Galatasaray was the first football club in Turkey to play in the
league, it was far from being public. While it is certain that the team attracted a
degree of sympathy among Turks with the rise of nationalism, the club mostly
kept itself restricted to school members. This practice continues even today, as
not being a Galatasaray High School graduate makes club membership
particularly difficult, as non-High School graduates are subject to membership
quotas.
The closed-circuit nature of Galatasaray Sports Club, especially after the
Second Constitutional Period, which created a relatively more liberal
atmosphere, left space for competition. Although it was the first Turkish club to
play against the Gavur (infidel), a more public team was still destined to come.
This team was Fenerbahçe, founded in 1907, but could only become active in
1908, after the Second Constitution was declared. Yet, at this point, it should be
noted that even though Fenerbahçe seems to have been more open to the public
then Galatasaray, this publicness did not mean a participative structure like in
the English football clubs. Like Galatasaray, and also Beşiktaş which was
founded as a gymnastics club and involved in football much later, Fenerbahçe
was equally reserved to a certain elite. Former Fenerbahçe player and historian
Rüştü Dağlaroğlu describes the club founders as ‘St. Joseph graduate Nuri Zade
Ziya, Ottoman Bank officer Ayetullah – equally a SJ graduate – Necip (Okaner);
a naval student and the nephew of Sami Paşazade Sezai Bey, Hassan Sami
(Kocamemi); the son of Bassorah governor Hasan Bey and St. Joseph student
‘Indian’ Asaf …’ (1957: 15)
As is clearly seen, none of these individuals could be considered to be
‘ordinary people’. However the difference between Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe
considering publicness was that Fenerbahçe was open to all elite, whereas
Galatasaray was more restricted to the Galatasaray School.
As the characteristics of Fenerbahçe allowed outsiders to get involved with
the club relatively more easily, it became the centre of attraction for those who
would manipulate football’s popularity for their political ambitions. Since its
appearance in the Ottoman Empire, football had never been out of political
context in the first place. Football’s competitive nature, combined with the
zeitgeist of the era, could easily be transformed into ethno-national rivalries.
Hence, football proved to be a handy tool with which to reinforce the newly
structured Turkish nationalism.
The Second Constitutional Period (1908–1923): The
football of the nation
The Committee of Union of Progress (İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti – CUP)
organisation, which pioneered many of the modernist-positivist reforms in the
Ottoman State, also could be considered to be the organisation to have led the
Turkish nationalism movement. Even though football was itself a product of
modern culture, at first, it did not catch the CUP’s attention. The first
involvement of the CUP with sports was through gymnastics and scouting.
However, whereas these athletic activities that aimed to improve and perfect the
human body complied undoubtedly with their positivist ideas, they lacked the
vastly popular enthusiasm that football could create. The first attempt of the
CUP to permeate a football club involved Galatasaray. Nevertheless, the
principal of the time, Tevfik Fikret, blocked this attempt as he previously had
had a conflict with the organisation when the CUP demanded Tanin, the
newspaper that he ran, to be the official CUP paper (Gökaçtı, 2008: 44). Later,
Galatasaray maintained a distant yet moderate relationship with the organisation.
Galatasaray probably owed this relationship to having ties with different political
actors, which allowed it to avoid coming under patronage of any political entity.
Fenerbahçe, however, had no such insurance. Having joined the league in
1909, the team was unable to compete with Galatasaray at all. In its first season
in the league, Fenerbahçe did not have a single win and conceded 11 goals
against 4 scored. Galatasaray was the champion with conceding only 2 goals and
scoring 25. The difference between two teams was immense. Galatasaray,
indeed, had much more experience than its future rival; however, they also had
better financial support. In 1910, Fenerbahçe was in such condition that the club
was about to merge with Üsküdar Anadolu club, taking the latter’s name. This
plan was withdrawn at the last moment.
The fate of the club took a twist with Mustafa Elkatipzade’s presidency. The
merchant from Kadıköy area merged Kuşdili Club over which he presided with
Fenerbahçe and became its president. During the years he was in power, the
Fenerbahçe board, which had been virtually deserted before, underwent a
notable change in profile. High-ranking members of the CUP, such as Hulûsi
Bey (later to be the Minister of Public Works), joined the club board, and
Fenerbahçe started to find its way through the administration to obtain real
estate. The first club headquarters and the famous boathouse later to be visited
by Mustafa Kemal were acquired in this period. With this support, Fenerbahçe
also managed to win the Istanbul League three times between 1911 and 1915.
Equally, during the First World War, many commodities confiscated from
foreigners in Istanbul became club property (Gökaçtı, 2008: 48–49). As the CUP
rose, so did Fenerbahçe.
However, Fenerbahçe was not the only club that benefited from the CUP
reign. Even though the Fenerbahçe club board mainly consisted of high-ranking
CUP members, it was not the official club of the party. Some Galatasaray
members who disagreed with Tevfik Fikret,led by Aydınoğlu Raşit Bey, formed
a club called ‘Progress’ and joined the league in the 1910–1911 football season.
Eventually, this club was renamed as Altınordu (in accordance with CUP
principles, even if Progress was a name representing the CUP it was not Turkish)
in 1914. Altınordu gradually became integrated with Union and Progress and it
built a strong rivalry with Fenerbahçe. In the 1916–1917 and 1917–1918
seasons, Altınordu managed to win consecutively the Friday League and ended
Fenerbahçe’s reign thanks to seven players transferred from its rival.
While Fenerbahçe and Altınordu had a fierce competition on the field, the
rivalry between these two clubs was far away from being solely football-related.
It was not even the support from the CUP to the clubs that was at stake, but the
competition of two club board members to be more powerful in the CUP against
the other grasp that was based on the rival club. The Altınordu board initially
won this battle. During the war, Altınordu players were excluded from military
service and the club was not affected by economic difficulties (Gökaçtı, 2008:
56). Nevertheless, Altınordu’s golden years, which it owed to its close
relationship with the Union and Progress organisation, was destined to fade.
When the CUP had to step down, Altınordu vanished and was absorbed into its
once rival, Fenerbahçe.
The reason behind Altınordu’s disappearance and Fenerbahçe’s ability to
remain intact can be found in latter’s more balanced relationship with the CUP.
While Altınordu instantly had become the party club, Fenerbahçe had kept a
guarded distance. It was not a secret that the club had close ties with the
organisation; however, it remained an independent entity. Thus, its destiny
stayed apart from that of the CUP. Indeed, it also should be noted that
Fenerbahçe had a history and a certain level of popularity unlike newly founded
Altınordu. However, the main reason Fenerbahçe survived seems to have been
the club’s ability to follow and adapt itself to political tendencies, just like
Galatasaray had done successfully before.
 During the war years, the three presidents of the Fenerbahçe club were all
high-ranking CUP members: Hulûsi Bey, the Minister of Public Works; Mehmet
Sabri Toprak, the General Secretary of the CUP; and Dr Nazım Bey, the
Minister of Education. However, when the Talat Paşa cabinet was about to
resign, this trend ceased abruptly and İbnürrefik Ahmet Nuri (Sekizinci) took
over the presidency. Ahmet Nuri was a playwright known for his sympathy to
the CUP (as he once directed ‘Vatan Yahut Silistre’ (Homeland or Silistra) by
Namık Kemal in benefit of the organisation), his position in the party was
incomparable to that of the previous presidents.
The president following Ahmet Nuri was even a more interesting choice:
Ömer Faruk Efendi, the son of the last caliph Abdülmecid, who eventually was
sent into exile with the Ottoman dynasty in 1924 and died in Cairo. While a new
republic was being founded, Fenerbahçe’s incumbent president was expelled
from the country. This would not be the last problem that Fenerbahçe would
have with the early Republican administration. Their imminent, almost organic
relations with a certain group within the CUP led them into a tense period with
the founders of the republic, who happened to be on the other side of the inner-
party rivalry which had resulted in a political purge within the CUP.
On the other hand, Fenerbahçe, evidently more than its inner city rivals, had
an effect on reinforcing the national feelings in the Ottoman capital before and
during Turkish Independence War, notably after the occupation of the city. The
team played 50 matches against teams composed of occupation force soldiers
and won 41 of them. This was more than the total of the matches played by
Beşiktaş and Galatasaray against the same opponents at the time. In Turkish
sports history writing, the athletic value of these games is either neglected or
overrated. The Turkish Football Federation’s publication (Türk Futbol Tarihi,
2013: 13) describes these matches as:

Especially in Istanbul, the victories of Turkish teams against military teams

associated with occupational forces rendered football a ‘national cause’ and helped
restore the nation’s injured pride. That is why football became so popular in our
country. Our clubs such as Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray and Beşiktaş gained
unforgettable places in the nation’s heart thanks to their victories against
occupational forces’ teams and sewed the first seeds of love that would cover the
whole country in the dark days of the Occupation.

This kind of nationalistic tone is no exception in Turkish sports history writing.

It is virtually impossible to find a piece which does not employ a similar
discourse. This kind of language shows itself in its most apparent form when the
General Harington Cup is discussed. This cup, played in Istanbul in June 1923,
was organised by Sir Charles Harington, the commander-in-Chief of the Allied
occupation army. This cup, consisting of a single game, matched Fenerbahçe
with a selection of men from occupational forces based in Istanbul, and included
four professional players. Fenerbahçe won this game 1–0, thanks a goal from
Zeki Riza Sporel, one of the most influential football players of his time.
The nationalistic feeling created around the General Harington Cup and other
games against occupational forces’ teams cannot be denied. However, the
narrative and the athletic value attributed to these games should be questioned.
As in Ertuğrul’s article (n.d), these games are perceived as having been
‘activities against the enemy’. However, it should be noted that such matches
against occupation teams had different political value than those played against
local ethnic rival teams or other foreign football teams. Turkish teams, by
accepting challenges from army teams, actually recognised the legitimacy of
those forces’ existence in Ottoman land. Whereas it is true that these games had
an effect on growing national feelings among Istanbul Turks, it is equally valid
to claim that the clubs accepted occupational forces as an agency or a
counterpart.
In the athletic domain, these games usually are classified as regular football
matches. For example, one of the most detailed works on Fenerbahçe,
Fenerbahçe Sports Club History (Fenerbahçe Spor Kulübü Tarihi) by Rüştü
Dağlaroğlu (1957: 115), classifies these matches as ‘Matches of Fenerbahçe
against foreign teams’, just like the friendly games played with foreign sports
clubs invited to the Ottoman State or to Turkey. Nevertheless, it is obvious that
most of the players on the occupational forces’ teams were not football players
and only soldiers with some interest in the game. For instance, the General
Harington Cup was played in June 1923, during the Lausanne peace talks. The
players of the occupation forces team were soldiers who were on the verge of
being dismissed from a five-year long occupation during which they had been
deprived of their homes and families. On the other hand, their opponents,
Fenerbahçe, were composed of football players who had just clinched the title of
Friday League in 1922–1923. Before that game, they had played 12 competitive
games of which they had won 11. Thus, in athletic terms, it is impossible and
unjust to compare the two opponents and qualify this game as a regular football
game.
Notes
1 Through this chapter, I will often make references to the late football historian
Mehmet Ali Gökaçtı’s influential book Bizim İçin Oyna, of which I had the chance to
be the co-editor with Tanıl Bora. Unfortunately, the author is no longer with us and
this valuable work has only been published in Turkish.
2 The name was originally chosen in English.
Bibliography
Alan, Gülbadi. ‘Protestan Amerikan Misyonerleri, Anadolu’daki Rumlar ve Pontus
Meselesi’. Erciyes Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi 10 (2001): 186–208.
Dağlaroğlu, Rüştü. Fenerbahçe Spor Kulübü Tarihi: 1907–1957. Istanbul: n.p, 1957.
Ertuğrul, Cem. ‘General Harington Kupası’. Available online at
www.fenerbahce.org/kurumsal/detay.asp?ContentID=3561 [1 December 2018].
Gökaçtı, Mehmet Ali. Bizim İçin Oyna: Türkiye’de Futbol ve Siyaset. Istanbul: İletişim,
2008.
Güneş, Günver. ‘Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda 19. Yüzyıldan 20. Yüzyıla … İzmir’de
Futbol’. Toplumsal Tarih 142 (October 2005): 68–77.
Millas, Herkül. Yunan Ulusunun Doğuşu. Istanbul: İletişim, 1994.
Solomonidis, Christos. Tis Smyrnis. Athens: np, 1957.
Türk Futbol Tarihi 1–2. Istanbul: Türkiye Futbol Federasyonu, 2013.
Chapter 3
Football in the new Republic of Turkey (1923–
1960)
The early Republican period (1923–1933): The first steps
In one of the most remarkable works in the field of Turkish sports history, Akın
(2004: 55) claims that sports policies in early Republican years present a
continuity from the late Ottoman period as the perception of physical education
of the CUP shows remarkable similarities with that of the Kemalists’, which was
to centralise the sports organisation and emphasise the notion of body health
rather than competitiveness. This hypothesis can be considered to be true in
many examples, however, in football, that may not have been the case. Whereas
it is certain that the priority of the new state-controlled Union of Sports
Associations was to improve Olympic sports branches other than football, the
new republicans were far away from being unaware of how football could be
used as a political tool. Insomuch as football has a very distinctive political
context that comes from its vast popularity, the approach to football differed
most of the times from other sports policies.
In the early Republican case, the administrative cadre was aware of the unique
characteristics of football and its probable political consequences to a great
extent. Even if football was not the perfect candidate for the state to promote
national body health through, it was destined to be used to announce the
existence of the new republic to the world, even to the Turkish public. Thus, it
was certainly not a coincidence that the Turkish national football team played its
first international fixture (v. Romania) just three days before the republic was
proclaimed on 26 October 1923. Football providing international representation
and equivalency with European peers could not be negligible for any
government. The opening of the first football field in Ankara, ‘Independence
Field’ (İstiklâl Sahası) and the foundation of the National Guards’ Club
Muhafızgücü in the first days of the new state proved that the administration did
not aim to overlook football but to control it by its own actors. Partly because of
this control policy, but also for other reasons, the relationship between the
republican cadre and the other actors of the football scene were about to become
tense.
Fenerbahçe, known as a CUP-backed team, was the first football club to
confront the new ruling elite. The source of the problem was an ordinary matter,
a disputed penalty decision and dismissal of a player by the referee in a
Fenerbahçe–Galatasaray match played on the 15 August 1924. However, when
Fenerbahçe withdrew from the 1924–1925 football season and froze its
affiliation with the newly founded Turkish Football Federation (TFF), the
conflict spilled off the field. The club also refused to give its players to the
national team for a match against the Soviet Union. Fenerbahçe’s strong protest
threatened to put the new federation’s legitimacy into jeopardy. This conflict
was resolved one season later and Fenerbahçe rejoined the league and its players
rejoined the national team; however, the club had to face some complications
arising from its protest. The club was not officially sanctioned by the federation
or the state. During the time Fenerbahçe abstained from the football scene,
Galatasaray, which already had members among the republican cadre, improved
its relationship with the state. The TFF president Yusuf Ziya Öniş was a
Galatasaray High School graduate and during his reign, English trainer Billy
Hunter, who was invited to coach the national team for the 1924 Olympic
Games, became the Galatasaray trainer (Atabeyoğlu, 1991: 95). This led
Galatasaray to win four consecutive titles in the league between 1925 and 1929.
Whereas the governing body of national football showed a certain sympathy
towards Galatasaray through the second half of the 1920s, the administration
generally chose not to lose impartiality for one of the teams. This had a simple
logic: the actors of the football scene, including Galatasaray, which seemed to be
the closest to the state, were still beyond the control of the Football Federation
and other sports bodies. They were older than the republic, they were more
popular than any official in the federation could be and an open confrontation
with these clubs could result in serious damage to the image of the unifying
republic. Hence, the federation chose to control the clubs, instead of confronting
them.
The most essential need of the clubs was stadiums, given the fact that the first
fields in Istanbul belonged to foreigners. After the liberation of Istanbul from the
occupation, Taksim Stadium was nationalised and eventually its administration
was yielded to Galatasaray. Fenerbahçe acquired its own stadium, thanks to a
motion given by Şükrü Saracoğlu (later to be the prime minister and the
Fenerbahçe president) proposing ‘in case there are more than one football clubs
in one neighbourhood, only the one with the most number of members could
pursue its existence’ in 1929.
According to the accepted motion, İttihatspor, which was known as the club of
the former CUP cadre, was closed down and its stadium was yielded to
Fenerbahçe, and was renamed Fenerbahçe Stadium (Gökaçtı, 2008: 99–100).
The third biggest club, Beşiktaş, also had the chance to have its own stadium,
when it acquired the burned down backyard of the Çırağan Palace in Ortaköy.
These events established a close relationship between the state and the most
popular football clubs. The state’s support in the stadiums matter later led to the
parliament members joining the high ranks of these clubs. The clubs realised that
having politicians close to the government on their boards would help them gain
certain advantages. Furthermore, not having those members would leave them
short-handed against their rivals and this rendered politicians on club boards
even more crucial. The popular clubs were under some sort of state protectorate
and this would continue as a reality of the game in Turkey for decades.1
Single-party ruling (1933–1945): State versus football
Whereas the government started to acquire certain powers over the clubs in the
1930s, it was still far from its final objective. The single-party regime, perhaps
influenced by Nazi Germany, aimed to control and dictate all sports activities
throughout the country. The motive behind this objective depended on the
cultural agenda the state pursued throughout the 1930s. One of the major targets
of the new republic was to prove that Turks were not inferior to Western
civilisations, if not superior to them. In order to reach this goal, two principal
theories were constructed: the Turkish History Thesis which hypothesised that
Turks were the ancestors of modern civilisations, and the Sun-Language Theory,
which claimed that all languages were derivatives of one initial language, to
which Turkish language is the closest. With these two theses, the new republic
aimed to show that Turks were not outsiders to Western culture, but the creators
of it. This obviously required taking hold of the modern sports. Turks, who were
supposed to have created the entire modern culture according to those two
pseudo-scientific theories, could not fail at modern sports. All sports
organisations had to be restructured accordingly.
In order to reach its goals in sports, the Turkish state requested help from
another state with a similar cultural agenda, which was Germany. To determine
the structural, organisational and methodical paths to follow, Carl Diem, the
German member of the International Olympic Committee (and later the sports
minister of the Nazi government), and Hermann Altrock, a professor at Leipzig
University, were invited to Turkey in 1933 (Akın, 2003: 58). These two invitees
proposed a youth organisation similar to the Youth (Jugend) in Germany and
that a state-controlled sports authority be founded. The Turkish Sports
Organisation (Türk Spor Kurumu) directly affiliated with the single-party was
founded in 1936 and all sportspeople and sports clubs in the country were
members of this organisation, hence of the party.
Football did not seem very compatible with this scheme, even when the clubs
were relatively under state control. The state was planning a popular sports
environment which aimed to reinforce national cohesion and citizens’
attachment to the state itself. Any other deep sense of affiliation to another
organisation would disrupt this attempt. Besides, there was an immense rivalry
between football teams, which was perceived to damage the national unity.
Football teams were useful regarding international representation and rivalry
when playing against foreign teams, but within the country they were quite
problematic. Hence, the sports organisation acted usually severely against the
football clubs when their rivalries crossed the line. The punishments varied from
open criticism (usually against the big clubs, which could not afford to be
perceived as ‘the club against the state’) to abolition.
Here, it is useful to take a look at how Nazi Germany, the inspiration for the
entire Turkish sports organisation, dealt with the same threat. In the Nazi era,
Schalke 04, a football club from Gelsenkirchen, also known as the ‘Miners’
Club’ was perceived to be the de facto state-supported club. The team contained
most of the stars in the country and was already popular before it acquired Nazi
support. It was the success symbol that the Nazis sought, and it could divert the
fans’ attention from the failing German national team. The fact that it was a
labour team also could prove the Nazi regime supported German workers (Pyta,
2006: 8–9). The state just took Schalke’s popularity, combined it with its own
populism and spread it throughout the country. However, even the Nazi support
could not prevent the Austrian team Rapid Vienna, which was forced to play in
the German League after the Anschluss, from triumphing over Schalke in Berlin
(the team played most of its matches in the capital during the Nazi years) and
became the German champions in 1940–1941. Football was too improbable to
be employed as a fully effective propaganda tool, even for the Nazi propaganda
machine.
Like Nazi Germany, also the Kemalist state attempted to give full support to a
single club. The Ateş-Güneş club (literally Fire-Sun in English), which was
named by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk himself referring to the Turkish cultural
theories, was founded by former Galatasaray members led by Yusuf Ziya Öniş
as a breakaway club from latter. The club gathered its first congress in the
People’s Party Beyoğlu Branch, and Cevat Abbas Gürer, who was known by his
works attempting to prove the words like ‘sports’, ‘sportman’, ‘athlete’ and
‘athleticism’ were of Turkish-origin according to the Sun-Language Theory
(Akın, 2003: 60), was elected to the presidency. Ateş-Güneş, later to be renamed
Güneş, was taken to the First Division of Istanbul in 1935. The club had a
merger with Kumkapı Club which actually had been relegated that season from
the Second Division; however the merged club was given permission to play in
the First Division whereas it was supposed to play in the lower division. The
team managed to clinch the title in 1937–1938 season thanks to a disputed goal
difference rule declared after the matches were played. It could not, however,
succeed in becoming a popular club and dissolved its football branch shortly
before Mustafa Kemal died in 1938. The club abolished itself completely in
1940.
A comparison between short-lived Güneş and still-existing Schalke 04 can be
fruitful in order to capture the unique characteristics of football in Turkey. In
Germany, Schalke, founded in 1904, had a history as a labour club long before
the Nazi party even existed. The German state took over an already popular and
successful club, whereas the Kemalist founded one from scratch. Another major
difference is that Schalke was hardly contested in Germany before Nazis gave
support to this team, while Güneş was born in the middle of a fierce rivalry with
Galatasaray. However, Galatasaray was still strong both on and off the field and
posed serious problems to Güneş starting from the first day. Even if Güneş had
succeeded to overcome these difficulties, they would have the same problems
with Fenerbahçe and Beşiktaş later.
Furthermore, Schalke was a labour club in a country with a history of class
consciousness. In Turkey, there were not such definite classes and clubs founded
by bureaucrats did not differ from each other regarding identity. A factory
worker in Berlin had a reason to support Schalke even though it was from
another city, but a Galatasaray fan in Istanbul had no reason to change his/her
affiliation. Decades later, İstanbulspor in the 1990s had a similar problem about
gaining popularity. The blurred identities of football clubs in Turkey have
always left the choice of the favourite club to random factors, which may at most
be slightly affected by the others members in the family or the place of
residence/birth.
In the 1940s, football in Turkey, just like the country itself, loosened its ties
with Germany and adopted a more liberal approach. Turkey, having passed the
Second War World period as a transition period between the Republican
People’s Party’s unquestionable governance and multi-party democracy, found
itself in a different international conjuncture right after the war. It can be claimed
that this conjuncture even forced Turkey to end its internal crisis and take a
position in the new world order. Even in the very last days of the war, the
Turkish state could not position itself in regard to the upcoming balance of
powers. Up to that point, Turkey had the agenda of survival, while it struggled to
be present; it could not have a stance on how and where to be present. On the
other hand, as Zürcher (2005: 206) states, the new Turkish regime during the
World War failed to popularise itself; moreover the post-Mustafa Kemal
administration was rather greeted with resentment. The feeling of survival left its
place to a regime crisis regarding both administration and masses.
 The major axes of this crisis can be summarised as the elite administration and
the masses. However, it should be underlined that war-time regulations such as
‘Varlık Vergisi’ (Wealth Tax) and ‘Çiftçiyi Topraklandırma Kanunu’ (Land
Reform Law) caused a rupture with the state bureaucracy, the Turkish-Muslim
bourgeoisie and the rural land owners, who had been in a coalition of Turkish
modernisation up to that point (ibid.: 207–208). The single-party administration
was deprived of public support more than ever.
In the international domain, Turkey had to choose its side in the new world
order. The first years of the new Turkish Republic witnessed a balanced foreign
policy, however the conjuncture on which this policy was committed no longer
existed. The German state, which had loosely inspired the Republican
administration in the post-Kemal period, was doomed with the defeat of the Nazi
regime. The Soviet Union, with which Turkey had always had good relations,
left out its internationalist foreign policy with the Stalin administration and
rejected the renewal of Ribbentrop–Molotov security pact with Turkey.
Internally chaotic Turkey did not dare to stay out of the new world order on the
international domain. It needed American aid in economic and military fields.
To benefit from the Marshall Plan that was introduced in association with the
Truman doctrine that aimed to increase American influence over the countries
geographically close to the Soviet Union, democratisation was of paramount
importance.
These factors had an effect on the football realm as well. Actually, football
was having its own transitional period in the 1930s. The game was discovered to
have commercial value, so it became a part of the economic system. Besides,
this factor also encouraged football clubs to expand their visions to international
field, to make more money, clubs were eager to have international fixtures as
much as possible. We should underline that this was not a trend unique to
Turkey, but rather a worldwide phenomenon. However, the transition of football
clubs in Turkey in the era solely stayed in the international and economic
domain. The fact that almost all of the big Istanbul clubs were administrated by
high-ranking officials of the Republican People’s Party prevented this transition
to lead to an internal revolution in the 1930s.
In the first years of the new republic, despite the state’s will, football gained
popularity in the cities. In Istanbul, especially Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe
succeeded in having loyal fan bases. Latecomer Beşiktaş joined them in the
1930s.
Starting from the 1930s, the gate receipts became an immense revenue for the
clubs. The need to have the best team in order to achieve the maximum
attendance was considered to be essential. Football had surpassed the amateur
level and now had an economic value. Thus, like many other sectors in Turkey,
it had to meet free market principles. To be able to achieve the maximum
revenue possible, clubs had to offer the best product; in other words, they had to
form the best team possible. Indeed, this was where professionalism in football
became inevitable. To be able to form the best team, a club had to offer the best
players more than its rivals offered. However, clubs were not entitled to offer
any transfer fee to amateur players. Thus, in the late 1930s, 1940s and 1950s,
football in Turkey passed through years of ‘hidden professionalism’.
In this epoch, the players were paid secretly and the source of this payment
was generally provided by a rich fan of the club. Cem Atabeyoğlu describes this
period in Fenerbahçe as follows: ‘Ali Bey (Muhittin Hacı Bekir, Fenerbahçe
president in 1950–1951) used to come to the training field earlier than all the
players in the first training day of the month … open the lockers one by one …
and put envelopes in them’ (interview with the author, 2007).
From this, it is understood that Ali Muhittin Hacı Bekir oversaw some sort of
equity among the players in order to preserve the harmony of the team. On the
other hand, not only does this not prove that all of the clubs had the equal
payment principle but also it points to an evident violation of amateurship.
In order to overcome ‘hidden professionalism’, the General Directorate of
Physical Education (Beden Terbiyesi Genel Müdürlüğü – BTGM) promulgated
the Code of Amateurship in 1941. According to this code, amateur athletes were
not able to receive more than 30 liras per month as monthly payment, allowance
or award. It is obvious, however, that this code was breached by methods like
the one noted above.
In the 1940s supposedly ‘amateur’ football in Turkey consisted of the
following tournaments:

a Local-regional amateur leagues.

b Maarif Vekaleti Kupası (Ministry of National Education Cup).
c Millî Lig (national championship, with the participants of Istanbul (four
participants), Ankara and Izmir (two participants each)).
d Başbakanlık Kupası (Prime Minister’s Cup, played between the champions
of Maarif Vekaleti Kupası and Başbakanlık Kupası).

The status of these regional and national leagues and cups brought about
several encounters between the same teams, notably between the big Istanbul
clubs. Along with league, cup games and some private cups (such as the
Fenerbahçe–Galatasaray fest, which first took place in 1948) two Istanbul clubs
might have played three–four times a year. Whereas these ‘derbies’ were always
anticipated games, in the long term repeatedly playing with the same teams
would reduce the number of spectators. In addition, domestic matches did not
earn the clubs the gate receipts they sought. The remedy to this problem was to
invite foreign teams to Turkey.
As was discussed in the previous chapter, in Turkey, football was born as a
battle against foreigners. Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray owed their popularity to
the matches they played against the occupation forces. Football was seen as a
public display of perseverance, challenge and equivalence against the foreigners
who controlled the Ottoman capital at that moment. Fenerbahçe’s first encounter
with a foreign team dates to the beginning of the Turkish national movement. On
23 March 1913, Fenerbahçe played New Zealand at Fenerbahçe field. A year
later, the club made its first trip to Odessa and played five matches in Ukraine.
During the Turkish Independence War, the team had many matches against the
occupation forces.
In the new republic, the international fixtures went hand in hand with
economic and political aspects. In the first years, the economic aspect was about
affording the expenses of an international fixture rather than making profit out of
it. For example, the first Czech club to play in Turkey, Slavia, was invited jointly
by three clubs in 1923, Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray and Altınordu. These three
clubs were only able to pay to the Czech club 1,500 liras for four matches,
despite their demand of 4,000 liras. The problem was solved by the monetary aid
of the Czech Ministry of Propaganda (Dağlaroğlu, 1957: 132–133).
Under these conditions, Turkish clubs could not afford to invite clubs with
better reputation from Western Europe. The majority of the clubs that came to
Turkey in the first ten years were from Central and Eastern Europe, notably from
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia. The only other option,
Greek teams, could not be invited until the 1930s when Turkey and Greece
solved their issues coming from the 1920s. However, after the first match in
1930, Greek teams were the first choice for Turkish clubs.
The first match between the Greek champion Olympiakos and Fenerbahçe
was organised in 1931 (during the visit of Greek Prime Minister Venizelos) and
broke both attendance and gate receipt records (Dağlaroğlu, 1957: 147–148).
Here, it should be noted that a change in the political climate was necessary to
invite the first Greek team; however the constantly raising number of Turkish–
Greek encounters in the 1930s and 1940s should be also analysed according to
economic and social factors. In the first years of football in Turkey, playing the
Greeks was always at the centre, probably more than anything. It should be also
remembered that the first Turkish team, Black Stocking, had been gathered to
beat the Greeks of Istanbul. Even when the political relations were much
healthier between the two countries, the encounters between Turkish and Greek
teams was always welcomed in a different manner by the spectators. Thus, for
an organiser, a tie between teams of these two countries was a guaranteed sell-
out. Moreover, Greek teams were much easier to bring to Turkey thanks to
geographical proximity.
The professional era

The multi-party period (1945–1960): The shift to the ‘liberal’ world

After 1945, the number of international fixtures continued to grow. The political
climate as well as the football trends of the time was very suitable for this
growth. Turkey was willing to break its shell in order to be a part of the new
world order and international fixtures was a must for organisers who wanted to
make profits and clubs that had to provide resources for ‘hidden
professionalism’. The amateur football administration was not against the
international encounters, nor was the state. However, the teams to be played
remained a delicate issue.
In 1945, the first international encounter after the Second World War was a
significant event. On 16 September, in other words, one week after the last
Japanese troops in China surrendered and the war ended, Fenerbahçe played
against the crew of the battle cruiser Ajax of the British Naval Forces. The
visitors were welcomed warmly in Istanbul, and the only issue, according to
Eşref Şefik who wrote the match critique was ‘the scuffle between the stadium
gatekeepers and people who could not enter the stadium, unfortunately going on
under our British guests’ noses’ (Akşam, 17 September 1945). It is noteworthy
that Fenerbahçe club’s president at that time was Şükrü Saracoğlu, the Turkish
prime minister. In addition to football, swimming races were scheduled between
the Ajax crew and Turkish clubs. Two weeks later, an American track and field
team was invited to Turkey.
Another notable point about the international athletic relations of Turkey after
the war is the relations with Egypt. For the first time, Fenerbahçe played an
Egyptian team, Al-Ahly, on its 40th anniversary in June 1946. The political
value of this game should be considered to be very high as Al-Ahly was under
the protection of King Fouad and this game was played between the period of
the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 and the 1952 Revolution in Egypt when the
country was basically under British control. Equally the same year, in December,
Turkey sent Egypt a multi-sports team which would join competitions with their
Egyptian colleagues. This crew was presided over by Zeki Riza Sporel, former
Fenerbahçe player and president of the club in the upcoming years.
English teams also started to visit Turkey after 1945. Before the Second
World War the only encounters with the British had been the ones against the
occupation forces in Turkish Independence War period. In the first years of the
republic, the lack of matches with English teams can be explained by financial
difficulties. However, it is possible to claim that amateur Turkish clubs were not
wealthy enough to afford English clubs. For example, in 1949. Beşiktaş and
Galatasaray invited the English side Charlton to Turkey at a cost of 90,000
Turkish Liras (Akşam, 3 April 1949). Even if these two clubs were able to afford
this sum, the exchange of such an amount into English pounds certainly required
the state’s approval.
In 1946 and 1947, Hungarian and Czech teams frequently visited Turkey.
These games had athletic and economic value, rather than political importance as
these teams were rather stronger than the Greek teams or the teams of other
nearby countries, and Turkish spectators were accustomed to seeing those teams
in Turkey. Nevertheless, it should be kept in mind that both Hungary and
Czechoslovakia had not joined the communist pact yet. Equally, Austria, which
was a neutral country in that period, sent many teams to Turkey. These countries
had the most affordable clubs among strong football teams in Europe, besides
these countries almost had the same moment of choice as Turkey about taking
sides in the new world order.
The frequency of games against Greek teams continued to accelerate after the
war as well. After the withdrawal of the occupation forces from Greece, AEK
(founded by Istanbul Greeks immigrated to Greece after the Turkish War of
Independence) was the first team to visit Turkey in the post-war era. After that
visit, several encounters took place between Turkish and Greek teams. In
addition to the Turkish national team, even rather lower profile clubs like
Göztepe Izmir, Aydınspor and Beykozspor travelled to Greece. Especially after
the Greek Civil War, the number of Turkish–Greek matches increased. This
phenomenon can be explained with two things; first, playing with Greek teams
either in Turkey or Greece was very affordable. A Turkish team could easily go
for a tour in Greece instead of inviting one low-profile English team. The second
reason was definitely political. Turkey and Greece, both aiming to join the
Western pact, in other words NATO, needed to overcome the war images, in
order to be publicly accepted allies. Both countries welcomed each other’s team
with delicacy and more than courtesy. However, there is one incident which
proved the fragility of relations between the two countries. On 15 May 1949, the
Turkish national team played against Greece in Athens. After Turkey’s 2–1
victory, some players of the team were verbally harassed by some Greek
supporters. This incident, in Turkey, was widely protested against by the Turkish
National Students’ Union (Türk Millî Talebe Birliği – TMTB) and banners
reading ‘We want no more athletic relations with Greeks’ were carried (Akşam,
24 May 1949). This was followed by protests in Izmir and Ankara. Moreover,
the Foreign Minister, Necmettin Sadak, faced a motion in the National Assembly
about the incident. Sadak explained the situation had been nothing but some
overexcited supporters and that this kind of incidents could occur at domestic
matches as well (Akşam, 31 May 1949). After these statements, the protests
calmed down; however, this incident is noteworthy as it was the first public
appearance of the TMTB, which would be a major actor in nationalist-
conservative student action and notably in the Cyprus issue. It is also interesting
that the protest started days after the match and suddenly ended after the speech
of the minister. Here, it is possible to claim that the TMTB, which cooperated
with Panturkists in the Cyprus issue, was seeking for a pretext to launch such an
anti-Greek protest, because no article narrating grave incidents about this match
actually appeared in the press before the demonstration. It can be said that it was
the TMTB’s reaction which pushed the press and the public to classify this
match as a grave incident.
Another important incident in this period was the foundation of the state of
Israel in 1948. On 28 March 1949, Turkey officially recognised Israel despite the
protests of Arab countries. The following year, Fenerbahçe made a trip to Israel
and played against Hapoel Tel Aviv. Here, it should be noted that this trip was
made under Şükrü Saracoğlu’s presidency and before the elections in which the
CHP would lose the power to the Democratic Party (DP). Equally, Beşiktaş’s
trip to the United States was decided just before the elections and took place
right after the CHP lost power. Thus, it is important to note that, contrary to the
general belief Turkey’s move to the Western pact started much before the DP
reign.
Apart from foreign policy engagements, clubs preferred international fixtures
to domestic ones, mainly with economic concerns and also because of the
monotonous character of domestic encounters. One striking example of this fact
happened in 1947. On 16 February, Beşiktaş and Fenerbahçe were scheduled to
play the Istanbul Cup final. However, neither team attended the final and both
played against the Hungarian MTK team instead. Therefore, the BTGM declared
both teams to have withdrawn and the cup was not handed to either of them.
This was also the end of the Istanbul Cup. In the following years, until full
professionalism arrived, this tendency continued.
The Democratic Party governments in the 1950s had been a period in which
Turkey’s expansion to the West and closeness to the United States continued
with further acceleration. This attitude also showed its effects on the football
field. In the first years of the DP government, international sports contacts
carried on with high frequency. Good relations with Israel were preserved and
the first Israeli team, Hapoel Tel Aviv, visited Turkey in March 1950. In June
1950, Lebanese football champion Racing also came to Turkey. This encounter
was made possible by the Lebanon–Israel armistice in March 1949. Before this
date, there had been no sporting contacts with this country.
The matches with the Lebanon team raised question of the frequency of
international fixtures in Turkey. These games were played in June, the off-
season of football, after a very busy season with many international encounters,
cup and league matches. Also clubs could not have satisfactory gate receipts
from these hardly appealing matches. Indeed, it seems clear that these Lebanese
matches were not arranged by clubs or organisers, but were rather a diplomatic
move.
An interesting incident in 1950 was the request for asylum by two Albanian
footballers. These players, Bahri Kavaya and Süleyman Vafi, escaped from the
Soviet boat Babet in Arnavutköy, Istanbul, on the way to Konstanta, Romania
and asked for asylum. These two men played in Fenerbahçe for a brief period. It
that period, United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees had
not been promulgated yet; however as this incident happened months before this
convention, it is possible to say that the common principle of refugee was to be
‘a well-founded fear of persecution because of his/her race, religion, nationality,
membership in a particular social group or political opinion’. Thus, it can be
claimed that Turkey’s acceptance of these two players had political meanings.
Another important incident in 1950 was the first sports contact with the
Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. On 26 December, the Sarajevo team
arrived in Istanbul to play matches with Istanbul teams. As in the other
examples, the date of the first encounter was no coincidence. In June 1948,
Yugoslavia was expelled from the Stalin’s Cominform, the successor of the
Communist International. In 1950, Yugoslavian president, Josip Broz Tito,
declared his famous ‘self-management’ (samoupravljanje) principle and strictly
diverted his country from Soviet communism.
Meanwhile, the football trends of the world sometimes transcended the
foreign policy trends of Turkey. Teams from Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina,
which had no visible ties to the Western pact but were very strong in football,
were invited to Turkey during their European tours. Especially, the Lanus team
from Argentina made a great impact. Eva Peron, the wife of Argentine leader
Juan Peron, was terminally ill in that period, and her tragedy touched many
people in Turkey as well. Even a mevlit (Islamic prayer) was staged in Şişli
Mosque on the 8 December 1951. After this incident, Lanus came to Turkey in
January 1952 with a silver cup called the Eva Peron Cup to be awarded to the
winner of the Lanus’s last match. Argentine team played Fenerbahçe twice. In
the first match teams entered the pitch with each other’s country flags. In the
second match, Fenerbahçe defeated Lanus and won the unique Eva Peron Cup.
Lanus also played with Beşiktaş and Galatasaray.
The end of the civil war in Greece by the victory of the right-wing and the
victory of the pro-American, conservative DP in Turkey put the two countries in
the same, Western direction. In this context, past issues were buried and both
governments put communism as the biggest threat on their agendas. Hence, until
the Cyprus problem emerged as a big issue, both countries continued their sports
contacts. In 1951, Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray athletics teams went to Greece
and the AEK football team came to Istanbul. This is followed by Beykozspor’s
Thessaloniki trip and Ethnikos, Apollon and Panathinaikos’s Istanbul visits.
Fenerbahçe visited Athens and AEK along with Olympiakos came to Istanbul
later in 1953. Greek teams coming to Istanbul also played with Beyoğluspor, the
team of the remaining Istanbul Greeks.
The frequency of foreign teams coming to Turkey caused the newly founded
professional Istanbul League to remain incomplete in the 1953–1954 season.
Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray rejected the Football Federation’s offer to play the
remaining matches in summer and yielded the championship title to Beşiktaş.
Bearing in mind that Brazilian teams played the highest number of matches in
Turkey that year, probably it was because of the clubs trying to raise funds for
the upcoming professional transfer season. After that incomplete season, the
number of international friendly games were reduced to a handful of matches
and only strong football nations, such as Brazil and Hungary, were invited. The
sporting relations with Greece were suspended at the end of the year with the
rise of the Cyprus issue and 6–7 September events in Istanbul and Izmir.
After 1955, the majority of international matches that Turkish clubs played
were with Hungarian and Yugoslavian clubs. This choice was a reflection of
club’s coach choices. In this period, many clubs in Turkey were coached by
trainers of these countries. One important reason for the scale down in
international friendly matches was the foundation of the Union of European
Football Associations (UEFA). This international body of European football
finally reshaped the international club matches and organised the first pan-
European club championship, the European Cup of Champion Clubs, starting
from 1955. The leading teams of Europe attended this cup and stopped their
European tours. Turkey joined this competition with Beşiktaş in the 1958–1959
season. Hence, the period of international friendlies was over.
The constantly increasing popularity of football and the hidden
professionalism quickly turned football into a business. Clubs were constantly
arranging international fixtures in order to raise funds and finance their teams.
Furthermore, as transfer fees and monthly wages were forbidden by amateurship
regulations put into effect in 1941, some teams developed other ways to
persuade players to join their ranks. Some board members promised the
footballers stable jobs where they could earn satisfactory money and some
arranged their military affairs in order to keep them in Istanbul during their
obligatory military service. Adalet, the team of Adalet textile company’s owner
Süreyya İlmen, was notorious for his tempting offers, which included high-
paying administrative jobs in the textile factory.
A regulated professionalism was not only bound to happen but it also became
a necessity in those conditions. On 21 September 1951, the TFF published a set
of regulations about professionalism gradually permitting clubs to switch to
professional status. According to the new rules, the clubs remained amateur;
nevertheless they could form professional teams. Even today, this principle is in
force in a way as non-corporate clubs are officially associations which can make
professional contracts. The regulations also defined the players’ contracts and
the minimum and maximum wage that they could be paid.
The second half of the 1950s also triggered a second wave of Turkish
nationalism in football. Regarding foreign policy, the first 30 years of the
republic was fairly peaceful as the state did not pursue conflicts with its former
enemies and tried to establish stable diplomacy with them instead. This foreign
policy, which can be described as realistic and careful, was quite understandable
as Turkey had nothing to gain more, but much to suffer from any revisionism
attempt. That is why even during the years when Turkey had very close relations
with Germany the İnönü government did not approve any revisionist policy. This
attitude obviously reflected well on the general opinion as well as the football
fans. Except for a couple of minor incidents, teams from countries like Greece or
Britain with which Turkey had once been enemies were generally welcomed
amicably and the encounters were received within athletic terms.
This peaceful environment, in terms of diplomacy and public opinion, was
interrupted in the second half of the 1950s by the Cyprus issue. Before 1955, the
rising ethnic tension between the Cypriot Turks and Cypriot Greeks was not
perceived as a matter that should have concerned Turkey. For instance, in a
meeting between a Cypriot Turk commission and Turkish Foreign Minister Fuat
Köprülü in 1952, rejected the Cypriot Turk delegation’s intervention demand as
‘Now there’s peace with Greeks. The friendships are essential. But we will not
lose our interest in you’ (Kızılyürek, 2003: 20). One year before Turkey had
seen violent acts in September 1955 against Turkish citizen Greeks, the Cyprus
issue was still considered to be a ‘matter concerning only Britain and Greece’
and Enosis, the Greek nationalist movement defending the merger of the island
by Greece, was presented as a communist scheme trying to create tension
between Turks and Greeks.
During the summer of 1955, especially with the protests organised by the
Cyprus is Turkish Association (Kıbrıs Türktür Cemiyeti), a group supported by
Turkish Nationalists in Cyprus, the Turkish Armed Forces and the Turkish
Secret Service, this matter became sine qua non and the first post-war major
twist in Turkish foreign policy eventuated. The DP government tried to use
Cyprus Is Turkish and the public protests in order to manipulate the British–
Greek–Turkish diplomatic talks that were scheduled to take place in London, in
September. However, the events, intentionally or not, went beyond control and
massive attacks against almost all the non-Muslim minorities took place on the
6–7 September. Even though a probable massive immigration of the Greek
minority to Greece was blocked by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul, this
incident marked a major social turning point in cosmopolitan cities like Istanbul
and Izmir.
The political climate of 1955 reflected on football as much as it affected the
social life. Whereas Cypriot football had been virtually unknown in Turkey
before, in the summer of 1955, a specific interest in this subject mushroomed
almost instantly. In June 1955, the coach of Çetinkaya, the only Turkish
champions of the Cypriot Football League, travelled to Istanbul in order to
‘resolve the sports matters of Cyprus’ (Milliyet, 14 June 1955). The same week,
Çetinkaya invited the Istanbul University football team to Cyprus via the TMTB,
one of the nationalist political organisations that arranged most of the Cyprus
protests. These visits became more frequent over the next five years whereas the
games against Greek teams were removed from the agenda.
The Cyprus issue and the tense relations between Turkey and Greece
continued to affect the daily lives of the Greek minority in Turkey for another
decade. It was no coincidence that Beyoğluspor, the team of Istanbul Greeks was
relegated from the First Division and Lefter Küçükandonyadis, the most famous
Turkish–Greek footballer decided to retire in 1964, the same year when Greek
citizens residing in Turkey were expelled from the country. Most people
subjected to deportation left the country along with their families (most of them
were married to Turkish citizens) and it was the biggest immigration from
Turkey to another country since the forced population exchange in 1923. Most
of the minority football clubs vanished in this period.
Note
1 By 1938, Prime Minister Şükrü Saracoğlu was Fenerbahçe chairman and Beşiktaş was
presided over by one of the major ideologues of the Republican People’s Party
(Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi – CHP), Recep Peker. Galatasaray, which did not have a
high-rank CHP member president at the time, was suffering from the breakaway of
Güneş which contained many high-ranking officials of the party.
Bibliography
Akın, Yiğit. Master’s thesis, Boğaziçi University Atatürk Institute, 2003.
Akın, Yiğit. Gürbüz ve Yavuz Evlatlar. Istanbul: İletişim, 2004.
Akşam, 17 September 1945–1931 May 1949.
Atabeyoğlu, Cem. 1453–1991 Türk Spor Tarihi Ansiklopedisi. Istanbul: Fotospor, 1991.
Atabeyoğlu, Cem. Interview by author. Digital audio recording. Istanbul, Turkey, 19
March, 2007.
Dağlaroğlu, Rüştü. Fenerbahçe Spor Kulübü Tarihi: 1907–1957. Istanbul: n.p, 1957.
Gökaçtı, Mehmet Ali. Bizim İçin Oyna: Türkiye’de Futbol ve Siyaset. Istanbul: İletişim,
2008.
Kızılyürek, Niyazi. ‘Birinci Cumhuriyet’ten Yeni Kıbrıs’a’. In Masis Kürkçügil (ed.),
Kıbrıs: Dün ve Bugün. Istanbul: Ithaki, 2003.
Milliyet, 14 June 1955.
Pyta, Wolfram. ‘German Football: A Cultural History’. In Alan Tomlinson and
Christopher Young (eds), German Football: History, Culture, Society. London and
New York: Routledge, 2006, 1–22.
Zürcher, Eric Jan. Turkey: A Modern History. London: I. B.Tauris, 2005.
Chapter 4
A new political paradigm (1960–1980)

The start and end points of three decades in the Turkish history can be found
easily in a series of coups d’état that took place in 1960, 1971 and 1980. These
coups created a tradition of military perturbation in Turkish democracy and
became decisive in the course of social and political history. Among those three
coups, the 12 March 1971 coup was probably the most permeable regarding the
political climate before and after it. In the late 1960s, the right-wing Demirel
government of the Justice Party (Adalet Partisi – AP) took an anti-leftist stance
against the rising left influenced by the global political atmosphere and found a
chance to grow under the relatively more libertarian conditions of the 1960
Constitution. Left-thought became popular, notably in the universities through
‘Thought Clubs’ (Fikir Kulüpleri) and the Workers’ Party of Turkey (Türkiye
İşçi Partisi – TİP) became the first legal socialist party to be represented in the
National Assembly thanks to the 3% vote they received in the 1965 general
elections. However, the Turkish socialists were divided into factions a couple of
years later due to ideological differences mainly based on how the revolution
should be made.
The National Democratic Revolution (Millî Demokratik Devrim – MDD)
faction of the TİP believed in a coalition of progressive military officers and
socialists in order to lead the proletariat to the revolution, which was let down
later by the severe reaction of the army against the 15–16 June 1970 workers’
protests (Zürcher, 2005: 255–256). The MDD also led to many communist
organisations which adopted urban guerrilla warfare tactics, such as the
kidnapping of the American officials in Turkey, bank robberies and bombings.
The leftist violence at the end of the 1960s gave the much-awaited chance to the
right-wing militants to respond in a far more destructive manner. Especially, the
Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi – MHP) of the 1960 coup’s
Colonel Türkeş and its paramilitary youth organisation the Grey Wolves
(Bozkurtlar) escalated the violence climb to higher levels. The Demirel
government was not impartial between the two parties of the violence, and even
it had been, it was not capable of stopping it as the government was weakened
by the defections to minor right-wing parties.
In these conditions, the 12 March 1971 ultimatum came. The memorandum
was addressed to the whole Assembly and briefly saying ‘a military intervention
would be compulsory in case a government that could stop the anarchy and
make reforms in a Kemalist insight’ (Milliyet, 13 March 1971). Demirel
immediately responded to the memorandum by resigning with his entire cabinet
and called the military declaration ‘incompatible with the constitutional
principles and the state of law’. The CHP, in opposition, initially protested
against the military memorandum, however when it became clear that the
military had selected CHP member Nihat Erim as the next prime minister, the
party president İsmet İnönü gave support to the new government (Zürcher, 2005:
258). Nihat Erim was a conservative PM who represented the centre-right wing
of the CHP. He somehow had a political rivalry with the CHP general secretary
Bülent Ecevit, who was the leader of the centre-left wing of the party. Days
before the military ultimatum, two wings opposed each other over a motion of
constitutional change about the treasure aid to the political parties, proposed by
Ecevit himself. The appointment of Erim to the new government as prime
minister and the CHP’s support led the party to a major break and Ecevit-wing
resigned from party posts one week later to pursue an inner-party opposition
against İnönü.
In May 1972, Ecevit took over the power in the CHP and reshaped the party.
While Ecevit was pushing the CHP to the centre-left, the government and the
army was carrying out a massive hunt against the left. Starting from the National
Security Council meeting in 27 April 1971, thousands of union members, left
intellectuals and the TİP members were arrested and most faced torture and
inhumane behaviour (Zürcher, 2005: 259). During this offensive, many right-
wing militants were employed. This violent attitude of the army against the
socialists humbled the left; however, it also helped the centre-left CHP to
become a new source of attraction. With the abolition of the TİP on 20 July
1971, the CHP remained as the sole legal left party. While the Turkish left was
forced to shift to centre, the right quickly gave up its initial reaction against the
military intervention and supported the Erim and later Melen governments. It
was clear that the army, its government and the right-wing had a common
agenda against the ‘communism threat’. The right’s support to unpopular
governments also helped Ecevit and the CHP became the first party on popular
vote in the 14 October 1973 general elections by 33.3% against the 29.8% of
Demirel’s AP. However, this vote and 185 MPs were insufficient for the CHP to
form a government, so the country went into another period of crisis.
Ecevit had to enter into a coalition with Islamist Necmettin Erbakan’s
National Order Party (Millî Nizam Partisi) in January 1974. In the first months
of the government, the attacks against the Cypriot Turks by Greek Cypriot
paramilitary organisation EOKA-B reached a climax in Cyprus, so the
government decided to intervene according to Turkey’s guarantor status given
by the 1960 Treaty of Cyprus Republic. The first intervention in Cyprus in June
1974 was later followed by a second and unlawful intervention in August
(during the Geneva talks which were supposed to find a solution to the issue),
which led to an illegal occupation by the Turkish army in Cyprus, which still
remains today. Ecevit benefited from the nationalistic climate sourced by the
interventions in Turkey. He decided to push the National Assembly into the
elections in order to cash the popularity into votes and form a strong single-party
government; thus he declared his intention to resign on 16 September 1974,
claiming that he could not convince Necmettin Erbakan not to make speeches
that could put Turkey into a difficult position. However, his plan backfired as the
other parties were aware that they could not handle the CHP and Ecevit in an
early election and they decided to form a coalition. After long negotiations
which involved unethical tactics, Demirel convinced the small right-wing parties
to form a ‘Nationalist Front’ government. However, this government, which was
based solely on avoiding an early election and an Ecevit government, failed to
act against the global economic crisis and the Kurdish issue which aggravated
with the 1970 coup.
The Kurdish issue in Turkey can be traced back to the early years of the
modern Turkey, even before the War of Independence. The issues which
emerged from the clash of two late nationalisms built decades of mistrust and
brought a torment to the late 1960s. The 1960s witnessed some major changes in
both parties. After the 1960 coup, especially the Kurdish bourgeoisie was widely
punished by the military. The bank that the Kurdish bourgeoisie had founded,
Doğu Bank, was liquidated by military decree, their tribal leaders were forced to
migrate to western Turkey and the body of the religious Kurdish nationalist
Said-i Nursi was interred by the army (Bozarslan, 1991:103).
Despite the harshness of the army, the 1960s still became a period of
enlightenment for the Kurds. This enlightenment had two sources; the Kurdish
Democratic Party of Iraq (KDPI) and the general left intellectual current in
Turkey. The actions of the army against the clerical and tribal leaders which
either deported and destabilise them resulted in a more liberal and intellectual
Kurdish nationalism. On one hand, the Democratic Party of Turkish Kurdistan
was founded clandestinely as a branch or equivalent of KDPI in 1964 which
brought together intellectual, craftsmen and clerics (Bozarslan, 1991: 76–77). On
the other hand, Marxist Kurdish fractions emerged inside and outside the
Marxist political entities. The TİP was one of the parties which gave special
importance to the subject and it was one of the reasons of the closing verdict
against them.
In the early 1970s, the Revolutionary Culture Clubs of the East (Doğu
Devrimci Kültür Ocakları – DDKO) also played an important role in the Kurdish
movement. This network of Kurdish intellectuals were influenced by the
uprisings in the world, notably in Latin America. The DDKOs helped the
Kurdish intellectuals of Turkey distinguish themselves both from the Kurdish
movement in Iraq and the Turkish left movement (Bozarslan, 1991: 78–79). The
DDKOs were short-lived, but they managed to draw the frame of the Kurdish
political movement in Turkey.
1977 was an important year in the Kurdish movement as a result of two
events. First, in the general elections of June, four Kurdish independent
candidates were elected to the National Assembly. The other event was the
foundation of the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan –
PKK), the militant organisation led by Abdullah Öcalan. The Kurdish
nationalists were trying to find ways of political struggle both in legal and illegal
means. However, the constant military interventions in region and the political
turmoil of Turkey in general pushed the Kurdish movement into further
radicalisation through the late 1970s and 1980s.
In the late 1970s, Turkey went through a violent phase apart from the Kurdish
issue as well. This violence depended on different reasons: the employment of
right-wing radicals by the state, the unstable political climate, the disillusioned
radical left and the appalling economic figures being the major ones. After the
1977 elections, both the AP and the CHP formed short-lived coalitions with
minor political powers, and in November 1979, the AP formed a minority
government. None of these governments could resolve the problems that the
country faced.
Probably the most crucial problem was the economic figures. By the end of
the 1970s, the unemployment rate was estimated as 20%, whereas the inflation
rate found 100%, and Turkey’s international debt reached US$2.6 billion
(Pamuk, 1981: 26–27). In these years, the economic crisis manifested itself as a
foreign exchange shortage. Pamuk lists the reasons behind the foreign exchange
crisis as the clientelist agricultural support policies, the expansion of market for
consumer goods as unionisation in the 1960s brought high wages and the
remittances sent to Turkey by the workers emigrated to Europe in the 1960s and
early 1970s (ibid., 28). The import-substitution model applied to Turkey for the
previous two decades were no longer sufficient due to the rising demands of the
public anymore, so the intermediate and consumer goods as well as technology
had to be imported which caused the rapid liquidation of the foreign exchange
reserves.
The demand for more advanced consumer goods also depended on – generally
ignored – cultural reasons. The 1970s was the era where the television was
introduced to Turkey. The state television TRT (Turkish Radio and Television –
Türkiye Radyo Televizyonu) initially gave priority to domestic productions and
foreign films; however, American soap operas rapidly took over both in terms of
broadcasting hours and popularity. In 1970, 30.73% of the broadcasts were
imported, among which 6.09% were the serials (none of them were American
productions) (Cankaya, n.d: 22). As an important change, TV started to
broadcast commercials in 1972 and the broadcasts’ popularity became more
crucial. The following year, the serials occupied 8.58% of total broadcasting
time, of which 60% were American productions (ibid., 29–30). In 1977, the
serials occupied one-eighth of the total broadcasting time and 27 American
serials were broadcast (ibid., 46–47). The content of these serials was criticised
even by government officials in TRT General Council Meetings for ‘showing
the lives of rotten capitalist families’ and ‘nibbling moral values’ (ibid., 58–59).
The domination of the American serials on television was, in fact, another
facet of the failing import-substitution model. On one hand, the increasing
television audience were demanding for high-quality production. On the other
hand, the domestic producers did not have the experience and technical
capabilities to produce programmes that could match American productions, and
it was not cost-effective. Hence, the TRT was obliged to import these
productions. The figures that the former senior TRT official of the era and the
prominent academic Cankaya diligently gathered shows the trend towards
American production changed neither during intellectual İsmail Cem’s
presidency nor when the conservative Nationalist Front (Milliyetçi Cephe – MC)
reigned. The commercialised television was simply following the viewers’
demand.
The cultural codes that these serials contained and their effects can be
discussed. It is widely believed that especially productions like Dallas and
Dynasty were tools of cultural imperialism and they promoted American values.
I think that these productions’ real cultural effect was not entirely direct like the
government official quoted believed. However, these serials set the standards for
the television production worldwide. In Turkey and in many other countries,
hundreds of local productions modelled after Dallas were made. It is more
important to focus on what Dallas was, rather than what Dallas tried to say.
Dallas (like many others) was a show which solely targeted entertainment and
created a complex fictional world of almost surreal relationships that almost
stupefies the viewer. It was probably the first popular example of this kind of
entertainment. Today, Dallas is no longer shown in Turkey; however, there are
dozens of Turkish serials which include similar fictional worlds that have no
value in the real world. This can be considered as the real ‘Dallas effect’.
While the Turkish public were discovering America through television, the
country was isolated from the rest of the world. The second Cyprus intervention
and the occupation following the invasion put the Turkish foreign policy on a
steep road. The second intervention was condemned unanimously by the United
Nations Security Council Resolution No. 367 on 12 March 1975. This reaction
pushed Turkish foreign policy onto new paths. Both the Ecevit and Nationalist
Front governments sought to create close ties with the Arab world. Ecevit’s pro-
Third World approach and the MC’s conservatism close to Islamism shifted
Turkey to a policy which was more sympathetic to the Arab world, especially
during the tense periods of the Arab–Israeli conflict (Hasgüler, 2002: 186). Yet,
this particular Third World tendency of the 1970s ended in 1980 with the pro-
American coup d’état.
The 1980 coup d’état was different than the previous two in many aspects.
First of all, the 1971 coup d’état was actually a memorandum after which the
government took the threat seriously. The structure of the Assembly did not
change after the coup, the governments were formed by independent and
technocrat ministers. In 1980, all the actors of the Turkish politics were wiped
out, on a scale which even the 1960 coup had not reached. The objective of the
1980 coup was to remove all the actors from the table and reshape the political
scene from scratch. Its difference from the 1960 coup was it did not aim at a
single group. If the 1960 coup d’état took over the government, the 1980 coup
confiscated the entire political life. It also affected almost anyone involved in
any political activity. In one year 122,600 arrests was made, one-quarter of
which had to wait more than one year for trial (Zürcher, 2005: 279). 171 people
died because of torture (Öndül and Önen, n.d.), although the real number is
believed to exceed thousands, bearing in mind the unreported cases and ‘natural
cause’ and ‘suicide’ death reports given by state officials.
The 1980 coup is widely believed to have been orchestrated by the CIA. This
claim has not been proven yet; however, there is strong evidence that it was at
least staged under USA acknowledgement. General Tahsin Şahinkaya was in
Washington DC just nine days before the coup. Also, the communications
systems of Turkish military were operated by the US Army at the time (Paul,
1993: 4).
Whether it is true that the 1980 coup was performed under US commands or
not, the junta in 1980 only had the USA as an international ally after the coup.
The second biggest arms supplier of Turkey after the USA, West Germany gave
‘political refugee’ status to those who fled after the coup and blocked the
financial aid planned under the 1981 OECD Consortium (Dağı, 1996: 126). The
Council of Europe, of which Turkey was a founding member, suspended
Turkey’s presence in the Assembly between 1980 and 1984 while a probable
expulsion from the Council was prevented by the US lobbies (ibid., 127). The
military junta also created outrage in the Third World. Turkey’s sole
international contacts except the USA were either junta leaders like Ziya Ul-Hak
in Pakistan or dictators such as Todor Zhivkov in Bulgaria or Nikolai Ceausescu
in Romania (Hasgüler, 2002: 186–187). The country was completely isolated
regarding foreign policy.
The 1983 general elections was the initial but unhealthy attempt to switch
back to democracy. The Political Parties Law that lifted the ban on political
activities but connecting them entirely to the permission of the National Security
Council came into effect in April 1983. The elections were scheduled to be in
November. Six months was an extremely short period to form new political
entities. To be able to succeed in such a short term, one should have either
somehow affiliated to state organisations or should have been the successor of
one of the banned parties. Twelve of the 15 newly founded parties were vetoed
by the National Security Council (because of having ties with the banned
organisations) and only 3 parties qualified to join the elections. These were the
Nationalist Democracy Party (Milliyetçi Demokrasi Partisi – MDP), founded by
former military officials, the Populist Party (Halkçı Parti – HP), close to CHP-
style Kemalism and the Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi – ANAP), founded
by pre-1980 economics bureaucrat Turgut Özal. Among these parties, the MDP
had the closest ties to the junta. The programme of the party was referring to the
coup, declaring that it will work ‘according to the spirit and philosophy of
September 12 which had saved the nation from being divided’. The HP
considered itself to be on the centre-left. ANAP’s political tendency was the
mixture of economic liberalism, conservatism, Islamism and nationalism.
While founding the MDP, the initial idea was to form a political entity that
could receive support from both the former CHP and AP supporters (Ahmad,
1984: 4). Instead, the MDP turned out to be a party that disillusioned voters from
both sides. The MDP’s politics, based on the continuity of the 12 September
spirit, faced a widespread rejection from the voters and came last in the elections
by 23%. The word ‘nationalist’ in its name and the rumours that the party was
close to the former MHP that created the most of the pre-1980 right-wing
violence could have also been a factor on this defeat (ibid., 7).
The second party in the elections, the Populist Party was the sole alternative
on the left; however, it could not get pass over 30% in this three-party race. The
HP aimed to appeal to the former CHP voters, but it was closer to İnönü‘s CHP
rather than Ecevit’s. If Social Democracy Party (SODEP) had not been barred
from the elections, probably the party could have never reached the amount of
votes that it received. The HP was the choice of those who did not want to vote
for Sunalp or Özal.
Özal’s ANAP’s victory in the elections by 45% (which was sufficient to form
a new government due to the new system specially designed to prevent
coalitions) can be interpreted in different ways. On one hand, among Sunalp and
Calp, Özal might have seemed to be the ‘genuine’ civilian candidate (Zürcher,
2005: 282). On the other hand both Sunalp and Calp defended some sort of
statism whereas Özal represented economic liberalism. Even economic statism
might have been avoided because it was related to the state, in other words the
junta. It is hard to make assumptions about the reasons for the ANAP victory as
it was a very short election campaign after which the public voted for parties that
the programmes and leaders of which they did not know (Ahmad, 1984: 8–9).
One thing is clear: the winner of these elections would obtain great political
power, as he would form a one-party government due to the new system and the
opposition would be weak as the real serious opponents were banned outside.
Özal managed to get this power and used it to reshape the country.
The main focus in the Özal years was the economy. In fact, Özal’s economic
policies came into effect much before the 1983 elections. Özal was the ‘super-
minister’ to regulate the economy in compliance with the IMF stand-by
agreement. He stayed in this post during the junta reign as well. The
transformation from import substitution to liberalism started with the 24 January
1980 decisions, passed through the junta years and came back to Özal in 1983.
That was probably why Turgut Özal and his party were not vetoed by the junta
and allowed as the third party, whereas it was known that the real aim was a
two-party system (both founded by the state figures). The junta may have erased
everything in the country but Turkey still depended on IMF agreements and
probably on Özal, too. The key elements of economic transformations were the
devaluation of the Lira and flexible exchange rate, subsidiarity of exports and
import liberalisation (Bayar, 1996: 779).
While carrying out the economic transformation, Özal had to deal with high
inflation figures. In order to slow down the inflation, the junta government froze
public wages and removed any restrictions on rates, so people would invest
instead of spending and the inflation would fall down (Zürcher, 2005: 307).
However, this resulted in the brokerage scandal, as most independent brokers,
‘Banker Kastelli’ Cevher Özden being the most famous, touched risky funds in
order to compete with the rising interest rates of the regular banks and lost their
clients’ money who invested on them in order to survive the high inflation.
Furthermore, these measures failed to resolve the inflation problem in long-term,
but brought very short-term relief.
Apart from the inflation problem, Özal reached his goals in economic
transformation. He created a competitive market where domestic producers were
expected to grow by exporting and to compete with the foreign goods which
were easy to import. In the background of this picture, consumers were
encouraged to buy luxury items. The new goods acted as the propaganda of the
economic policies. The imported consumer goods appealed to public curiosity
after years of import substitution. One interesting example of this curiosity was
the ‘Chiquita’ crisis in 1984. That year, the government allowed the import of
Chiquita brand bananas, claiming domestic banana production had been lower
than expected. The imported bananas caused a political crisis as the Motherland
Party MPs of the major banana producing city, Antalya, threatened to resign.
However, Chiquita bananas were sold in Antalya on the day Özal visited the city
at a higher rate than the domestic product. It was striking that bananas were sold
out in a city where bananas were one of the major products.
Özal’s import-export policy widened the gap between the companies. The big
holdings that were capable of exporting abroad and competing domestically
grew in that era as many smaller others were wiped out. Equally, many
entrepreneurs who could afford to invest became rich whereas the regular paid
workers and officers struggled. The high competition and the widening
economic gap between rich and poor also triggered a wave of corruption.
During Özal’s reign, the political liberalisation was rather slow comparing to
the economic one. However, still important steps towards a more civil
democracy were taken. The most crucial one among those was the lifting of the
ban on some political parties and figures. In 1984, the National Assembly freed
some of the banned parties of 1983, such as the SODEP and the Right Path Party
(DYP). These parties were obvious successors of the CHP and AP, respectively,
and became serious opponents to ANAP. The second step was on lifting the ban
on political leaders, such as Ecevit, Demirel and Erbakan.
After the first step worked against the government, Özal tried to prevent their
comeback by yielding the issue to public voting. Second gamble of Özal on this
subject was once again against him. He lost the referendum by 50.26% to
49.76%. As a response, Özal changed the elective system before the 1987
elections and brought a system which gave more MPs to the party with most
public votes. Thanks to this system, the ANAP managed to have 292 MPs
despite having one-third of the votes. The SHP won only 99 MPs in exchange
for 25% of votes. The DYP gained 59 MPs. One important result of these
elections was İnönü and the SHP were by far the biggest party on the left against
Ecevit’s 8%. The SHP was awarded for being a strong opposition during the
previous term. The party surpassed the Motherland Party in the municipal
elections two years later.
The lifting of the ban hurt Özal in three ways. The Motherland Party was a
party of different factions. The return of Erbakan, Demirel and Türkeş caused
the dissolution of these factions. Most Islamists, conservatives and nationalists
went back to their original entities as the Motherland Party was losing power.
The 1980s wore out the Özal government while the others were refreshed during
the ban. In 1989, Özal replaced Kenan Evren as the president of the republic and
this probably marked the end of an era. Demirel became the PM after the 1991
elections.
On the left, things were quite different. Until 1991, Erdal İnönü and the SHP
pursued an uncontested leadership of the left. However, the low-key
performance of the SHP municipalities between 1989 and 1991, especially the
wave of strikes and water breakouts in Istanbul cost the party 8% of votes in the
1991 elections. In 1992, a faction of the party led by Deniz Baykal broke away
to recreate the Republican People’s Party.
By 1994, the SHP votes were as low as 19.68% while the Democratic Left
Party (DSP) of Ecevit reached 11.23%. The CHP was at 2.93%. After the
elections, the heavy defeat of the SHP triggered the discussions of a unified
social democrat party as the total vote of the three parties could have signified a
victory. Ecevit responded negatively to this proposal, mainly due to his feud
with Baykal. However, İnönü responded positively, and the SHP and the CHP
were merged in February 1995 under the name of the CHP. By the end of the
year, Baykal took over the presidency from Çetin, which led to many
resignations from the party. The new CHP, especially with the rise of the
Islamist Welfare Party and the 28 February 1997 military intervention, followed
a more nationalistic and militantly secular style of politics. The focus of the
former SHP was rather economics and it had a more liberal stance on the
Kurdish issue. The CHP gave priority to the defence of Kemalism and
secularism instead of labour politics, so it was from time to time accused of not
being a social democratic party any longer. Interestingly, this shift of Baykal to
Kemalism resulted in the biggest election defeat of party’s history as in 1999 the
CHP was left out of the Assembly as the party failed to pass 10% electoral
barrage. Ecevit won those elections by 22% of votes. Baykal and the CHP could
bounce back only when Ecevit suffered a heavy economic crisis in 2001 when
the DSP was in power.
One of the key factors that had led the social democratic SHP become the
Kemalist CHP was the rise of the Islamists throughout the 1990s. The Islamist
movement had been more or less a target of the 12 September coup as their party
National Salvation (Millî Selamet Partisi – MSP) had also been banned. Its
continuity Welfare Party (Refah Partisi – RP) was formed but vetoed from the
1983 elections. However, some former MSP members formed a group within the
ANAP and managed to survive the ban orders against the continuity parties
before the 1983 elections. Turgut Özal was himself a former MSP member and
his elder brother Korkut had also been one of the leading figures of the party.
Also Mehmet Keçeciler had been the former MSP mayor of Konya where the
famous anti-Kemalist ‘Jerusalem Rally’ was organised in 6 September 1980.
Most of the ANAP members with Islamist backgrounds managed to pass the
military veto and became MPs after the 1983 elections. Some others, like
Keçeciler, joined them one term later with the ANAP’s motion to lift some of
the bans in 1984. The Islamists in the ANAP both profited from and contributed
to the party’s success. After the referendum for lifting the political ban of the
former party leaders resulted in favour and Özal’s death, a number of these
people such as Abdülkadir Aksu and Cemil Çiçek resigned from the ANAP and
joined the RP, presided by Necmettin Erbakan, the former MSP leader. The RP
benefited from the decline of the ANAP in the 1991 elections. Whereas the
ANAP had kept the Islamist current alive for years, the RP managed to take over
when it stalled. It should be noted that the ANAP had a similar effect on the
MHP as well. While Alparslan Türkeş was banned and the continuity party was
struggling, the nationalist current was alive within ANAP ranks. With the return
of the old leaders and the fall of the ANAP, both parties regained their former
positions and for some period they exceeded where they had been before.
The RP succeeded in joining the National Assembly after the 1991 elections
by raising its votes to around 9% and largely profiting (along with DYP) from
the 12% loss of ANAP. The second and big leap of the party came with the 1994
municipal elections. This time the RP not only managed to gather the right-wing
votes lost by the Özal-less ANAP and the Demirel-less DYP (Demirel became
the president of the Republic after Özal’s death), but also profited from the poor
performance of the SHP mayors, especially in Istanbul, where the municipal
workers’ strikes and the water outages created Istanbul’s own ‘period of
discontent’. The SHP lost all three big cities to the RP (Istanbul, Ankara) and the
DYP (Izmir). The future prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, one of the
young ‘innovators’ of the RP, became Istanbul mayor. One year later, with the
fall of the DYP-SHP coalition, the early elections took place and Erbakan’s RP
claimed victory against unexperienced rivals Çiller, Yılmaz and Karayalçın.
However, its 21% was not enough for a single-party government, and the short-
lived ANAP-DYP coalition (also known as Anayol) was founded.
The early 1990s also witnessed the assassinations of major Kemalist and left-
wing thinkers, such as Turan Dursun, Bahriye Üçok, Çetin Emeç and Uğur
Mumcu. During this period, both Islamists and Kemalists began to radicalise.
For instance, Hasan Mezarcı, the RP MP, who had already been controversial by
criticising the secular state and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, claimed those who
attended Uğur Mumcu’s mass funeral ‘disrespected Islam’. Mezarcı continued
his criticisms of Mustafa Kemal, and Prime Minister Tansu Çiller invited all
party leaders (except those of the RP and pro-Kurdish Democracy Party – DEP)
and citizens to a ‘Respect Atatürk’ rally. The SHP leader Murat Karayalçın,
MHP leader Alparslan Türkeş, as well as the army officials responded
positively. Students from high schools were brought by buses to join the rally in
Taksim Square. This rally was probably the first instance of the Kemalist mass
politics in the 1990s that positioned itself as secular and nationalist – in other
words, anti-Islamist and anti-Kurdish. This rally also marked the end of the left-
right wing distinction in Turkish politics for the first time after the 1960 coup.
The political lines were redrawn over ethnicity and religion.
The ethnicity axis of the new politics evidently was drawn over the Kurdish
issue. In the early 1990s, the ANAP tried to make some reforms about the
cultural rights of the Kurdish minority who struggled under Martial Law. The
ban on the Kurdish language in private life was lifted in 1991. Also Adnan
Kahveci prepared a report about the resolution of the issue through
democratisation; however, he was killed in a car crash after this report. In 1992,
he had claimed his party’s reform attempts to solve the issue were blocked by
Kenan Evren, including a Kurdish language state TV station. This was probably
true as the SHP report which also proposed Kurdish broadcasts in 1990 was
investigated by the State Security Court. However, it would be incorrect to say
the ANAP had a strong will to resolve this issue after Özal resigned from the
party to become the president of the Republic. The prime minister Yıldırım
Akbulut, the successor of Özal in ANAP, responded to the SHP report saying
‘There is no such thing as a Kurd, there is only Turks. Everyone living in this
land is obliged to be Turk’ (Milliyet, 31 July 1990). Of course, this nationalistic
tone also can be associated by ANAP’s willingness to benefit from nationalism
to strengthen up its struggling position against the SHP and the DYP at that
period; however, it should also be taken into account that the ANAP was a party
that also had strong nationalist roots.
One important twist in the Kurdish issue in the early 1990s was the foundation
of Kurdish political parties. The September 1980 coup and the torture and
killings that Kurdish intellectuals suffered in Diyarbakır prison during the junta
years had a big impact on Kurdish nationalism. While the Workers’ Party of
Kurdistan (PKK) was conducting armed battle by attacking military and also
civilian targets, prominent Kurdish nationalists sought a legal political battle. In
1990, the People’s Labour Party (Halkın Emek Partisi) was founded. The party
made an alliance with the SHP in the 1991 elections and its ten candidates were
elected to the Assembly. However, these MP’s attempt on reading the
Parliament vow in Kurdish created an uproar. The MPs were expelled from the
Assembly by police force. The party was banned. Many continuity parties were
founded after the first experience; all of them were eventually banned. In 2009,
the Constitutional Court had abolished the Democratic Society Party, the sixth
Kurdish party. Another party called the Peace and Democracy Party (Barış ve
Demokrasi Partisi – BDP) founded during the court case, which later divided
into two, Democratic Regions Party (Demokratik Bölgeler Partisi – BDP) in the
Kurdish regions, and Peoples’ Democracy Party (Halkların Demokrasi Partisi –
HDP) in the rest of Turkey. These parties still exist as of 2018, but most of their
key officials have been imprisoned by the Erdoğan regime.
During the 1990s, both legal and illegal attempts at Kurdish liberation
received negative reactions from the Turkish public. The Kurdish parties were
associated with the PKK by public, media and also by the Constitutional Court.
Also, the politicians in these parties did not have a compromising stance in most
cases due to the reactionary radicalisation through the 1970s and notably after
the 1980 coup. It should also be noted that as the visibility of Kurdish
nationalism increased in the 1990s, the Turkish nationalism benefited from it to
a great extent. Tansu Çiller’s allegations against the DEP (the second successor
of HEP) in the famous ‘Respect Atatürk’ rally (Çiller was greeted by ‘nationalist
Prime Minister’ slogans while making a speech directed against the DEP), the
MHP’s constant appearances at military funerals were examples of Turkish
nationalism seeking public support on the Kurdish issue.
The anti-Islamist and anti-Kurdish climate of the early 1990s seemed to work
for Tansu Çiller and the DYP at first. However, the secular voters of the DYP
experienced a shock when the party made a coalition with the RP in June 1996.
This coalition brought Islamists to power as the major party for the first time in
Turkish history. This government was later thrown away by the 28 February
1997 de facto coup. Tansu Çiller, who once rallied the public against RP, lost
her popularity among secular Kemalists with this decision.
The 28 February military intervention, which consisted of an ultimatum given
to Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan in a National Security Council meeting,
reshaped the political balance in Turkey. Bülent Ecevit’s DSP, the minor partner
of the post-intervention government, benefited from both the Kemalist-secular
political climate and the transformation from the SHP to the CHP. Also taking
part in the post-crisis government reassured the voters who carried the DSP to
the leading party position in the 1999 elections. The major party of the coalition
the ANAP of Mesut Yılmaz also profited from the fall of both the RP and the
DYP; however, the inner-party balance was seriously damaged after Özal’s
death and some issues such as giving too many seats to the DSP in the
government and appointing the former DYP members to ministries led to major
differences within the party.
Even with those problems, the ANAP managed to surpass the DYP and was
very close to the newly founded Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi – FP, the
continuity of RP banned by Constitutional Court order in 1997) in the 1999
elections. The DYP could come in only fifth and Tansu Çiller resigned from
party presidency. The Nationalist MHP was another party that took advantage of
the post-28 February climate. In the six-party and rather diverse Assembly, the
DSP made a coalition with the MHP and the ANAP to form the government.
However, all three parties received severe damage during this term. The
performance of the MHP’s health and public works ministers after the 1999
earthquake disaster, the major 2001 economic crisis and the DSP leaders’
divergence with the president of the Republic Ahmet Necdet Sezer affected
these two parties very negatively. Also the ANAP could not overcome its own
crisis. As a result, all three parties were left out of the Assembly in the 2002
elections. The sum of three parties’ votes did not exceed 15%. Especially for the
DSP, losing 21% of votes in three years had the biggest damage.
The 28 February intervention led to major changes on the Islamist side of
Turkish politics. The intervention and the closing orders against the RP and the
FP accelerated the separation of party’s two wings. With the closing order
against the continuity party the FP acted as a decree absolute. The pro-
innovation side led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan went on to founding the Justice
and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) while the
traditionalists stayed with the Felicity Party (Saadet Partisi – SP), led by Recai
Kutan, a close ally of Necmettin Erbakan. Whereas the intervention affected
both wings and shifted their politics towards a less radical direction, it was the
AKP that took it to next level and redefined Islamist conservatism.
Erdoğan’s cadre combined economic liberalism and some sort of conservative
modernism with family and religious values and produced an entity which
resembled the neo-conservative Republican Party of the USA (İnsel, 2003: 301).
As Bush’s Republicans had connections with the Reagan era, the AKP had with
the Özal period. The AKP was like a more religious-oriented version of Özal’s
ANAP. Just like the ANAP, it appeared in a destabilised post-coup era and
managed to gather popularity. However, what the ANAP did not have to face
was the Kemalists and the army. The AKP and its new conservatism, along with
the newly emerged upper class modern conservatives pushed the Kemalist
middle class to a climate of fear. This climate also reshaped the CHP, and the
party rapidly shifted to a much more nationalistic, Kemalist and secularist
approach. İnsel claims this shift was because the party saw that there was a
nationalistic reaction against the problems of globalisation and Turkey’s
essential issues (İnsel, 2008). While İnsel’s claim seems reasonable at some
points, it should also be added that the CHP also adapted itself to the new
definition of post-28 February politics. Whereas the former SHP had contested
the ANAP in the 1980s through economic policies, the CHP contested the
AKP’s religious aspirations as well as its pro-EU and pro-solution approach in
issues like the Cyprus and the Kurdish issue. The major political line of the
1980s in Turkey was the economic transformation, whereas in the 2000s, it was
rather the religious and national questions. However, I should underline that the
latter political atmosphere is deeply rooted in the defining issues of Turkey,
whereas the 1980s was an exceptional period where the traditional political
currents and their representatives in the country were gagged by a military
regime.
Bibliography
Ahmad, Feroz. ‘The 1983 Elections’. MERIP Reports, March/April 1984. Available
[online] at www.jstor.org/stable/3011796 [22 February 2019].
Bayar, Ali. ‘The Developmental State and Economic Policy in Turkey’. Third World
Quarterly 17, no. 4 (1996): 773–786.
Bozarslan, Hamit. ‘Political Aspects of the Kurdish Problem in Contemporary Turkey’. In
Philip K. Kreyenbroek and Stefan Sperl (eds), The Kurds: a Contemporary Overview.
London: Routledge, 1991, 76–103.
Cankaya, Özden. ‘Türk Televizyonun Program Yapısı’. Author’s own publication. n.d.
Dağı, İhsan D. ‘Democratic Transition in Turkey, 1980–1983: The Impact of European
Diplomacy’. Middle Eastern Studies 32, no. 2 (1996): 124–141.
Hasgüler, Mehmet. Kıbrıs’ta Enosis ve Taksim Politikalarının Sonu. Istanbul: İletişim,
2002.
İnsel, Ahmet. ‘CHP Nedir?’ 6 September 2008. Available online at
www.birikimdergisi.com/guncel-yazilar/652/chp-nedir [1 December 2018].
İnsel Ahmet. ‘The AKP and Normalizing Democracy in Turkey’. South Atlantic
Quarterly 102, no. 2/3 (2003): 293–308.
Milliyet, 13 March 1971–1931 July 1990.
Öndül Hüsnü and Yavuz Önen. ‘Basına ve Kamuoyuna’. Available online at
www.ihd.org.tr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=32:basina-ve-
kamuoyuna&catid=30:ortak-baslamalar&Itemid=80 [12 December 2009].
Pamuk, Şevket. ‘Political Economy of Industrialization in Turkey’. MERIP Reports,
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Paul, Jim. ‘The Coup’. MERIP Reports, no. 4, 1993. Available [online] at
www.jstor.org/stable/3011658 [22 February 2019].
Zürcher, Eric Jan. Turkey: A Modern History. London: I.B.Tauris, 2005.
Chapter 5
Hyper-commodification of football in Turkey
The national expansion of football (1960–1975)
Whereas the minority clubs disappeared because of emigration and the other
minor clubs of Istanbul sank into the lower divisions as they could not keep up
with professionalism, the void was filled by the provincial clubs. The National
Football League started in 1959 and it was made up of the biggest clubs of three
major cities – Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. The real expansion of football
throughout whole country was made possible with the foundation of the Second
Division in the 1963–1964 season. Initially, the Second Division was
geographically diversified and most teams competing in this league were the
former participants of the First Division in major cities. However, especially due
to considerable support from the TFF President Orhan Şeref Apak and the State
Secretary responsible for sports, Kâmil Ocak, many clubs in Anatolia
mushroomed and quickly took over the majority in the Second Division.
In the first ever season of the division, 10 of the 13 clubs competing were
from one of three major cities,1 whereas in the 1965–1966 season 9 of the 21
competing teams were from Anatolia. In the fifth season of the division, the
number of teams increased to 36, only 11 of which were from Istanbul, Ankara
or Izmir. Evidently, as well as the efforts of official governing sports about
unifying and founding city clubs, the newly accumulated capital in the provinces
thanks to the development plans and the rising Anatolian bourgeoisie, were the
major contributors to this process. With professionalism, the criteria of existence
in top-class football changed dramatically. The clubs with tradition and small but
loyal fan bases rapidly vanished. Popular metropolitan clubs cashed in on their
popularity through gate receipts and survived, while other clubs started from
scratch thanks to the capital invested in them.
The characteristics of the surviving professional clubs also defined the
pathway to success. From then on, the success depended more or less on how
much money could be doled out. This would certainly change how football
would be perceived by any actors involved, including fans.
One of the reasons the major clubs of Istanbul were able to survive the
restructuring of football without damage was once again the support they
received from the political forces, or in other words their ability to keep up with
the political trends. Fenerbahçe and Beşiktaş, which kept a certain closeness to
the CHP during the single-party period, quickly adapted themselves to the new
conditions and yielded the president’s chair to the DP deputies, Osman
Kavrakoğlu and Nuri Togay. Galatasaray, which had a little more space thanks
to its own bureaucratic network within the state, did not elect a DP member to
the presidency, but they were careful to ask the president Suphi Batur to step
down as he had resigned from the DP after a conflict. Among these three clubs,
the closest to the DP government was Fenerbahçe. This was not a direct result of
club’s pragmatic choices, but rather it was because many high-ranking members
of the club at the time were liberal entrepreneurs and eventually they did well in
the DP which defended their points of view.
This relationship of Fenerbahçe board members with the DP gave them major
advantages during the 1950s (especially about the ownership of Fenerbahçe
Stadium); however, it also caused huge problems to the club after the 1960 coup
d’état. Especially, after a controversial match versus Gençlerbirliği, military
officials intervened in the tension between the club and federation and the club
was threatened by a colonel of ‘facing a huge hatred and pressure of
responsibility and eventually being dissolved because of punishments’ (Gökaçtı,
2008: 215–216). The club’s general secretary Faruk Ilgaz (also a member of the
DP and later of its successor the Justice Party) made a huge effort in arranging
the Balkan Cup and, along with the probable effect of the high-ranking military
Fenerbahçe fans, this may have been a factor in why Fenerbahçe did not face
more severe punishment at that time. The Balkan Cup was an initiative that
Faruk Ilgaz started thanks to his business ties throughout the Balkans and not
only was it one of the most remarkable organisations of football in Turkey but it
also helped restore sporting relations with Greece. Faruk Ilgaz later presided
over the club and he was one of the longest-serving presidents of club’s history.
Football in the 1950s and 1960s generally overlapped with the political events
of these two decades. The passage to professionalism and the relegation of minor
clubs completely complied with the liberal economic policies of the Democratic
Party. Their nationalistic conservatism resulted in the disappearance of the
minority clubs and the Turkification of football. In the 1960s, the geographically
diversified football environment may have been the result of more planned and
reserved economic policies aiming at a more equitable allocation of resources.
However, it should not be forgotten that the provincial clubs born in the 1960s
were also a result of the Anatolian conservative bourgeoisie and their
accumulated capital created during the DP years. These trends also endured
during the first half of the 1970s, until the global oil crisis and the international
isolation caused by the Cyprus invasion shook the country.
The great transformation (1970–2002)
The 1970s marked very important changes in football in Turkey. One of these,
which probably accelerated others, was the introduction of television broadcasts.
TRT, which started its broadcasts in 1968, included its first major football event
in its programming in the summer of 1970 with the World Cup played in
Mexico; however, due to technical problems, matches were only shown as short
highlights the day after. Even so, the broadcasting of this world-class event
caused excitement, as the football scene in Turkey got the chance to know how
the game was played elsewhere, which was a new experience except for a couple
of teams who played up to four European matches per year. The newspapers
quoted club board members, who said they ‘would like to sign Pele or
Beckenbauer if the government allowed big transfers’ (Milliyet, 20 June 1970),
and the Turkish Cup finalists Eskişehirspor and Göztepe gathered at newspaper
headquarters to watch the final game together (Milliyet, 23 June 1970). The first
broadcast also motivated TRT and Istanbul Technical University (that had
handled the test broadcasting of Istanbul TV) to televise games played in
Turkey. After a press campaign, on 25 April 1971 the Turkey–West Germany
was broadcast live. It should be noted that the domestic live TV broadcasts
started right after the 12 March 1971 coup d’état; the timing of the broadcasts
suggests that these broadcasts were made under military approval, if not
encouragement.
After 1972, it was usual that national team games, European cup ties or
important domestic fixtures such as the President’s Cup were shown live on TV,
and the league games were shown as short highlights on a weekly basis. With
the television transmissions, the football games started to reach a wider
audience; however the audience was not entirely happy with what it saw. What
television showed was the poor state of football in Turkey against foreign
opponents. At the beginning of the 1970s, the national team was really in a poor
state. The 1972 European Championship qualifiers against Poland, Albania and
West Germany were not completely a disaster as Turkey managed to take at a
least one point from each opponent while finishing the four-team group as third.
However, the 1974 World Cup qualification games started with a shock as
Luxembourg beat Turkey 2–0 in October 1972. Two weeks later, the national
team won the return game at home 3–0, but nevertheless failed at the rest of the
matches. The situation was not so different from the second half of the 1950s
and the entire 1960s as the national team had failed to qualify for any major
tournament after the 1954 World Cup. The difference in the 1970s was that now
everybody could see why. The TV broadcasts not only showed the defeats of the
national team but also gave the football fans a point of reference with which to
compare football in Turkey with the rest of the world.
Whereas the national team was failing expectations, the general situation of
football in Turkey regarding institutionalisation was not bad at all. In the late
1960s, the league became fully nationwide; almost all the cities in the province
had their own professional teams and the lower leagues started. By the 1970s,
the football scene presented a more balanced, more decentralised and more
competitive profile. Anatolian teams could not succeed in clinching the league
title; however, in the 1969–1970 season the only Istanbul team in top five of the
league table was Fenerbahçe, the champions. Eskişehirspor (of Eskişehir), a
unique phenomenon of the era with its university-based fan group and their
innovative terrace acts, finished both the league and the cup in second place
despite having only five years of history. Eskişehirspor, along with other
Anatolian teams such as Mersin İdman Yurdu, Boluspor and Bursaspor, had
stayed in the title race for the entire first half of the 1970s; however, the title
always stayed in Istanbul until Trabzonspor completed the Anatolian revolution
at the end of the decade.
The failure in the international fixtures probably depended on this transition.
The Istanbul teams, maybe except Galatasaray, stalled in this period. The major
powers of football in Turkey had more difficulty in attracting talented players
from Anatolia as there were quality teams there as well. As well as some
provincial teams that aimed to dominate the top flight, some went into regional
rivalries which overshadowed the title race, starting from the late 1960s.
The infamous Kayseri–Sivas Second Division game which resulted in deaths
and casualties was the most striking example of this (two cities with critical
religious and social differences). The Kayseri–Sivas incident might have created
some kind of prejudice against football and distanced certain strata of society
from the game (Akın, 2004:230); however, it probably just hinted at the climate
of instability, unrest and violence that the country was heading into in the 1970s.
That climate would also affected football.
In this era, violent clashes involving footballers, referees and fans could be
witnessed in any division. The Diyarbakırspor–Hatayspor game (Second
Division) on 22 February 1970 and the Siirt–Adana Mensucat game (Amateur
championship) on 3 May 1970 both resulted in deaths or casualties. Violence
was also seen in the First Division. The Karşıyaka–Galatasaray match, where
players got into a fight and Galatasaray wanted to raid the Karşıyaka camp after
the game on 8 November 1970, was an example of how top-level football had
fallen into violence. After the 12 March coup, such open acts of violence were
limited to some degree; however, the general climate of football was very tense
and physical violence was integrated as a routine figure in football in Turkey.
This violence included players as well as fans, and the security forces. In
April 1972, after the Beşiktaş–Ankaragücü Turkish Cup tie, the tension between
losing Beşiktaş board members, footballers and the police resulted in Beşiktaş
player Zekeriya Alp fainting because of a blow he received to his head. The
violence that was becoming ordinary contributed to the disillusionment about
football in Turkey as much as the poor results in international fixtures. Thus,
whilst the game expanded through the nation, its prestige decreased.
Also in the 1970s, the club boards faced the transition between political
figures and wealthy businessmen. In major Istanbul clubs, for decades, the
presidents had been the members of the leading party, the CHP or the DP. After
the 1960 coup, as clubs were caught with the DP member presidents who were
declared criminals in most cases, this tradition started to fade. Political power
was still important for the clubs, but the coup showed that the political profile of
the country could be changed in one day. With the introduction of
professionalism and the national leagues, economic power started to replace
political power. Fenerbahçe was the leading club in this trend, and Faruk Ilgaz, a
successful businessmen and the Justice Party Istanbul branch chief, symbolised
this transition. During his presidency between 1966 and 1974 and 1976 and
1980, Ilgaz used both his political power and business skills in order to
contribute to the club. The crucial point in Ilgaz’s term was that the benefits of
his economic power and entrepreneurship exceeded what his political power
could bring.
The Balkan Cup was an example of this. Ilgaz brought up the idea of a
regional cup between Balkan teams right after the 1960 coup, before he became
the president. The state replied that the relations with different countries (most
belonging to the Warsaw Pact) would be difficult, so Ilgaz organised the cup
himself with his business contacts in all those countries.2 The Balkan Cup was
organised during the CHP, the AP and the coup years. Equally Ilgaz’s
presidency did not depend on who had the political power, unlike in the
examples of Şükrü Saracoğlu, Recep Peker (CHP) and Osman Kavrakoğlu (DP).
This created a new model, a wealthy president who did not rely on political
power. Galatasaray and Beşiktaş also adapted this trend. Selahattin Beyazıt was
the transition figure as he was both a wealthy businessmen and a prestigious
member of the Galatasaray High School tradition. Beyazıt served two terms of
presidency through the 1970s just like Faruk Ilgaz. Beşiktaş was the last of the
three teams to follow the fashion. The 1970s for Beşiktaş was a period of
confusion after the legendary player, coach and president of the club, Hakkı
Yeten, left the presidency. Until the election of Mehmet Üstünkaya in 1973, no
president managed to serve more than two years in the club. Even Mehmet
Üstünkaya, who symbolised the wealthy businessman trend in Beşiktaş, had to
compete with Gazi Akınal, the leader of the traditionalist opposition during his
reign. As the club failed to find itself a wealthy businessman president, unlike
the others, and also could not succeed in forming another model as Trabzonspor
would do by end of the decade, the club went into the biggest period of failure
and did not win the championship between 1966 and 1981.Beşiktaş emerged
from its crisis in the second half of the 1980s only after it developed a youth
system that did not depend on economic power.
The wealthy businessmen presidents secured the success of the Istanbul clubs
through the first half of the 1970s. However, the global economic crisis initiated
by the oil crisis in 1973 also struck Turkey heavily. This obviously affected the
club boards, and the power of money in football in Turkey gradually was
diminished. Moreover, Beşiktaş and Galatasaray went into a state of economic
crisis. This helped a new model to emerge and arise.
Trabzon was a northern city where football had been played popularly for
decades. In 1967, when most cities had professional teams, the city had managed
to unify the rival teams within the city and created Trabzonspor. The club
presented a unique example of locality in football in Turkey. The board, the
technical staff and the footballers were all born in the region and formed a team
based on the Black Sea identity. Before Trabzonspor, Eskişehirspor was a team
that had come close to forming the same kind of an identity club. However,
Eskişehir lacked the football tradition in Trabzon and despite the popularity the
club received it failed to convert it into a football dynasty. It also should be
noted Trabzonspor benefited hugely from the ban on foreign players between
1979 and 1984 and also the economic difficulties of the Istanbul clubs,
conditions which had not existed when Eskişehirspor was in the title race.
The 1980 coup d’état did not affect football immediately as club boards
mostly were composed of non-politics-related businessmen. The football
competitions also resumed without any interruption. The 12 September junta
claimed that it could instantly stop the turmoil and ‘normalise’ the country. The
new government and the National Security Council started their work just one
week after the coup. Also, factories and other businesses resumed their work in a
couple of days. While thousands of people were detained, arrested and tortured,
the country seemed to be as normal as possible. Football was a part of this
normal life. During the 1970s, even though the football climate was sometimes
violent, this violence was caused either by the general atmosphere of discontent
or by the local rivalries and it rarely had a political agenda. In fact, football of
the 1970s had very little to do with the politics. The clubs were mostly run by
non-political people unlike any decade before, and the club identities were
mostly founded on locality and not any other social identity. Football seemed to
be the perfect apolitical, harmless social gathering for the post-1980 period.
Moreover, it could be used as a manipulative tool to discharge the emotions of
the people or recharge them with other emotions, if required.
But there was one problem: football and football clubs in Turkey had hit rock
bottom by the 1980s. In order to render football a meaningful tool, it had to
better than it was then. The government appointed by the junta rapidly started to
work on rehabilitating football. The first step was to stabilise the Turkish
Football Federation. In the previous four years, the federation had had eight
different executive boards; some of these did not last more than two months.
After an interim period of Doğan Andaç as president in October–November
1980, Yılmaz Tokatlı was appointed to be the new TFF president. Tokatlı was a
retired general who had also presided Muhafızgücü, the sports club of the
Presidents’ Guards that he commanded at the same time. This choice evidently
showed how football was taken seriously by the junta. One of the first decisions
of Tokatlı was to demote the national team coach Fethi Demircan to the Under-
21 national team due to his disciplinary record.
One of the most controversial issues in football in Turkey in the 1980s was the
ban on foreign players and coaches. This ban, which had come into effect in
1979, was opposed by the major Istanbul clubs, whereas Trabzonspor openly
supported it. The new TFF board declared in January 1981 that the ban would be
revoked; however, in May 1981 it was decided that the ban would remain and
domestic transfers were also restricted to five players per year. The same year, in
September, the controversial Law No. 2527 on Facilitating Foreigners of Turkish
Ancestry to Perform their Occupations and Crafts Freely in Turkey and Their
Employment in Public and Private Establishments or Businesses was accepted in
the National Assembly. This law, which did not bring any clarification to the
definition of ‘Turkish ancestry’, was open to any interpretation, including racist
ones.3 The authority which determined who was of the ‘Turkish ancestry’ was
the Cabinet of Ministers.
The football clubs, especially the major three clubs who advocated the foreign
players, claimed Bosniac Yugoslav players were of ‘Turkish ancestry’ and they
were granted permission for these players. Hence, in a couple years, many
Yugoslavian players were signed by clubs. In 1982, the TFF revoked the foreign
coach ban. By 1982–1983, the big teams were with ‘Turkish’ foreign players and
Yugoslavian coaches. Football in Turkey was Yugoslavised unintentionally due
to the arbitrariness of the junta government. A minority of these Yugoslavian
coaches and players had had notable careers before coming to Turkey and
contributed to football in Turkey successfully as many others faded without
leaving a trace. However, even this situation was not close to the biggest
example of the arbitrary decisions taken by the junta-driven TFF of Yılmaz
Tokatlı.
By the 1980–1981 football season, there was not an Ankara representative in
the First Division. The capital city has traditionally been overshadowed by
Istanbul in football, as in many other domains alike. That year (which was also
Mustafa Kemal’s 100th birthday), Ankaragücü managed to reach the quarter-
finals of the Turkish Cup. Despite losing the first leg against Beşiktaş, the capital
team won the second match 3–0 in extra time and became a semi-finalist.
At that match, the banners hung at the stadium were interesting: ‘We want to
see Ankaragücü of Atatürk’s capital in the First Division’, ‘The headquarters of
revolution Ankara cannot be without the First Division’ and ‘Ankaragücü is a
First Division side’ (Milliyet, 9 April 1981). These slogans, which could be
interpreted as the wishes of Ankara fans, quickly turned into the arguments of a
campaign which aimed that Ankaragücü be taken to the First Division. The club
president Sabri Nermutlu claimed that the club should have been promoted
because it was Atatürk’s 100th birthday. When Ankaragücü eliminated
Fenerbahçe and reached the cup final against Boluspor, the ultimate support
came from the junta leader, Kenan Evren.
Evren ordered the sports authorities to promote Ankaragücü, which would
also play the President’s Cup game despite the objections of the undersecretary
İsmail Güngör about a 20-team league with prolonged schedule. Ankaragücü
won the Turkish Cup and the President’s Cup with that motivation. When the
team was playing the President’s Cup game, ‘Long live Evren Pasha’ chants rose
from Ankaragücü stands. Evren later became an honorary member of the club.
The promotion of Ankaragücü recreated the tradition of political pressure and
arbitrariness in football in Turkey through the 1980s, and it would to be Özal
who used this power to reshape football in Turkey.
The Özal years in football shared the same characteristics with many other
areas in social life. The Özal philosophy was based on two things: liberalisation
at all costs and reducing any possible discontent by giving public things that they
had not enjoyed before. Football was one of the areas in which these two
principles were the most visible. Özal knew that any progress in this field would
bring him instant popularity. He was not eager to disguise this thought either, as
he once said, ‘if Turkish national team were one of the 5–6 teams who played in
the European finals, the Motherland Party would win the elections landslide’
(Milliyet, 1 February 1985).
The Özal government started dealing with football matters radically by
undoing all the steps that the junta had taken. ANAP member Kemal Ulusu was
appointed as the TFF president instead of Yılmaz Tokatlı, who was forced to
resignation. The financial accounts of the Tokatlı federation were taken into
investigation. Coşkun Özarı, the national team coach that Tokatlı had hired, was
replaced by Candan Tarhan. The transfer restrictions were completely lifted and
a new taxation regime based on players’ qualities was brought in. The Third
Division was reopened. The match observer licences were cancelled and this
position was entirely reshaped.
Ulusu’s appointment to the presidency received some negative reaction as he
was accused of having had a role in a brokerage scandal that Beşiktaş was
involved in when he was a board member of the club. The new president also
attracted attention by dismissing his resignation from the ANAP; however, he
had to resign later as he became a state officer by being the TFF president and
the state officers were banned from politics at the time. Even though he had to
resign, his contacts with the party remained. It was rumoured that the reopening
of the Third Division and the teams that could play in that league were entirely
defined by Vehbi Dinçerler and the Motherland Party MP Ata Aksu, bypassing
General Director of Sports and Youth (Gençlik Spor Genel Müdürlüğü – GSGM)
Yücel Seçkiner and even the TFF president himself. The Third Division had
obviously a great political importance as more than 100 teams would compete in
this league and it would boost the government’s popularity in many regions
where the football teams were not represented in professional leagues before.
Also the TFF was regionalised by the foundation of region and city branches. It
should be remembered that the post-1980 parties did not have the chance to
establish strong regional branches before the elections as there was very little
time. So, football was a short-cut for the party to reach small residential areas.
Thus, it is notable that the expansion of lower-division football was a priority for
the ANAP-driven TFF.
The government aimed to modernise top-class football while expanding the
lower half. It was certain that successful and modern Turkish teams at the
national and club levels would bring a propaganda boost to the government. The
economic policies that Özal applied, such as attracting foreign exchange by
higher interest rates, flexible exchange and subsidising exporters made an
immediate impact on the major Istanbul clubs. The rich businessmen presidents
now had the foreign exchange capital and they were free from the transfer
restrictions of the former era. The gates to the world were opened both in
monetary and athletic terms. Galatasaray and its dynamic board followed this
opportunity. They hired the world-class German coach Jupp Derwall days after
his glory in the European Championships of 1984. He also worked for the TFF
as counsellor. Derwall made great contributions to football in Turkey, especially
to the physical conditions. His team captain at Galatasaray, Fatih Terim later
became the most successful Turkish coach of all times and his apprentice,
Mustafa Denizli, became the first Turkish coach to play in a semi-final in
European cups.
In the hard days of the national team, Derwall gave the recipe for success to
sports writer Turgay Şeren as ‘opening football schools, educating 10 year-olds
as first sports people then footballers, building facilities like the ones in
Germany’ (Milliyet, 2 November 1984). These recommendations were criticised
by Şeren as being long-term responses to urgent needs; however, Turkey
followed those steps and became successful in the succeeding years. The
conversation between Şeren and Derwall also portrayed the difference in
mentality between football in Turkey and world-class football. The next two
decades of football in Turkey passed with closing this gap. However, by 1984,
that gap was still wide open and 8–0 defeat against England ended the Derwall–
Tarhan era. Derwall continued contributing to Galatasaray after the national
team days. That was probably why Galatasaray reached its goals much quicker
than the national team.
The political connections of Ulusu had helped him in speeding up things. He
also faced difficulties because of them. In December 1984, the TFF’s
disciplinary measures against some clubs were vetoed by the National
Education, Sports and Youth Minister Vehbi Dinçerler. This decision created a
crisis which led three TFF board members to resign. Ulusu gave up resignation
at the eleventh hour. After this crisis, Ulusu gradually lost the ANAP support
and went into an open clash with Dinçerler throughout 1985. In July, the
regulatory change which gives three points per win in the leagues was made by
the TFF but vetoed by deputy GSGM Şahap Sayın. This veto ended the era of
Ulusu as the president, and the board resigned.
The brief but troublesome Ulusu era was an interesting example of how the
TFF depended on politics and how an ultra-liberal party like the ANAP also
could be bundled with bureaucracy. The failure of the first TFF of the Özal era
also initiated the autonomy discussions about the federation. A motion of law
was proposed by Ata Aksu about the TFF in May 1985, but the matter was
merged into a new sports regulation motion which passed one year later. The
delay in autonomy caused trouble in the federation. The TFF went into another
period of unstable boards. Efforts were made to resolve the problem by Law No.
3461 (passed in May 1988) and No. 3524 (passed in March 1989). While the
first law separated the TFF from the central sports body, the second law stated
the TFF president would be appointed by the prime minister initially and would
be elected four years after the law had come into effect (Devecioğlu, 2003: 53).
The Law No. 3813, which passed in June 1992, defined the statute and the
mission of the TFF and the federation officially became autonomous.
Another major change in the late 1980s and the early 1990s was the ticket
prices began to be fixed by clubs instead of by the GSGM. This change resulted
in a massive and instant increase of 400% in ticket prices. The autonomy of the
clubs on tickets also brought back season tickets, which had been issued in the
1950s by the GSGM. This time, clubs started to sell their own season tickets.
From then on, the modernisation of the clubs was funded not only by rich
presidents but also by the fans.
In the 1990s, the products of the investment and the modernisation made in
the 1980s were harvested as international success. The liberalisation of the
previous decade was an unintentional preparation to the new era of the global
football. The neo-liberal Özal government lifted virtually all the restrictions in
football and also created the free market economy that could invest in the sport.
In this context, Turkey was more prepared to enter the hyper-commodified
global football of the 1990s than the former Warsaw Pact countries. Whereas the
Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian football stars fled the country the moment they
were free to make a transfer to a European club, Turkish players did not. For a
fair comparison, we may take the Golden Shoe winners (European top scorers)
of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The 1986–1987 winner Rodion Camataru of
Romania made a transfer to Belgium in the 1989–1990 season, right after the fall
of the Ceausescu regime. Equally, the 1988–1989 winner, another Romanian
Dorin Mateut, was transferred to Real Zaragoza of Spain the same season. The
1989–1990 winner Bulgarian Hristo Stoichkov was hired by Barcelona FC in
1990 as well. The 1990–1991 winner Darko Pancev of Yugoslavia waited for
1992 as that country changed regime that year and went to Internazionale right
after. Among all those winners, there was one single Eastern European footballer
that did not make a transfer. The 1987–1988 winner, Tanju Çolak of Turkey,
never made a transfer to Europe and spent his entire career in Turkey.
Another striking example is the two teams that confronted each other in the
1988–1989 European Cup semi-final, Galatasaray and Steaua Bucharest of
Romania. Among 13 players (including two substitutes later entering the match)
11 players played abroad in the post-1990 period. At Galatasaray, none of the
playing squad made a transfer to Europe after that match, including the foreign
players, Zoran Simovic and Cevat Prekazi, and the Germany-born players, Uğur
Tütüneker and İlyas Tüfekçi. This huge difference between two sides reveals the
different conditions in Turkey and in Romania in the early 1990s. Even foreign-
born players did not leave Galatasaray, as their conditions in Turkey were
satisfying for them.
Furthermore, the taxation regime regarding football transfers were very liberal
in Turkey. Football transactions were excluded from value-added tax. Besides,
almost all the contracts were signed for lower figures than the real fees paid in
order to pay lesser income tax. For instance, in 1985, the transfer fees paid could
go up to 80 million liras while the average number declared was 2–3 million
liras. Footballers in Turkey may have earned slightly less than they could have
earned abroad, but they paid much less in taxes. In those conditions, nobody
risked a European adventure.
The major change in global football in the 1990s was the hyper-
commodification. Turkey also followed this trend and the Özal government took
the lead on this. For football to be profitable for the clubs, football broadcasts
needed to be included in competitive free market economy. However, the TV
broadcasting was under state monopoly. In 1990, this monopoly was broken
illegally by Magic Box (Star 1) TV channel, owned by Ahmet Özal, Prime
Minister Turgut Özal’s son. This channel started its broadcasts from
Ludwigshafen, Germany via satellite. Their signals were usually retransmitted
by ANAP member municipalities and they could be watched via regular
antennas as well as via satellite dishes. This channel, considered to be pirate by
Turkish laws, made an offer to the TFF and the clubs to broadcast the league
matches in February 1990. In exchange, Magic Box would pay at least 5 billion
liras (plus 15% of advertising revenues) to the big clubs and 1.5 billion liras to
the other clubs.
The pirate station also reached an agreement with the state postal company to
transmit the matches through their uplink channels and with the GSGM for
entering the stadiums. The TV network announced the agreements with full-page
advertisements in newspapers. The broadcasts started without problems. The
prime minister’s son was broadcasting illegally with the help of state companies
and the municipalities. Other holdings also founded TV networks and their legal
status could not be defined for years. With the introduction of the first encrypted
terrestrial channel Cine5 in 1993, the football market enlarged even further.
However, the allocation of money paid to football clubs was rationed per
popularity, so the economic gap between the Istanbul big three and the others
constantly widened. It was virtually impossible to repeat the success of
Trabzonspor in the 1980s for Anatolian teams, even for Trabzonspor itself. It is
striking that the last non-Istanbul championship victory was in 1984, when the
junta-driven Tokatlı federation was in charge. Since the Özal years, the title has
been shared among Beşiktaş, Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe. The Turkish league is
still the European league with the least number of different champions. This
picture indeed overlaps the widening economic gap between the rich and poor
since the same years in Turkey. Also, the global football economy aggravates
this gap in football as the UEFA pays millions of Euros per success to those who
participate in the European club competitions and also additional TV rights are
paid. Hence, the successful teams in Turkey receive more revenue from
domestic TV rights and also from İddaa, the state betting company; equally they
receive money from the UEFA. This economic power helps the successful teams
buy better players from abroad and also the best players from the other teams, so
they can have more success. Both in global and domestic football, success
generates money that generates success, and the ones who stay outside this circle
have little chance to succeed. In Turkey, this was a wave created by the Özal
government; however it has been continued by the global ‘industrial’ football.
The three-team monopoly over the domestic title eventually rendered
European success more crucial. The 1989 European Cup semi-final of
Galatasaray was beyond imagination for many and it helped raise the stakes.
This success was later followed by the 1996 European Championship
qualification of the national team for the first time, Galatasaray’s 2000 UEFA
Cup victory, third-place of the Turkish team in 2002 World Cup and semi-final
2008 European Championships. All these successes created a sense of national
pride which manifested itself unhealthily on several occasions, such as the
stabbing of two Leeds fans in Taksim Square in 2000 and a newspaper
commented ‘they made the Leeds hooligans kiss the homeland soil by hitting
their heads’ the next day (Star, 7 April 2000). Succeeding in international
football also revealed a two-faced regard of Europe in which belonging to
Europe and despising it went hand in hand (Bora, 2004: 231). Obviously, the
fact that these successes in European football overlapped in the period Turkey
when was waiting indefinitely to join the European Union is a factor in this
complicated feeling. The joy of being successful at joining Europe (even though
it is only in football) usually brings along the hatred of waiting for too long and
knowing that nothing will change outside the football field. Success in
international football actually show how deep and expanded this feeling is in
Turkish society. However, it should also be remembered that while a part of this
feeling comes from the earliest days of the belated Turkish modernism, another
big part of it is nourished by the nationalist/revanchist feeling which was
manufactured to compensate for Turkey’s deceptions in international politics.
The rising Turkish nationalism regarding the Kurdish issue in the 1990s also
changed the fans’ reactions both in domestic and international games. MHP
militants appearing in the stands in this period also played a major role on this
change. Anti-PKK slogans and the official singing of the national anthem before
each domestic game were introduced to the stands in that period.
The importance of football success was perceived by Özal in the early 1980s.
The other politicians and political parties also realised how strong the hype could
be after a major football success. On the national level, the common
understanding of this fact created a continuity in football policies. Even though,
different leaders have become prime minister since Özal, the football’s path
almost has never changed. Even in the economic crisis periods of 1994 and
2001, the politicians did not risk cutting the football budgets. The clubs also
have always enjoyed a constant privilege in taxation and tax amnesties, which
actually started in the 1960s. One of the key factors behind this privileged
situation is that the major clubs usually act together in state-related monetary
issues, such as the tax amnesties.
On the local level, the municipalities have become major actors in football
since the 1980s. In that era, the revenues of municipalities were raised and the
ANAP member municipalities invested this money in local football clubs in
order to seize popularity; the reopening of the Third Division helped a lot in this
matter (Gökaçtı, 2008: 319–320). These clubs were either already existing local
clubs or they were founded within municipal ventures. The existing clubs needed
this support in order to battle the widening gap between the major clubs. The
new clubs were founded where an agreement with the local clubs could not be
reached. Ankara and Istanbul were the most visible examples of this latter
situation. As it was impossible to cooperate with the major clubs of the city, both
municipalities founded their own clubs. In Ankara, a merger between the
municipality team Ankaraspor and Ankaragücü, the most popular Ankara team,
came into reality in 2009. As a result of this merger, the mayor’s son, Ahmet
Gökçek, became the Ankaragücü president, while many Ankaraspor players
were transferred to Ankaragücü after formality transactions. The TFF noted the
irregularities in the transactions between these two Süper Lig sides and relegated
Ankaraspor to the First League (second division). The team that benefited from
this merger, Ankaragücü, did not face any punishment. This incident which
happened in the top division and in the capital city shows the level of political
involvement in local clubs as well. I will analyse Ankaraspor incident later, in a
more detailed manner, as it is one of the important football-related incidents of
the AKP period.
Notes
1 Adana Demirspor (Adana), Bursaspor (Bursa) and Çukurova İdman Yurdu (Mersin)
were the sole three provincial clubs in the Second Division of 1963–64 the season.
2 Faruk Ilgaz, interview with the author, 18 October 2007, Istanbul, Turkey.
3 This law has still been in effect, with a couple of changes.
Bibliography
Akın, Yiğit. ‘Not Just a Game: The Kayseri vs. Sivas Football Disaster’. Soccer & Society
5, no. 2 (2004), 219–232.
Bora, Tanıl. ‘Dur Tarih, Vur Türkiye’. In Roman Horak, Wolfgang Reiter and Tanıl Bora
(eds), Futbol ve Kültürü. Istanbul: İletişim, 2004, 221–240.
Devecioğlu, Sebahattin. ‘Türkiye Futbol Federasyonu’nun Özerkliği’. Gazi Beden Eğitimi
ve Spor Bilimleri Dergisi 8, no. 3 (2003), 49–58.
Gökaçtı, Mehmet Ali. Bizim İçin Oyna: Türkiye’de Futbol ve Siyaset. Istanbul: İletişim,
2008.
Milliyet, 20 June 1970 – 1 February 1985.
Star, 7 April 2000.
Chapter 6
Football during the AKP period (2002–)

As in most domains, the year 2010 was the turning point for the AKP’s
involvement in football. Until that year when the Constitution referendum that
would give the ruling party the powers to eliminate its secular rivals and
redesign the state, the party’s interventions in the social-cultural domain had
rather been confined to the discourse level. Even though Tayyip Erdoğan’s
interest in football was well-known, the AKP’s involvement in football until that
year remained limited to the usual amount which meant municipalities
sponsoring professional football clubs and having their own. This involvement,
during the first two terms of the AKP government, did not go beyond what any
other political party had. As a matter of fact, in 2005, with the Law on
Municipalities (Law No. 5393), it became illegal for mayors to preside over
professional sports clubs. Not surprisingly, most mayors circumvented this ban
by assigning people close to them to club boards. It may be said that the
government did not have a direct intervention strategy in football during its first
years; however local officials generally diverted from the party line.
The early years: Mayors in the business
As I discussed earlier, the professional football clubs founded in the provincial
towns were entrusted to the local bourgeoisie from the beginning. As the mayors
in most towns came from the ranks of local businesspeople, they were expected
to lead the town in many domains, including (and often especially) football.
Presiding over a successful football club meant two things: having an
uncontested political power in the local level and creating prospects of a political
career at the national level. In the 1990s, Sefa Sirmen of Kocaeli and Celal
Doğan of Gaziantep (both social democrats) established rewarding political
careers using the national media visibility they earned thanks to the
unexpectedly successful First Division campaigns of the local football clubs they
presided. Until the legal restriction came into force, it was almost without
exception that mayors presided over professional football clubs in provincial
towns, to the extent that it was almost an obligation since refusing a leading role
in a football club would make a mayor wildly unpopular and the political rivals
would certainly be willing to take up both seats. Hence, mayors’ involvement in
football became a political tradition. The AKP mayors followed this tradition in
most cases, some with more gusto than others.
The prime example of the AKP mayors building themselves a football
franchise is Ankara and its former mayor Melih Gökçek. In Ankara, Melih
Gökçek became the mayor as part of the Welfare Party’s (RP) major surprise in
the 1994 local elections which also made Erdoğan the Istanbul mayor. However,
Gökçek’s political career, as well as his involvement in football, predates these
elections. In 1984, in the first local elections after the 1980 coup d’état, Gökçek,
a former MHP militant and candidate of Özal’s Motherland Party (ANAP), won
the seat in the Ankara county Keçiören. During his five-year tenure, one of his
most controversial calls was to take over the historical Hacettepe club and
renaming it to Keçiörengücü in 1989. Before he became an MP for the Welfare
Party in 1991, during his time as the Director of the Social Service and Child
Protection Institution of the Prime Minister’s Office, the opposition accused him
of putting Keçiörengücü players on the institution bankroll. In 1992, he became
talk of the town when he signed new transfers for Keçiörengücü in the
Parliament building. In 1994, he resigned from his seat to run for the mayor’s
office in Ankara, and he was elected by a close call, also taking over the
municipal sports club Büyükşehir Belediye Ankaraspor. In 1999, the
opposition’s mayoral candidate Murat Karayalçın accused Gökçek of using the
club as a front for cooking the books of the municipality. After Gökçek was re-
elected, again by a close call, Ankaraspor was promoted to the top division in
2004, for the first team in its history. After the law banning mayors from club
boards went into effect, Ankaraspor became a corporation. It was often
rumoured that this corporation benefited from the municipal tenders. As of
October 2018, there has been an investigation conducted by the Ankara public
attorney’s office on the corruption claims about the excavation tenders given to
the Ankaraspor (later renamed to Osmanlıspor) by Melih Gökçek during his
tenure at the mayor’s office. Meanwhile, after the Ankaraspor corporation was
founded, Ankaraspor finished the league in the seventh place and qualified for
the UEFA Intertoto Cup in the 2004–2005 season. It has continued to be a mid-
table team in the following seasons. While Ankaraspor was actively supported
by Gökçek, he was aware that it was not a popular team. He was after the most
popular club in the capital city, Ankaragücü.
As a matter of fact, controlling Ankaragücü had been Gökçek’s objective
since the late 1990s. In 1997, he made his first move and demanded to be the
club president twice. After these moves were rejected by the club community, he
worked on his own club. However, in 2009, when Ankaragücü found itself in a
dire economic situation, Gökçek relaunched his campaign and his 30-year old
son Ahmet Gökçek, who used to be the football director of Ankaraspor, became
the Ankaragücü chairman. Days after the election, the Gökçek family decided to
merge two clubs which competed in the Turkish top division. Later, while the
merger was dropped, the two clubs had a direct relationship which also attracted
the TFF’s attention. In September 2009, the Professional Discipline Board of the
TFF decided that the relationship between two clubs was detrimental to the fair
competition principle and relegated Ankaraspor to the second tier, while
suspending the chairmen of both clubs for six months. At that period,
Ankaraspor loaned almost all of its important players to Ankaragücü for two-
year contracts. In December 2010, an Ankara court ruled that the Ankaragücü
elections which made Ahmet Gökçek the club chairman should have been
annulled due to irregularities. In August 2011, Gökçek handed the club over to
the new board, leaving debts behind. Meanwhile, Ankaraspor filed a lawsuit
against the TFF board’s relegation order in August 2010. The TFF, in turn,
suspended Ankaraspor’s licence and banned the club from all leagues. After both
parties retracted their moves and the TFF paid compensation to Ankaraspor, the
club returned to the second tier of Turkish leagues (1. Lig) in the 2013–2014
season after a three-year hiatus. While Ankaraspor restarted its endeavours, the
former Ankaragücü chairman Ahmet Gökçek was back in the club, this time as a
footballer. In August 2014, when Ankaraspor changed its name to Osmanlıspor
(Ottoman Sports Club), Ahmet Gökçek was declared the club’s ‘founding
president’, while his father became the honorary president. After the rebranding,
Osmanlıspor quickly picked up the Ottoman theme, in line with President
Erdoğan’s neo-Ottomanist rhetoric. A fan group, named Yeniçeriler
(Janissaries), was founded, unsurprisingly by a group very close to the Gökçek
family. It was rumoured that the fans comprised employees of a municipality-run
company, ANFA, which happened to contract out excavation works to the club
since the Ankaraspor days, providing a major income resource to the club.
After the name change, the overt displays of pro-government politics in the
stands and massive financial support from the mayor’s office, Osmanlıspor was
quickly promoted to the Süper Lig, the top division of football in Turkey. In its
first season in the top league, Osmanlıspor managed to qualify for European
cups in 2015–2016. However, the political tides were turning against Melih
Gökçek. In October 2017, the Ankara mayor was forced to resign by Tayyip
Erdoğan, who thought a municipal reshuffling was inevitable to keep the party’s
popularity in the local level. After father Gökçek’s resignation from the
municipality, Osmanlıspor lost its main source of finance. Confirming the
rumours that Gökçek sent his employees to games, the club also lost a great
number in attendance. According to the Passolig e-ticket scheme numbers, the
club lost 54% of its attendance after Gökçek left his post. In the 2017–2018
season, Osmanlıspor was relegated, while Ankaragücü, relegated to lower
leagues after the Gökçek reign, was ironically promoted to the top division.
Today Melih Gökçek still keeps his interest in controlling Ankaragücü, claiming
that his financial support was the driving force in the club’s rebirth. Most
Ankaragücü fans tend to disagree.
Başakşehir: The club out of nowhere
Başakşehir (meaning ‘ear of grain city’ in Turkish) is an urbanisation project in
the western outskirts of Istanbul, initially comprised housing estates built by
KİPTAŞ, the municipality-run housing corporation, during the tenure of Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan as the Istanbul mayor. The district bears the name ‘ear of grain’
as it was one of the symbols of the Islamist Welfare Party that Erdoğan was a
member of. Başakşehir is one of the first examples of the urbanisation projects
for conservative people in Turkey. According to Çavdar (2016: 17), Başakşehir
reflected ‘the wish of its founders to show that Muslims are capable of building a
modern city and live in it’. Therefore, the district, which has expanded over time
and became a municipality in 2009, holds a special place in the Islamist political
movement’s and also Erdoğan’s own history. Since 2014, the district has its own
football club in the top division of the football leagues, Başakşehir FK, a
perennial contender for European qualification spots. The history of this club
also dates back to the period when mayors actively sponsored professional
football clubs.
In 1989, the centre-left Social Democratic People’s Party (Sosyal Demokrat
Halkçı Parti – SHP) recorded a major upset against the neoliberal Motherland
Party (Anavatan Partisi – ANAP) of Turgut Özal in the local elections.
Accordingly, in the Istanbul race, Nurettin Sözen of the SHP defeated Bedrettin
Dalan of the ANAP, the incumbent mayor by 36%–26%. Before Sözen’s tenure,
there used to be a group of sports clubs under the umbrella of municipal
institutions, including the İETT Spor, the club of the public transportation
company which Recep Tayyip Erdoğan worked for and also played in as a semi-
professional footballer in his youth. In 1990, Sözen merged these clubs and
founded the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipal Sports Club (İstanbul Büyükşehir
Belediye Spor Kulübü – İstanbul BB). The club used the professional licence of
one of its predecessors and started playing in the third tier. By 1993, the club
was promoted to the Second Division.
During the tenures of Islamist mayors Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Ali Müfit
Gürtüna and Kadir Topbaş between 1994 and 2007, the club came close to being
promoted to the top tier, however lost in the promotion play-offs a couple of
times. In the 2006–2007 season, the team, coached by the future national team
trainer Abdullah Avcı, was finally promoted to the Süper Lig. Meanwhile, Nuri
Albayrak, a municipal board member and the club chairman since 2002, was
replaced by the vice-mayor Göksel Gümüşdağ, also a relative of Emine Erdoğan,
Tayyip Erdoğan’s wife, since Albayrak decided to become chairman for another
top division club, Trabzonspor. After this period, Gümüşdağ rose to prominence
in football, becoming the vice-president of the TFF shortly before the
controversial match-fixing operation in 2011. In the meantime, the Istanbul
mayor Kadir Topbaş was planning strong ties of the municipality with the
Istanbul BB football branch. In 2014, the club became independent and renamed
as Başakşehir Football Club (Başakşehir Futbol Kulübü – Başakşehir FK),
moving to the newly built stadium in the club’s namesake conservative
neighbourhood. During this rebranding operation, Göksel Gümüşdağ once again
became the club chairman and eventually the president of the Clubs’ Union
(Kulüpler Birliği), the association of top division football clubs, influential in
decisions regarding the Süper Lig.
During the Istanbul BB years, it was often argued that the club benefited from
political ties with the government after 2002. It was no secret that prominent
AKP members, such as Albayrak and Gümüşdağ, made themselves a name in
the football world thanks to their tenures at the club’s helm. However, the
renaming of the Istanbul BB football branch as Başakşehir FK created a
politically charged atmosphere almost unprecedented in the history of football in
Turkey, except maybe the Güneş club example which was encouraged and
supported by the single-party government in the 1930s.
The foundation of Başakşehir FK took place right after the 2013–2014 season
when the major Istanbul club supporters continued their protests against the
government in the stadiums, and during the presidential election campaign. The
inauguration ceremony of the newly built Başakşehir Fatih Terim Stadium was
organised as part of Prime Minister Erdoğan’s presidential campaign, including
an exhibition match where he could demonstrate his footballing skills against
former football stars and celebrities. Even the announcer of the game was hand-
picked, Ertem Şener, a sportscaster known by his avid sympathy for Erdoğan as
also an employee of the Gökçek family at Beyaz TV, a TV channel run by Melih
Gökçek’s other son, Osman. The exhibition match was a show event the likes of
which may only be seen in the world’s worst dictatorships dominated by an
undisputable cult of personality. The other players practically stepped aside for
Erdoğan to score the best goals that he could score and the announcer Şener
shouted political messages on TV after each goal: ‘This goal is for Gaza!’ The
Başakşehir FK chairman Gümüşdağ later organised a shrine-like museum in the
stadium to commemorate this event, where Erdoğan’s goals are repeatedly
shown on screens next to the showcase displaying the Başakşehir jersey and the
cleats that he wore that day. While Erdoğan was transforming the country into
the regime that he called the ‘New Turkey’, Başakşehir was quickly becoming
the regime club.
In its inaugural 2014–2015 season at the Süper Lig, Başakşehir finished the
league in fourth place and qualified for the UEFA Europa League. The next
season, the club transferred Emre Belözoğlu, former Inter star and Fenerbahçe
player. In the following years, he was followed by other national and
international transfers, such as Egemen Korkmaz, Emmanuel Adebayor, Eljero
Elia, Gael Clichy and finally the Barcelona player Arda Turan. Since the
rebranding, the club has never finished the league below the top four positions,
and continues to be a title contender. However, the club could hardly find any
support in Istanbul, while the city continued to be dominated by the traditional
‘Big Three’. In the 2017–2018 season in which Başakşehir FK was a title
contender until the last few weeks, the club had an average attendance of 5,112
while Beşiktaş recorded 29,562, Fenerbahçe 29,035 and Galatasaray 40,778.
While the Big Three had over 2 million Passolig e-card holders in total,
Başakşehir FK barely reached over 50,000. Istanbul football fandom, dominated
by a secular tradition in the central neighbourhood of the city, did not like this
project team, and the conservatives did not embrace it either. Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan was personally bothered by this fact. During his speech at the AKP
Başakşehir branch congress in April 2018, he addressed this issue in particular:
‘the youth of Başakşehir should fill these stands. Young people, are you up for
it? Your team is playing for the title, you should fill the stands. One day, I may
surprise you and show up for a game, if I see the stands empty, I would not like
it.’ He continued, leaving no doubt about what he meant:

If you are not present in these fields, you will remain weak also in politics. You
should take care of it. If you remain interested in following certain things, it will not
do it. The AK Party youth should manifest itself also in these fields, in football,
basketball, swimming. If our youth remains content with its own fields, we cannot
exist in these national fields.

Erdoğan was overtly demanding that the ‘pious generation’ that he dreamed
about replaced the secular football fans. In the last five years that the AKP
dominated all most every domain in Turkey, the Istanbul football stands, which
have single-handedly shaped football fandom, have remained a missing piece.
Law No. 6222: The first cut is the deepest
As aforementioned, the AKP’s intervention in football was rather indirect before
2010. Even though many AKP members were involved in football, especially at
the local level, institutionally not much had been done. After the Constitution
referendum of 2010, which resulted in a major power shift within the state
between the appointed secularists and the elected Islamists, this has changed.
Erdoğan’s party, with the help of their dearest ally Fethullah Gülen and his cult-
like religious community, launched a transformation in the state and society,
redesigning the justice system, the execution branch and also openly attempting
interventions on secular lifestyles. This aggressive change of strategy impacted
football severely, at many levels.
At the judicial level, a new regulation for dealing with violence and disorder
in sports was put in motion right after the referendum. The AKP government had
already passed a law on the subject in 2004 (Law No. 5149 on Preventing
Violence and Disorder in Sports Games): however, as Güney (2017: 265)
pointed out, this law mostly defined sports actors’ roles and had little
sanctioning power. One important part of this law was that it clearly recognised
fans’ associations and delegated responsibility to fans’ representatives, even
though the general approach of the law was that fans’ were potential
troublemakers. During the preparation of the new regulation, this somewhat
democratic principle was entirely discarded. The fans’ representative role which
used to be given to a person selected among the fans by club boards was
delegated to a club board member, effectively ending the already limited
participation of sports fans into decision-making processes, while they were
subject to severe penalties, including bans without appeal and prison sentences.
Furthermore, the law envisaged a compulsory electronic ticketing system, which
entailed the wide-range collection of personal data and completely authorised the
sports federations to use these data or transfer to any third parties.
The fans were not consulted while the draft text was prepared; the government
also contacted the mainstream sports media officials, making sure the new
regulation was adequately supported by the media, and the opposing voices
would not be heard. The law passed at the National Assembly in a very swift
manner on 31 March 2011, as opposition speaker Tayfun İçli underlined that day
during the discussions, ‘we are bringing this law to the session even before the
commission report on violence in sports was read in the parliament’ (TBMM
Parliamentary Minutes, 23rd term, 5th year, 85th session). Even though the
opposition made some critical remarks during the discussion and İçli called the
law ‘The Law on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s wrath’ (due to Erdoğan having been
opposed by sports fans in the World Basketball Championship in 2010 and Türk
Telekom Arena inauguration ceremony in January 2011), the CHP and the MHP
supported the law during the vote. Suat Kılıç, the Minister of Sports of the era,
thanked both parties after the vote and argued that the coalition of three parties
to pass the law is an example of ‘how sports unify people’.
While this law was advertised widely as a measure to ‘punish hooligans and
finish the violence in sports’, some less-debated aspects of the regulation proved
crucial a bit later, when public attorneys close to the Fethullah Gülen group
launched a major operation on match-fixing in July 2011. The most important
among these aspects was the fact that the law made match-fixing also a subject
of the criminal law, while it used to be a subject of private law, regulated by the
TFF in football (TFF’s authority was not rescinded by the new law). Therefore,
while any suspicion of match-fixing would be dealt with by the TFF, the public
attorneys were also authorised to launch a criminal investigation. Andthat was
what happened on 3 July 2011, when police officers raided the houses of
prominent football officials, including the Fenerbahçe chairman Aziz Yıldırım,
and made arrests. The operation was a bombshell in sports. The previous
season’s champions Fenerbahçe, as well as Beşiktaş and Trabzonspor among
other clubs, were accused of tampering with league and cup game results. The
fan reactions differed according to the clubs they supported. The Fenerbahçe
fans were furious and they were sure that the whole operation was an attempt to
control the club. The Kadıköy-based secularist and left-leaning groups, such as
Vamos Bien, later claimed that the operation was conducted against Fenerbahçe
by Gülenists because of the secular and Kemalist nature of the club (although, at
that period, Fenerbahçe board had AKP members). Beşiktaş fans were more
reserved, the most important fan group Çarşı invited the arrested Beşiktaş
officials to ‘clear their names and come back to the club’. Trabzonspor fans,
although their club was also accused initially, supported the operation and
demanded that the previous season’s championship title would be given to their
club having finished the league in second position. Galatasaray fans were mostly
sure that their bitter rivals Fenerbahçe fixed games without a single doubt. The
match-fixing operation rapidly turned into a social trauma where convictions
were held according to the teams of preference, as the police recklessly violated
the personal rights of the accused, leaking information to the media, including
their mugshots. The pro-government media, including the pro-Gülen ones, were
quick to criminalise the suspects, which added fuel to the fire.
The sudden and severe match-fixing operation, as well as the unfair treatment
of the accused, triggered a rapid mobilisation, especially among Fenerbahçe
fans. The fans, led by Kemalist or left-leaning fan groups based around the
Kadıköy area, organised a rally in the Kadıköy pier in December 2011, and
started to attend trials in the central courthouse in Çağlayan and the Silivri prison
in 2012. Their outrage was manipulated to a cult of personality for the
imprisoned chairman Aziz Yıldırım, on which the Fenerbahçe club actually
capitalised by selling apparel with Yıldırım’s photo on them. On Labour Day,
some Fenerbahçe fans brought a banner with the chairman’s portrait to the rally,
with the slogan ‘Aziz Yıldırım is our pride, we cannot live without pride’. Some
academics launched a petition for Yıldırım’s liberation, claiming that ‘they were
unable to write academic articles because they were too distracted by Yıldırım’s
unfair treatment’. The imprisoned chairman quickly picked up the discourse
created by the fans and included elements from Fenerbahçe’s involvement in the
Turkish War of Independence in his courthouse defence. All these would prove
quite ironic when Yıldırım was acquitted after the rift between Gülen and
Erdoğan, and Yıldırım became a devoted ally of Erdoğan. After his release,
Yıldırım also declared war on many fan groups who supported him
wholeheartedly when he was in prison. Aziz Yıldırım lost his seat in 2018 after
20 years, following a landslide defeat against Ali Koç in the Fenerbahçe
congress. Meanwhile, the AKP-driven courts have been dealing with another
lawsuit on match-fixing since 2016, this time against their former allies, the
Gülenists, claiming the whole match-fixing operation was a conspiracy by the
Gülenist public attorneys, including Zekeriya Öz, who rose to prominence in
2007 when he was in charge of the Ergenekon coup plot case. Öz fled the
country in 2016, after the coup d’état attempt presumed to be staged by
Gülenists. There has not been an AKP member among the defendants of the
match-fixing conspiracy case.
After the match-fixing operation aimed at prominent names who happen to
have important ties with the political world, the government decided to amend
the Law No. 6222 in November 2011. The Law No. 6250 made several changes
in the Law No. 6222, dramatically reducing prison sentences given to match-
fixing offences. The president of the era, Abdullah Gül, vetoed the law claiming
it lacked legal deterrence; however Parliament passed the law as was after the
veto. None of the criticised clauses about the fans were amended.
The Passolig E-ticket scheme
One of the most direct and controversial interventions by the AKP in the football
world has been the e-ticket scheme named Passolig. As aforementioned, the
electronic ticket scheme was first proposed during the draft text of the Law No.
6222 and came into effect in 2014, after the mass participation of football fans in
the Gezi Protests and the collective protests against the government in the
stadiums, especially in Istanbul. While, the scheme itself was quite controversial
regarding its possible repercussions on card holders’ privacy, the level of
criticism went up a notch when the system’s operation was given to Aktifbank, a
bank owned by Çalık Holding, a business conglomerate known by its closeness
to the Erdoğan family, as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak
(today’s Minister of Treasury and Finance) was the holding’s CEO at the time.
The holding has also been very active in key industries such as energy,
construction and media, in which it has found government support in finding
credit from public banks (Buğra and Savaşkan, 2012: 53).
The controversies around Passolig created a rare act of fan action, as an
association called Fans’ Rights Solidarity Association (Taraftar Hakları
Dayanışma Merkezi) brought the scheme to court. The Consumer Court, while
imposing an interim injunction against Passolig, ‘could not notify the plaintiff in
time due to workload’ and the injunction was annulled automatically as the
plaintiff could not make an application to the execution office for the decision to
come into effect. While this court order helped Passolig continue thanks to a
mere technicality, the Association also applied to the Competition Board about
the issue. As a result, in March 2015, the Board granted Passolig individual
exemption until the end of the 2016–2017 football season, which was later
extended until the 2023–2024 season. Both rulings were taken to the Court of
Cassation by the Association. After two years of stalling, the Court of Cassation
affirmed the decisions without justification in 2018. Meanwhile, the Association
also applied to the Constitutional Court. In December 2015, the court, while
rejecting the request for cancellation of the system, scrapped the article of Law
No. 6222 that gave authorisation to the TFF of selling card holders’ personal
information to third parties. The Fans’ Rights Solidarity Association will also
take the Court of Cassation rulings to the Constitutional Court.
The impartial bidding process and the bizarre irregularities in the appeal
process are far from being exceptional in Erdoğan’s Turkey. The NGOs battling
against construction or energy projects experience this type of process on an
almost daily basis. The Passolig system, which is quite comparable to the
membership card and CCTV scheme that Thatcher tried and failed to establish in
1984, established a very restrictive surveillance system that helped a company
very close to the Erdoğan family make money. Therefore, Passolig has fulfilled
the regime’s two core principles; autocracy and crony capitalism.
The Passolig scheme caused fan boycotts, especially during the 2014–2015
season. However, as might have been expected, these boycotts were short-lived.
The transfer craze between 2016 and 2018, partly fuelled by Aktifbank money in
forms of Passolig revenue and bank credit, brought world-class names such as
Van Persie, Pepe or Gomis to Turkey and the fans finally caved in. After all, ‘the
team needed them’.
Protests against the AKP in the stadiums
After the Passolig boycotts, the TFF president Yıldırım Demirören, who
happened to be an overt supporter of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that used the TFF
rostrum once to ask for the president’s ‘yes’ campaign the 2017 referendum,
shrugged his shoulders about the declining attendance in football matches and
said ‘we only lost two thousand people per game. But these two thousand people
are fans we do not want to see in the stadiums anyway’ (Futbol Aktüel, 2017).
Demirören’s statement confirmed a frequent argument that the AKP preferred
football with empty stadiums, since it could not fully control the stands,
especially in metropolitan cities with a heavy opposition presence, like Istanbul
or Izmir after the Gezi Protests.
As a matter of fact, the sour experiences of the AKP with the stadiums started
before the Gezi Protests. The stadiums in Turkey, loosely vetted public spaces
with a long-lasting secular tradition, created environments where the government
officials had to confront a probably hostile crowd without a safety net. These
confrontations have often led to public and sometimes global humiliations.
One of the first of such experiences was the final game of the World
Basketball Championships on 13 September 2010 in Istanbul, between Turkey
and the United States of America. This event, for which the tickets were sold for
30–130 euros days before by a complicated online sale system, hosted the
president of the era Abdullah Gül and the prime minister Erdoğan, during the
medal ceremony. This event, broadcast by over 60 TV channels all over the
world, witnessed a massive protest against the two Islamist politicians, who were
whistled at and booed by hundreds. After this humiliation, the Prime Minister’s
Office started an investigation to find the protesters that they called
‘provocateurs’ using the seat numbers.
Two years later, Istanbul hosted the WTA Tennis Championships. The tickets
for this elite event were sold for about 50 euros four months prior to the final
day. This time, Erdoğan and Gül did not attend the medal ceremony; ministers
Binali Yıldırım and Fatma Şahin were sent to face the music and be protested at
by hundreds in a major international event followed by millions. These two
events were elite events which were much more expensive compared to a regular
sports event in Turkey; they also required a pre-order process that entailed
planning to attend the event. Onn both occasions, it was the elite sports
spectators who were interested in basketball and tennis, branches much less
popular than football. The urban, secular middle-class and upper-middle-class
sports spectators publicly displayed their disgust against the AKP politicians.
These emotions would come back during the Gezi Protests to haunt the
government.
In 2011, an elite football event also had a similar story. On 15 January 2011,
during the inauguration ceremony of Galatasaray’s new stadium Türk Telekom
Arena, partly undertaken by the Public Housing Administration (TOKİ), the
director of this institution Erdoğan Bayraktar criticised the club’s newly
deceased president Özhan Canaydın and accused the club of ‘being incapable of
building its own stadium’. As a result, the Galatasaray fans, who exclusively
comprised invitees and season ticket holders, whistled Bayraktar and the Prime
Minister Erdoğan in attendance to the point that they had to leave the stadium
even before the exhibition match between Galatasaray and Ajax Amsterdam
started. Once again, it was the ‘distinguished’ fans who unleashed their furore
against Erdoğan.
In hindsight, these three events harbingered the middle-class Stambulite sports
fans’ reaction against the Erdoğan government during the Gezi Protests. These
elite events hosted (upper) middle-class fans with a higher cultural capital,
distinctive tastes (such as international basketball or tennis), and secular/modern
lifestyles. Those fans who whistled the ministers in those three occasions were
quite probably in the streets during Gezi.
Meanwhile, after the Gezi Protests, the government tried different measures to
stop being protested in international sports events. During the Mediterranean
Games in Mersin that began right after the evacuation of the Gezi Park in June
2013, the public ticket sales ceased abruptly and the Sports Minister Suat Kılıç
announced that the Ministry bought 20,000 tickets for ‘the protocol’. While
some of these tickets were distributed to the AKP Mersin youth branch, many
seats remained empty. Also cities with heavy AKP support like Kayseri and
Konya began to host national games. In one of those matches in Konya, a city
where Erdoğan had 75% of the votes in presidential elections, the fans booed the
one minute silence for the victims of the Ankara bombing committed by the ISIS
in 2015, and shouted ‘Ya Allah Bismillah Allah-u Ekber’.
Match-fixing operation
Match-fixing is a recurring theme in football in Turkey. Briefly, every supporter
is sure that every club except their own is involved in it. For a neutral observer,
all teams seem to be equally likely to be involved in match-fixing in different
periods of time. Until the passage of the Law No. 6222 in 2011, the TFF was the
sole authority for investigating match-fixing claims. While there were few
examples of such investigations, they mostly functioned as brushing things
under the rug. For instance, in 1998, Murat Akarsu, the Şekerspor goalkeeper,
was accused of receiving UD$100,000 from Fenerbahçe; however the
investigation was quickly closed. In 2002, a public attorney launched an
investigation into a mafia leader called Ali Fevzi Bir who allegedly had a crime
network that included football coaches and referees, documented by phone
recordings. However, the court had no jurisdiction about match-fixing back then;
the criminal investigation yielded no results either. Meanwhile, Ali Fevzi Bir
fled to Milan, and claimed that ‘the leagues would be suspended and the national
team could not have gone to the 2002 World Cup’ if a thorough match-fixing
operation took place (Milliyet, 19 February 2002).
In 2005, the Turkish Parliament arranged an investigative commission on
match-fixing, doping and violence in sports, and listened to some actors from the
football world in hearings. The commission later concluded that the TFF did not
take the match-fixing allegations seriously (TBMM investigation report 10/63:
113–228). As a result, the government started to seek ways of establishing new
regulations that would give public attorneys jurisdiction to investigate sports-
related matters, a move initially supported by all political parties. In March
2011, Law No. 6222 gave the public attorneys (including the specially
authorised ones, predominantly Gülenists) the authority to launch operations on
match-fixing. Right after, Zekeriya Öz, a Gülenist public attorney known by the
Ergenekon case, launched an investigation that would result in the arrests of
prominent football officials on 3 July, such as the Fenerbahçe president Aziz
Yıldırım, as well as Şekip Mosturoğlu, Serdal Adalı and Nevzat Şakar, the
Fenerbahçe, Beşiktaş and Trabzonspor board members respectively. According
to the police report, there was match-fixing in 19 Süper Lig matches. The police
also leaked the mugshots of Aziz Yıldırım, some evidence incriminating him to
the press. Meanwhile, the TFF wanted to launch its own investigation, as it still
held the jurisdiction for the football-related part of the issue, but they were
unable to see the evidence, as the investigation had a confidentiality order. After
a string of controversies, five TFF officials were given permission to examine
the documents in a ‘cosmic room’ where classified documents could be
inspected.
The European football body, UEFA was also involved in the process. The
authority first decided to wait for the end of the legal procedures. However, on
24 August 2013, it replaced Fenerbahçe with Trabzonspor in the Champions
League, even though Trabzonspor itself was mentioned in the investigation. The
Fenerbahçe board filed a case against this decision on Court of Arbitration for
Sport (CAS). The Court of Arbitration for Sport had dismissed the urgent
request for provisional measures to include Fenerbahçe back in the Champions
League, but the case proceeded. On 26 April 2012, Fenerbahçe suddenly
dismissed its 45 million euro case against the UEFA, citing ‘national interests’.
Just three days later, the TFF changed its regulations to revoke the relegation
penalty against clubs involved in match-fixing. Also, in December 2011, the
Law No. 6222 articles on match-fixing penalties were dramatically alleviated. In
May 2012, the TFF concluded its investigation, giving the club board members
minor penalties. In December 2012, the Court condemned Aziz Yıldırım to six
years in prison and a pecuniary punishment of US$1 million. Yıldırım, who had
been detained for 18 months, was liberated. In October 2015, after the Erdoğan-
Gülen rift, he was cleared by the Court of Appeal. After the coup d’état attempt,
the match-fixing conspiracy case was filed against the Gülenists, while Yıldırım
declared his support for Erdoğan in multiple occasions, such as when he visited
the Turkish army barracks in the southern border of the country to express
support for the troops fighting the Kurdish militants in Syria.
The wrongdoings during the judicial process, the long detention periods,
violation of defendants’ privacy and arbitrary regulation changes during the
process by the TFF and the Parliament created a massive trauma in the football
world. While the supporters of all clubs lost their trust on the impartiality of
judicial and executive actors, each interpreted the case solely based on their own
positions. The Fenerbahçe supporters were convicted that it was a conspiracy to
take over the club, while for the others the club used its influence with
politicians and executives to get away with match-fixing. Absence of a
transparent and well-structured investigation created a giant mess which
frustrated all football fans.
The match-fixing process also triggered a massive politicisation wave among
Fenerbahçe fans. This politicisation was especially visible on social media, on
Twitter and blogs in particular. A blog called ‘Papazın Çayırı’ (named after the
old name of the club’s ground ‘Preacher’s Meadow’), founded by left-leaning
Fenerbahçe fans in 2008, quickly became the principal source of information for
the fans. The blog was known to be a source critical of both the club board and
the government before, therefore they had serious credibility in the eyes of
Fenerbahçe fans. Between July 2011 and July 2012, the blog published 126
articles on the subject, which reshaped most fans’ perceptions about the match-
fixing operation around the argument that the Gülenists targeted Fenerbahçe as it
was a Republican club. The blog also played an important role in the
organisation of a mass rally in Kadıköy. The semi-official website 12 Numara
and its Twitter account, run by the club’s social media manager, were also
effective, especially in the creation of a personality cult around Aziz Yıldırım.
While these sources were critical of the government and the mainstream media,
they persistently refused to take the claims seriously. On the other hand, one
important consequence of these events was the growing mistrust on mainstream
media and the belief that it manipulated facts to the government’s favour,
accentuating some views while hiding others. This would later appear as one of
the core arguments of the protesters during the Gezi events.
The ‘Great Fenerbahçe Rally’ organised in Kadıköy on 25 December 2011 is
another point where the fans’ outrage could be linked to how they reacted in
Gezi. The rally was mostly organised as a fans’ initiative and it was announced
through social media. Even though, it was reserved to the Fenerbahçe fans, it
benefited from a repertoire of actions that would later nurture the Gezi Protests.
It was a non-partisan, citizens’ initiative that was made popular using other
sources than the conventional media, namely the social media. It was not a
premeditated, well-structured organisation, but an almost spontaneous outcry of
feeling mistreated. Also, even though it had political arguments, the participation
depended on shared identities that would gather people who do not know each
other. In many ways, this rally was quite comparable to Gezi, in terms of its
emergence, albeit different in its actual practices. The ‘Great Fenerbahçe Rally’
could be politically and action-wise compared to the Gazdanadam festival that
was organised in Kadıköy by left-leaning nationalist parties after Gezi, which
had Kemalist tones and was more nationalistic.
The difference that we cannot neglect between the Fenerbahçe fans’ actions
and Gezi lies in the position they took vis-à-vis the dominant actors. The main
arguments of Gezi openly questioned the government and the core values of the
state from time to time. Meanwhile, Fenerbahçe, like any other major football
club, has been in a ‘historical bloc’ with the state and the finance capital. While
the AKP tried to nudge this consensus to make room for its hegemony, the
dominant actors of football in Turkey never dared to break the consensus. Aziz
Yıldırım’s arrest and his challenging discourse against the AKP government was
an exception which actually presented fans an opportunity to take advantage of
this fallout within the historical bloc to get their share of the power. However,
because of their inability to distinguish between the club identity and the club
board whose interests were different from theirs, they chose to side with Aziz
Yıldırım unreservedly. There was never negotiation between the club board and
the fans for a more democratic club in exchange for the fans’ support that Aziz
Yıldırım greatly needed. The reason for the lack of such political exchange
stems from one of the principal arguments of this book.
In Turkey, almost 90% of football supporters all over the country support
three Stambulite teams. Except for some cities like Trabzon or Bursa where the
teams representing the city reached league titles, the Stambulite teams are
incomparably dominant against the local teams, regarding support. This fact has
two major consequences. Firstly, each Stambulite team has millions of fans
everywhere, in all cities and also in the diaspora communities. Secondly, as the
majority of fans are distant from Istanbul, their fandom practices depend on
imagined identities, not actual fandom practices that the Stambulite fans
experience. These two consequences create a setting which unmistakably
resembles nationalism. The major Stambulite clubs are micro-nations with
members from different regions and all walks of life with imagined ties that
create the fan’s identity that is very commensurable to the citizen’s identity. And
this citizenship is heavily modelled after Turkish citizenship, as the micro-
nationalism of clubs is a smaller-scale model of the Turkish nationalism. As the
Turkish citizen is expected to be a submissive subject to the Turkish state rather
than a political actor that redefines it; the fan is expected to pledge an
unquestionable allegiance to the club that is exclusively represented by the club
board, and the president as the father figure, quite comparable to Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The nation is the father’s children (The
adopted surname of Atatürk literally means ‘the father of Turks’), not equal
partners in the political process, be it in the nation or in a club. Accordingly, a
citizen or a fan voluntarily desists from exercising political rights and claims that
stem from being an actor in a society. They are represented by the state or the
board, led by the father figure. They rarely seek democratisation of this process.
Such a demand was, therefore, absent in the Fenerbahçe fans’ protests; however
it was one of the core arguments of the Gezi movement. Nevertheless, as we will
have to underline a few more times throughout this book, there was more than
one Gezi, one that created its discourse, the NGOs, political bodies, organised
entities, and one that popularised the movement without completely complying
with its causes, millions of Turkish citizens who were outraged by the
government’s mistreatment and intervention in their lives. While a few
organised fan groups with a limited number of members may belong to the first
Gezi, the hundreds of thousands who took the streets with their jerseys on
certainly belonged to the second. Whilst the majority of works about the
participation of football fans in Gezi analysed the first, I will work on the second
since it is more meaningful to explain the Turkish urban, secular middle-classes.
That is why the ethnographic sample used in this book solely consists of
independent fans.
The micro-nationalism in the Stambulite clubs also deepened the cleavages
between these clubs’ fans during the match-fixing case. As there was no
transparent process and a whole lot of controversial and contradictory calls, the
events were interpreted based solely on fans’ own convictions. However, there
was one common element that came out of this process; mistrust in the
government. For different reasons, most fans felt cheated and frustrated. That
common feeling might have helped in overcoming hostilities between clubs
during the spontaneous explosion of the Gezi Protests. However, from what I
observed, I can argue that this was a minor reason. The major reason, which also
constituted one of my hypotheses before my field research, was, in my opinion,
the more dominant identity elements intertwined with the fan identities, which
were threatened by the Erdoğan government. While some of the government’s
move created a perceived threat among secular people in general, some directly
affected fandom practices in Istanbul, like the alcohol restrictions.
The new regulation (Law No. 6487) imposing a broad spectrum of restriction
on the sale and public use of alcohol was proposed to Parliament right after the
police violence on the Labour Day and just before the Gezi Protests in May
2013. In many ways, it functioned as a final straw for people with a secular
lifestyle. Before, the Islamist Erdoğan government tried to discourage alcohol
and tobacco consumption through public discourses and tax surges. The new
regulation was interpreted as a direct intervention on the secular lifestyle, since it
not only prohibited the use of alcohol in many public places including the
stadiums and its sale after 10pm except restaurants and bars, it also banned
alcoholic beverage brands from sponsoring events. The sponsorship of such
companies had been the backbone of almost all cultural events in Istanbul and
other major cities, such as festivals and concerts. With the new law, these events,
of which it was not a secret that Erdoğan and his government did not approve,
took a direct hit. The heavy restrictions of alcohol sale and use in public places
also made an impact on the fandom practices. Beşiktaş, Galatasaray and
Fenerbahçe fans are known to drink and chant collectively before walking to
stadium en masse before home games in Istanbul, in Köyiçi, Nevizade and
Kadıköy Bağdat Street and Fish Market districts respectively. While most of the
drinking takes place in the restaurants, public drinking is nothing extraordinary.
The use of alcohol (along with much less frequent marijuana use) is so
integrated into the Stambulite fan subculture, a famous chant by the Çarşı group
starts with the verse ‘we drink the wine, we smoke the joint …’.
Therefore, the fandom practices of these three clubs were (and still are) at the
heart of the secular lifestyle in Istanbul. It does not mean that all fans are
drinkers, or even they all have a secular lifestyle. But the core neighbourhoods
(Beşiktaş, Beyoğlu and Kadıköy) that constitute the canon of the fan subculture
in Istanbul and Turkey, and the fandom practices are overwhelmingly secular.
There lies the conflict between the fans and the Erdoğan government. It is not a
coincidence that the Gezi Park is located inside the triangle framed by three
secular neighbourhoods of Istanbul, which are also the birth places of Beşiktaş,
Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray. This triangle that has functioned as the cultural
heart of the secular country that Erdoğan vowed to transform into a pious ‘New
Turkey’. That was why Erdoğan, after the historical Atatürk Cultural Centre next
to the Gezi Park was razed in April 2018, bragged vindictively; ‘Gezi supporters,
you can huff and puff all you want, we demolished it.’ It is also why there is a
giant mosque construction going on just across the Atatürk Statue at the Taksim
Square. Erdoğan, since his days as the mayor, has always wanted to conquer
Istanbul. Without taking over these secular neighbourhoods, his hegemony
would never be complete. This turned the Gezi Park urbanisation project to a
cultural battle, and it was inevitable that the Stambulite football clubs
intertwined with the Turkish modernity were caught in it.
It should also be noted that the neighbourhood where the fandom rituals take
place has been under a massive wave of urban transformation in the 2000s. For
example, in 2010, just across the street from the famous Kazan bistro where
Çarşı members and other Beşiktaş fans are known to drink and chant before
games, the Arts and Sculpture Museum was taken over by the Prime Minister’s
Office to build a workplace for Erdoğan. The public teahouse next to the
building was taken over to create a permanent police post of water cannons and
armoured vehicles. Next to Erdoğan’s office, after a very controversial
restoration process, a luxury hotel called Shangri La was inaugurated, removing
public bus stops in the area. On 12 May 2013, right between Labour Day events
and the Gezi Protests, the police officers in the area attacked Beşiktaş fans, firing
real bullets into air over hundreds of civilians. In Kadıköy, next to the
Fenerbahçe Stadium, an urbanisation project that would turn the open air
marketplace into a shopping mall was proposed in 2012, was eventually opposed
and blocked by residents of the area, predominantly avid Fenerbahçe fans. In
2010, the old stadium of Galatasaray, Ali Sami Yen (also known as ‘the Hell’ by
most European fans in the 1990s), was sold to a skyscraper project, removing all
traces of the club from the Mecidiyeköy area. Therefore, the fans were not
unfamiliar to the AKP transforming public places into urbanisation projects.
Gezi hit very close to home.
As I argue that the Republican Doxa is essential in defining the habitus of the
modern middle-classes in Turkey, I also put this concept at the core of my
research about the Gezi protesters who participated in this historic event
emphasising their football fan identity. Doing that, I will intentionally leave out
organised fan groups such as Çarşı, and work on independent fans with no fan
group or political affiliation. At this point, I would like to remind the duality of
Gezi, which comprises politically experienced groups (mostly part of Taksim
Solidarity from the beginning) and the newcomers who had never participated in
political rallies and mostly rejected political identities (and were quite hostile
against them). My research is about the latter group, since they constitute the
majority in these protests and represent nothing but their social position and
lifestyle. This does not mean that these people were without effect before or
during the events; on the contrary, they are one of the main reasons that the
Erdoğan regime turned these events to a culture war, as this group tended to use
its cultural capital as a defence mechanism against the regime’s hegemonic
attempts. One principal aim of this research is to find out the extent of the role
that the Republican Doxa played in the participation of newcomers in the Gezi
Protests, and their lack of political action in the aftermath. In other words, what I
have been looking for is whether these people participated in the protests to
restore the old regime or to contribute to the Gezi discourse, mostly created by
the politically experienced groups, demanding a new, unprecedented democracy.
The Gezi Movement was never composed of an homogeneous entity, but of
different ‘space of positions’ and ‘sub-spaces which correspond to different
fields’ (Wacquant, 1993: 21). Among these fields, the ‘field of power,’ which
the Movement tries to shake to its core, may have been paradoxically present,
and if so this should have been through the participation of crowds with a strong
alliance to the Republican Doxa, thus newcomers. My research aims to shed
some light on this suspicion.
Another thing that I would like to help explain is, indeed, why football
fandom played such an important role in attracting newcomers to Gezi. Up until
this point, through various chapters, I tried to elaborate that football is
inseparably interwoven with politics in Turkey. For now on, I will try to reveal if
the fan identity acts as a surrogate to political identities which have been
ostracised, marginalised and even criminalised, especially since the 1980 coup
d’état.
Bibliography
Buğra, Ayşe, and Osman Savaşkan. New Capitalism in Turkey: The Relationship between
Politics, Religion and Business. Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar,
2014.
Çavdar, Ayşe. ‘Building, Marketing and Living in an Islamic Gated Community: Novel
Configurations of Class and Religion in Istanbul: Building, Marketing and Living in
an Islamic Gated Community’. International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research 40, no. 3 (2016): 507–523.
Futbol Aktüel. TV broadcast, NTV, 18 January 2017.
Güney, Emir. ‘Supporter Ownership in Turkish Football’. In Borja García and Jinming
Zheng (eds), Football and Supporter Activism in Europe. Cham: Springer
International Publishing, 2017, 257–276. Milliyet, 19 February 2002.
TBMM Investigation Report 10/63. Available online at
www.tbmm.gov.tr/sirasayi/donem22/yil01/ss956.pdf [22 February 2019].
TBMM Parliamentary Minutes, 23rd term, 5th year, 85th session. Available online at
www.tbmm.gov.tr/develop/owa/tutanak_sd.birlesim_baslangic?
P4=20907&P5=B&PAGE1=63&PAGE2=&web_user_id=17388821 [22 February
2019].
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Bourdieu on La Noblesse d’Etat’. Theory Culture and Society 10 (1993): 19–44.
Chapter 7
Gezi matters
A brief context of politics in Turkey
In a country like Turkey with very complicated social dynamics where the
political choices are usually built upon identities and/or social allegiances, it is
exceptionally difficult to position social and political movements. However, in
order to facilitate the reader’s orientation to the political life in Turkey, I will
attempt to conceptualise the political sphere of the country.
In a survey directed by Çarkoğlu between 2011 and 2014 (oypusulasi.org), the
political parties participating in the local and legislative elections were
positioned on a bi-dimensional graph of spatial analysis, according to their
political inclinations in certain subjects. The political axes upon which political
positions were laid out were initially defined by Çarkoğlu and Hinich (2006:
369–392) as secularism and nationalism. In the subsequent study, Çarkoğlu
(2011) redefined these axes as ‘left-right’ and ‘being pro-change – anti-change’.
These studies by Çarkoğlu and his team take the political and ideological
shifts in party politics into account. Yet, they do not reveal the different factions
within each political movement and depict parties as dots in the matrix.
However, the places that political parties and movements occupy in the political
sphere are not distinct points but broad zones, therefore I suggest the following
graph using the same political axes proposed by Çarkoğlu.
As Çarkoğlu himself suggests, the political axes in Turkey may be defined
according to where political actors stand with respect to key aspects modernity,
such as secularism and nationalism. Therefore, in different periods, different
actors may develop different strategies and alliances. For this reason, political
positions and movements in Turkey should be treated in a segmented manner as
possible, avoiding generalisations about the characteristics of key actors. A
chronological approach may come in handy to show changes in actors and their
positions in diverse subjects.
The history of modern Turkey is generally considered to begin in 1908, with
the declaration of the Second Constitution (II. Meşrutiyet) as a genuine attempt
at constitutional monarchy in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. The
Kemalist approach to history, like that of Berkes (1964/1998: 17–19), often
explains the transformation that took place in that period as a ‘rupture’ between
the traditional order, represented by the Abdülhamid II period, and modernity.
However, this argument has recently been more and more contested. For
instance, Deringil (1991: 345–346) argues that Islam and the caliphate were used
as tools to reduce the legitimation deficit of the state in that period. Meanwhile,
Mardin (1990: 50) claims that the pan-Islamist politics of Abdülhamid II did not
aim to unite all the Muslims, but rather functioned as an example of proto-
nationalism. However, despite these newer interpretations, it may still be said
that the Abdülhamid II era is widely considered to be an Islamist and autocratic
period. This discussion, which is often more political than historical, is important
as it has ties to the current political agenda, since the AKP and its leader Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan consider Abdülhamid II as a point of reference. However this
particular period may be interpreted, it is evident that passage to a parliamentary
monarchy is a milestone in the political history, and the civil liberties flourishing
at that period led to the acceleration of modernisation in the country. Therefore,
taking the declaration of the Second Constitutional era as a starting point is
rather accurate.

Figure 7.1 Political axes and positions represented by political parties in Turkey

While the passage to parliamentary monarchy is a key part of the Ottoman

state’s modernisation, this transformation was by no means smooth and flawless.
Even though the young leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)
that was the driving force of the political transformation had revolutionary ideas,
they did not dare to dethrone Abdülhamid II; furthermore, the importance given
to age and seniority in Ottoman society and the lack of experience of the Young
Turks further diminished their political capacity (Zürcher, 2005: 94). They even
had to face an Islamist counter-revolution attempt in 1909. Nevertheless, in
1913, after the Balkan Wars, they gained further powers due to a coup carried
out by Enver, Talat and Cemal, three leaders of the CUP, which eliminated
several ministers within the Ottoman government. After this moment, the CUP
shifted its politics further towards Turkish nationalism.
Even though the political world in Turkey has gone through important
changes through the decades, Islamism and modernist nationalism have
remained as two defining political currents since the conflict between the CUP
and Abdülhamid II. These two currents have often eclipsed left–right as political
axes. After the AKP took the power, this traditional duality became even more
visible.
Turkish nationalism and ethnic cleavages
The national question in the Ottoman land became more and more apparent with
the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. As a matter of fact, the Serbian revolution in
1815 and the Greek revolution in 1821 had already sown the seeds of the ethnic
dissolution of the Empire. After the Balkan Wars, the ethnic question became an
issue that concerned all the ethnic groups in Anatolia. As keeping the Empire
intact was no longer an option, an irreversible phase began. Almost every ethnic
group, depending on their access to the economic capital, started to create its
own bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. In the Abdülhamid II period, the non-
Muslims had relatively more wiggle room compared to the Muslims. They also
had more access to the economic activities, and they had better contacts with
Europe. Most leaders of the emerging Turkish nationalism were from regions
other than Anatolia, such as Thessaloniki. Therefore, until the Second
Constitutional period, Turkish nationalism was belated and underdeveloped; and
soon after revanchism became one of its core features. Furthermore, Turks
feeling themselves the natural owners and the heir apparent of the Ottoman
Empire provoked irredentist tendencies. Also, a set of religion and nationality-
related unresolved issues that I will present below have made a massive impact
on the political world
The genocide and the Armenian question
According to Kévorkian (2011: 207–217), the Armenian Genocide in 1915 took
place as a result of the CUP shifting to authoritarian nationalism and the power
struggle between the Young Turks and the Armenian revolutionaries. Turkey
joining in the First World War in Germany’s favour, on the other hand, turned
the Eastern Anatolia into a bloody battlefield where Turks and Armenians faced
each other (ibid., 245–246), while the secret organisation of Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa
affiliated to the CUP started to commit civilian massacres between August 1914
and March 1915. In March 1915, the CUP decided to end the ‘Armenian threat’,
and a forced deportation wave that would result in a genocide started especially
in the southern Anatolia.
The Armenian Genocide is the quintessential element of the official Turkish
mentality, as the denial of this event is a core component of the Turkish
nationalism. Akçam argues that the denial of the Genocide is one of the basic
principles of the Turkish Republic that would eventually become state dogmas
protected by the Turkish army, along with the denial of the Kurdish identity, the
social classes and Islamism (2004: 231). Especially until the 2000s, these issues
remained to be taboos; however, with the Turkey’s candidacy for European
Union membership and the flourishing civil society in the 2000s, these issues
have increasingly become part of the public debate. The rise of the AKP to
prominence in Turkish politics coincided with this unprecedented wave, and the
party, mostly comprising previously ostracised Islamists, hugely benefited from
the taboos being broken, including the taboo of Islamists ruling the country. The
AKP’s willingness to discuss those forbidden issues including the Cyprus
question, the Kurdish issue and the Armenian Genocide, as well as the Kemalist
opposition’s stern refusal to bring the official ideology under discussion, brought
Erdoğan’s party an unexpected support from the European politics, as well as
from Turkish libertarian intellectuals.
The Kurdish question
The Kurdish question is another important point of discussion in the society of
Turkey. The Kurds, a predominantly Muslim community, were considered by
the Turkish elite as allies during the War of Independence and a founding
element of the Republic of Turkey, at least in theory. However, in the early years
of the Republic, there had been a number of issues arising between the Turkish
state and the Kurds, either of religious or ethnic nature, as respectively observed
in the examples of the Sheikh Said rebellion in 1925 and the 1934 Dersim
massacre where the Turkish army bombarded civilian Kurds. After this period,
Kurdish nationalism stalled until the late 1950s when a new wave of modern
Kurdish intellectuals emerged (Dorronsoro and Grojean, 2009). The renaissance
of the Kurdish nationalism coincided with a period of coups d’état in Turkey and
the Turkish state responded by force (Pérouse, 2004: 30–31). Meanwhile, the
new generation of Kurdish intellectuals had no chance to valorise their
competences in the job market and no access to the social and economic capital.
These facts led to the radicalisation of the Kurdish nationalism. With the
foundation of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan – PKK)
and use of violent methods, the Kurdish taboo was solidified among Turks. The
Kurds, who used to be represented in the National Assembly through alliances
with left-wing or left-leaning parties, were effectively kept away from political
representation with the 1982 Constitution that went into effect after 1980 coup
d’état. These restrictions were firstly circumvented with a short-lived coalition
with the Social Democratic People’s Party (Sosyal Demokrat Halkçı Parti –
SHP) in 1991 which resulted in Kurdish deputies being arrested or forced to
leave the country. The Kurdish electorate in the 2000s was represented in
Parliament through independent candidates that would sidestep the unusually
high 10% national threshold for political parties that was brought after the coup
d’état to keep Kurdish and left-wing parties out of the Parliament. After the EU
reforms, the Kurdish politics regained visibility in the political life and became
part of the liberal wave of the era, much to the chagrin of Kemalists. The
Kurdish Political Movement’s (KPM) increasing legitimacy finally led to peace
negotiations with the Kurds and the Turkish state that started around 2009 and
ended with failure in 2013. Meanwhile, the liberal left ideas of the KPM gained
popularity among many well-educated, urban Turkish youth voters, and the
Kurds alike; the Peoples’ Democracy Party (Halkın Demokrasi Partisi – HDP)
has become the first Kurdish and left-wing party to pass the national threshold in
the June 2015 legislative elections. The HDP leader Selahattin Demirtaş also
openly challenged Tayyip Erdoğan in the 2014 presidential elections, a move
that abruptly ended the peace negotiations. After this challenge and the Kurdish
victory in the June 2015 elections that almost cost the AKP power, Erdoğan
made a major ideological shift and took up ultranationalistic policies that
brought a major military offensive against Kurdish guerrillas and civilians in
2015–2016 and the detention of thousands of Kurdish politicians, including
Demirtaş and his co-leader Figen Yüksekdağ. The AKP also formed an official
alliance with the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi
Hareket Partisi – MHP) in 2017, and most of its anti-Kurdish policies, such as
stripping Kurdish politicians of their chair immunity and giving special forces
members that committed criminal acts during operations total impunity by law,
were actively supported by the Kemalist main opposition Republican People’s
Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi – CHP).
Secularism, Islamism and Alevism
The question of religion is another important fault-line that lies under
sociopolitical cleavages. In order to understand the role of religion in Turkey,
one should look at the role of the state in regulating religion. Even though
Turkey has been a constitutionally secular state since 1937, the definition of
secularism in the country differs vastly from other applications of the principle
in the world, even from the French example which, at first glance, may seem
comparable to the Turkish model. The secularism in Turkey functions as the
tight control of the religious domain by the state. The Directorate of Religious
Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, or in short, Diyanet), which used to be a
branch of the Prime Minister’s Office before being associated with the President
of the Republic in 2018, has created an official version of the Sunnite Islam and
mostly blocked other religious practices (Massicard, 2014: 711). The only
exception to this rule is that Christianity and Judaism are practised separately by
their own communities as a right recognised by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
Diyanet’s role in the religious domain is under discussion for two reasons.
Firstly, the state suggesting an official version of Islam breaches both state
neutrality over beliefs and the religious diversity (ibid.). On the other hand, the
Islamist point of view has also criticised the role of Diyanet for decades,
claiming the tight control of the Sunnite belief by the institution has limited the
religious liberties (Kucukcan, 2009: 975). It should also be noted that Diyanet is
a politically charged institution. It is not an autonomous organisation, but
directly tied to the presidency (previously to the Prime Minister’s Office).
Therefore, its policies are defined by the political strategies of the government of
any given period. Historically, Diyanet was created and had functioned as part of
the Kemalist tutelage that protected the regime against the Islamist movements
that it had perceived as a major threat. Today, under the Islamist AKP
government, Diyanet acts as a tool for spreading political Islam in Turkey, and
also among diaspora communities abroad through the Turkish-Islamic Union for
Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Türk-İslam Birliği – DİTİB) and the religious
functionaries assigned in foreign countries. Meanwhile, Alevism, with a
moderate interpretation of Islam, has been marginalised both by the old and new
regime. Even though, this Islamic belief system seems to be compatible with
secularism, its independent organisational dynamics makes it almost impossible
to be controlled by a structure like Diyanet, therefore it has often been perceived
by the state as a deviance, if not a danger.
Workers’ movements and the radical left in Turkey
The history of workers’ movements in Turkey is full of ruptures and pressure
coming directly from the state. The radical left in Turkey has traditionally been
outcast by the state, and except for a very short period has not been able to find
representation in the parliamentary system. However, these movements have had
an important role in mass protests and have still managed to appear as political
actors despite the amount of persecution that they had to endure. The methods
and discourses of these movements also suggest that their place in the political
life depends rather on their intellectual and symbolic capital than their ability to
reach masses. One of the most important issues of the radical left movements is
their limited capacity to reach the working class. This is mainly due to the weak
state of trade unions in Turkey. As of 2012, Turkey was the OECD member with
the lowest rate of unionisation by 4.5% (OECD, 2014). The trade unions had
traditionally been weak in Turkey, except the 1960s and 1970s, when all radical
left movements were on the rise, even represented in Parliament. However, with
the 1980 coup, the left-wing unions were banned and replaced by pro-
government ones. Even though they resurfaced after a brief period, the
unionisation was already marginalised. Therefore, the radical left movements in
Turkey mostly act as an intellectual current that has an appeal among
intellectuals, rather than a mass political one. Today, some radical left factions
are represented in the Parliament under the HDP, due to the coalition they made
with the Kurdish Political Movement (KPM). These factions contribute to the
party’s discourse; however, the electoral base of the party is overwhelmingly
Kurdish who vote for the KPM.
In the Gezi Movement, several left-wing factions were visible and they made
an impact on the discourse and claims of the protests. Their experience with the
police also helped during the defence of the park. However, this presence did not
increase their popularity among the Gezi participants, even social media
campaigns to get them and/or their banners out of the Gezi Park took place
during the protests, predominantly among newcomers.
Social movements of the 2000s: Rise of the civil society
Turkey’s official candidacy to the European Union in 1999 brought along a
wave of democratisation, supported by legal reforms. One of the most important
consequences of this democratisation was the rise of civil society. Benefiting
indirectly by the period’s political atmosphere, or being directly funded by the
EU programmes, several civil society initiatives became visible. Through this
wave, different movements rose to prominence, increased their organisational
capacity and started to challenge important subjects in the country, some of
which were considered taboo, like the Armenian Genocide or different sexual
identities. Especially, libertarian intellectuals, who were keen to challenge the
Kemalist regime on a variety of topics, played a major role in these initiatives.
One of the most important incidents of the 2000s took place in connection
with this transformation. In 2003, the United States asked Turkey’s permission
to use American military bases in the country during the Iraqi invasion. This
demand required a parliamentary motion in Turkey. Before the vote, mass anti-
war rallies were held in major cities, some of them reaching 100,000
participants. Even though the media supported the move at the period, the
protests imposed their own agenda, even to the lawmakers. On 1 March 2003,
one of the biggest surprises in the political history of Turkey, a considerable
number of government MPs voted against the bill along with the opposition,
despite their leader Erdoğan’s will, defeating the motion. This vote, which
triggered a conflictual period with the United States, is one of the very few
examples (if not the only one) in which the deputies listened to public opinion
and even voted against their leader’s directive. It was also one of the few
moments in which the radical left and the Islamists participated in the same
rallies. The anti-war movement also organised an important rock festival called
BarışaRock between 2003 and 2008.
Another important incident is the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink’s
funeral on 23 January 2007. Dink, one of the most outspoken intellectuals of his
era, was murdered by a young Turkish ultra-nationalist on 19 January 2007.
Before his death, Dink was known to touch sensitive issues for both Turkish and
Armenian communities in his newspaper Agos, and was persecuted for ‘insulting
Turkishness’ due to his articles. After his assassination, hundreds of people
immediately gathered in front of Agos. Four days later, more than 100,000
people participated in his funeral, organised under the slogan ‘We are all Hrant
Dinks, we are all Armenians’. This slogan shook the nationalistic official
ideology to the core. According to Suny (2009: 944), it ‘became symbolic of an
alternative to the current impasse [between the Turks and Armenians], a way
out, perhaps into the European Community, to greater tolerance, to democracy’.
Furthermore, akin to the style of Dink, it was direct challenge of the taboos of
society.
The feminists and the LGBTQI community also directly challenged the doxa
of the society in that period. The feminist movement in Turkey has roots dating
back to the Ottoman era, and made a major leap in the 1980s and 1990s.
However, in the 2000s, they also increased their visibility dramatically,
especially against male violence. On 8 March 2003, the first Feminist Night
March took place in Taksim, associated with the anti-war movement. After this
groundbreaking event, the feminist rallies became a staple of politics in Turkey.
The feminist movement also played an important role in Gezi, especially in
setting a non-male dominated tone during the protests. The LGBTQI movement
also organised its first Pride rally in 2003, attracting more and more people each
year until 2015. In 2015, the Erdoğan regime banned the Pride rallies, and the
participants have been facing massive police violence since then. One of the
common points of these two movements is that they have deliberately been
employing a discourse that would shock the conservative elements in the society,
like ‘so what if we are faggots’, or ‘may the father, may the husband, may the
State, may the beating come, revolt in spite of all, freedom in spite of all’. This
in-your-face discourse was also very dominant in the Gezi Protests, in which the
protesters often chanted sarcastic songs against the police during the tear gas
attacks. Part of this discourse also came from the football supporters, which
made an interesting alliance with the feminists and the LGBTQI during the
protests (there was a non-sexist chants workshop at the Gezi Park held by these
groups and attended by the football supporters).
Environmentalists have also made their voices heard during the 2000s. As the
other factions aforementioned, they also became very visible during the anti-war
movement, Greenpeace and Istanbul Environment Council organising protests.
The environmental protests became more widespread in the 2010s, as the AKP’s
urban transformation and energy projects created negative reactions among these
groups. In one of these protests, in Hopa, a retired teacher called Metin Lokumcu
was killed due to a heart attack caused by tear gas, on 31 May 2011. Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan frequently accused Lokumcu after his death, creating public
outrage that would increase gradually until the Gezi Protests, exactly two years
later.
One of the important mass protests held in the 2010s before Gezi was the
Rally against (Internet) Censorship, held in 30 cities simultaneously on 15 May
2011, against the new regulation of Information Technologies and
Communications Board that would result in banning thousands of websites and
dozens of keywords (ironically including the word ‘ban’) online. These rallies
are particularly important, as they attracted politically inexperienced crowds to
the streets, based on lifestyle and personal liberty concerns.
It may be said that the 2000s and 2010s had two separate but connected waves
of social movements. The 2000s witnessed movements that were products of a
liberalising Turkey, while the 2010s were caused by a country becoming
autocratic. However, all of these movements had important common points in
both waves. They challenged the taboos, used a repertoire of actions similar to
their coevals in the Western world, attracted non-partisan crowds, and demanded
a more open and democratic country. It is very fair to say that the Gezi Protests
were the accumulation and climax of all the discourses, practices and demands
in those protests.
How to explain Gezi?
A few dozens of environmentalists’ attempt to save the Gezi Park against an
urbanisation project in downtown Istanbul suddenly turned into a mass
movement of 5 million estimated participants in Istanbul and other big cities of
Turkey, in June 2013. This powerful, unexpected and unprecedented
mobilisation in the history of the country forced the academics, journalists and
political commentators alike to think about explanations regarding the sudden
emergence of this movement. In the academic literature, Gezi is questioned
through two angles; its evolution and reasoning. The evolution of the Gezi
Movement may be explained either by a rupture or a continuity in the history of
social movements in Turkey. In other words, this movement that has reached its
climax in a couple of days can be considered to be the consequence of a growing
civil society in the country since the 2000s, but still, by its claims and the way it
happened, it is unprecedented and represented a rupture with the past.
Meanwhile, the reasons of this movement taking place also need to be discussed.
Was the Gezi Movement an environmentalist objection to the ongoing urban
transformation, was it a counter-hegemonic collective trying to protect
threatened lifestyles, or a political movement that had constitutional demands?
Or was it all of them?
In a social event of this magnitude, the fieldwork conducted during the
incident constitutes an essential database for understanding the nature of the
phenomenon. Unfortunately, the spontaneous nature of the Gezi Protests and the
very difficult working conditions for researchers during the events marked by
police violence made it almost impossible to carry out fruitful fieldwork. All the
studies conducted after the Gezi Protests are regrettably impacted by this fact.
However, attempts to understand Gezi still created important hypotheses and a
necessary debate.
Who are the Gezi participants?
In one of the very few fieldworks conducted during the Gezi Protests, Ercan
Bilgiç and Kafkaslı made a survey with 3,008 individuals who declared they had
participated in the events. According to this survey (Bilgiç and Kafkaslı, 2013),
67.1% of the participants were between the ages of 19 and 35, 53.7%
participated in a protest for the first time, 70% declared not to feel close to any
political party, 97.2% considered themselves as ‘pro-freedom’, 93.2% as
‘environmentalist’, and 85.7% as ‘democrat’. The most popular reasons for
participating in the protests were ‘the autocratic tendencies of the Prime Minister
’, ‘the police violence ’, ‘restrictions against personal freedoms’, ‘emergence of
a police State’, and ‘the conservative lifestyle being imposed’; 79.5% were
against a ‘coup d’etat’, and 96.6% demanded ‘respect to personal liberties’.
While this survey presents a certain profile of the protesters, we should also take
the valid points raised by Yavuz (2014: 99–123) against the survey conducted
during the protests. The designations like ‘pro-freedom’ or ‘democrat’ are too
vague and hold positive connotations that most people would like to embrace,
while what these words mean may vary from person to person. Yavuz also
criticises the choice of social media users as sample and qualifies it as a
‘selection bias’ (ibid., 102). In my view, it is partly a valid point as not all
protesters used social media, but social media still played a very critical role.
Ercan and Kafkaslı may have conducted this research with a different sample
without their social media use being a factor; however, I do not think ‘selection
bias’ argument is too fair, as it is certain that Gezi was a movement popularised
through social media. In the case of my research, however, the participants had
to be social media users, as it was sine qua non for my data collection.
Many commentators agree that the Gezi Movement functioned as an
alternative to the traditional currents and axes of politics in Turkey, especially to
the duality of Kemalism and Islamism. Göle (2013: 7–14) considers the
movement as a pluralist movement that tried to recreate the public sphere. In the
same direction, Sınır (2014: 203–220) argues that the Gezi Movements rejected
the old Kemalist politics and created bonding opportunities between modern
(secular-urban) classes, Kurds and Alevis through rights and liberties. Kurtuluş
(2014: 261–275) also underlines that Gezi contested the traditional political
camps as a counter-hegemonic and pro-freedom movement that unified middle
classes with oppressed groups. Durakbaşa (2014: 191–202) claims that it was the
‘moderns’ excluded by the AKP who reacted at Gezi. According to Atay (2013:
39–44), secularism played a defining role in the Gezi Movement, the modern
bourgeoisie overcame its differences with ‘other moderns’ (middle classes) and
differentiated itself from the Islamic bourgeoisie despite their common class
interests.
Regarding the social class composition of the Gezi Movement, there is a
consensus on the middle classes, especially on the ‘new middle classes’, in other
words the precariat. According to Özatalay (2014: 170–185), the Gezi
Movement was inspired by the protest waves in the Western world, triggered by
the rise of precarisation and anti-capitalist movements; the researcher gives the
example of free exchange market that was operated at the Gezi Park during the
protests. Karadağ (2014: 186–190) also puts the emphasis on the ‘new middle-
class’ and the cultural capital of the protesters. Tuğal (2013: 157–172) argues
that it was the social impoverishment of these classes that proved to be
important, not the economic one. According to Atak (2014: 81), ‘the young
middle-class participant seems to dominate the Movement at first glance, but the
participation of lower classes away from major urban centres and the cameras
was also remarkable’. Doğuç (2014: 158–169) calls the Gezi Protests as a
‘prison revolt’ against the repression. Keyder (2013) also puts democratic
demands at the heart of the Movement.
Even though the exact composition of millions of participants cannot be fully
detected due to the spontaneity of the events and the lack of fieldwork, it may be
argued that the Gezi Protests were dominated by but not limited to the urban,
secular, middle classes (often referred as ‘moderns’), who were deprived of their
former social and cultural positions during the AKP period. An economic
component may also be argued to be present as students and intellectual workers
which constitute the precariat played an important role in the Movement;
however, I believe that it was not their worsening economic situation that drove
them to the streets, but the social and cultural walls closing in. The original
claims of the Gezi Movement had an economic aspect as it was against neo-
liberal policies; however’ through the course of the events, it has become more
of a lifestyle and personal freedoms-oriented movement. As Yörük (2014: 425)
underlines, the protests were driven by the middle-class habitus in Istanbul, but
they also could expand to other cities and poorer neighbourhoods, hinting that
identities and sociocultural positions were more important than economic ones in
that movement. The inclusion of predominantly Alevi neighbourhoods, like
Okmeydanı in Istanbul and Tuzluçayır in Ankara, in the movement also
confirms this argument.
Composition and demands of the Gezi Movement
Taksim Solidarity, a coalition of political bodies and NGOs that started the Gezi
Movement, was founded on 2 March 2012 against the urbanisation project
concerning the Taksim Square. On 27 April 2012, Taksim Solidarity released a
declaration against the project, calling it ‘a project of concrete, dehumanisation
and disidentification’ (toplumsol.org, 2012). Having collected 50,000 signatures
against the project, the coalition made a public call on Facebook, on 27 May
2013, announcing that the heavy machinery of the company that undertook the
project had arrived at the Gezi Park. A few hundred environmentalists started a
non-violent occupation in the Park that resulted in police staging a raid and
burning down the tents of the protesters at dawn two days later. This violent
police raid was not covered by the conventional media, but its details were
circulated through the social media, especially on Twitter, that created an
outrage.
After the police violence started, the Taksim Solidarity representative visited
Bülent Arınç, the vice PM of the era, on 5 June 2013, to negotiate their demands
below (haberturk.com, 2013):

The Gezi Park should remain as a park and it should not be part of any
construction project.
The Atatürk Cultural Centre demolition project (next to the Gezi Park)
should be suspended.
The culprits of the police violence, including the governor and police
chiefs, should be suspended.
Tear gas should be banned.
The detained protesters should be liberated and not prosecuted.
All the restrictions against the freedom of demonstration should be lifted.

None of these demands were accepted by the government, and the Gezi Park
was evacuated on 16 June 2013 with massive use of violence. On 24 June 2013,
Tayyip Erdoğan called the police raid ‘heroic’, and declared that he ordered it
personally. The protests continued in a more anti-Erdoğan tone, but, again, were
repressed by violence.
In this chronology, it is clear that the Gezi Movement started as an
environmental movement against the urbanisation of a public recreational space
in downtown Istanbul. The composition of Taksim Solidarity was very diverse;
for instance, it contained a libertarian left party called Yeşiller ve Sol Gelecek
(Greens and Left Future, YSGP) and also a hardline Kemalist İşçi Partisi
(Workers’ Party, İP). The political tone of movement shifted after the police
violence, Erdoğan’s polarising statements and the arrival of thousands of
politically inexperienced newcomers. Therefore, it is appropriate to argue that
there is more than one Gezi; the environmentalist movement, the pro-freedom
movement, and the newcomers’ movement that tried to restore the old regime.
Why does Gezi matter?
Albeit a makeshift coalition of traditional political organisations, up-and-coming
social movements and anti-political masses, the Gezi Movement had taken the
country by surprise in the summer of 2013. In my view, Gezi represents
continuities and ruptures at the same time in the country’s political history. Even
though almost all movements (even including Islamism through the Anti-
Capitalist Muslims group) in the Turkish political history were somewhat
present on the site, the discourse and claims of the movement vastly differed
from those traditionally pronounced by those movements. While this would
essentially mean a rupture with the conventional political practices, the
precursors of the liberal democratic demands, colourful, sarcastic and humorous
language, the use of social media and the inclusion of politically inexperienced
crowds can be found in some events like the anti-war protests in 2003,
assassinated Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink’s funeral in 2007, the
Istanbul Pride and Feminist Night rallies since the 2000s, as well as
environmental, anti-gentrification and anti-censorship rallies. It is noteworthy
that all of these events are the products of the growing civil society during
Turkey’s EU-membership process, and these globally connected groups shared a
common repertoire of action with their coeval social movements, which made
the discourse of the Gezi Protests more comparable to the social movements in
the Western world, such as Occupy Wall Street (USA) or Indignados (Spain),
rather than its counterparts in the Muslim world, to the extent that the movement
was initially called Occupy Gezi by the protesters. In this context, Gezi is the
climax of an original political mobilisation in Turkey’s politics, therefore
represents a rupture with the past, in terms of participants and discourse.
However, regarding institutional politics, it should be underlined that Gezi
quickly succumbed to the traditional fault-lines of politics in Turkey. A massive
movement with 5 million participants in the major cities did not have even a
minor impact in the local elections that were held only six months after. Unlike
in Spain and Greece, the Gezi Movement did not result in the birth of new major
political bodies; while a coalition of radical left parties named United June
Movement (Birleşik Haziran Hareketi – BHH or Haziran) was founded, it could
never reach its namesake crowd in the institutional level. It is certain that the
HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi – Peoples’ Democratic Party), the coalition
of the Kurdish Political Movement with a dozen minor radical left bodies, has
borrowed a lot from the Gezi discourse; however, it is not an heir apparent of the
movement. While the party has received some support from the liberal secular
voters in the big cities, the Kurdish voters have continued to be bread and butter
of the HDP, while the Kemalist CHP remains to be the unchallenged option for
the secular Turks. Social movements of the 2010s resulted in major shake-ups in
the political institutions in Europe, and revolutions in countries like Egypt and
Tunisia. In Turkey, none of those happened. The AKP has barely lost any of its
electoral power, and never lost a single election since then. However, Gezi
marked the beginning of the cultural battle that the AKP has not still managed to
win. Even with its massive media power, its cultural hegemony is shaky at best.
On the other hand, Gezi has turned into a mythical reference point for the
dissidents, rather than a starting point for a political transformation. It continues
to cast its shadow over the political realm in the cultural level, even though
institutionally it almost had no effect. Even in 2018, Tayyip Erdoğan continues
to attack Gezi supporters, accusing them often of supporting the coup d’état of
two years before or trying to block the ‘progress’ in the country, as seen in his
discourse after the demolition of the Atatürk Cultural Centre. For a politician
who has not seen an electoral failure in the last two decades, Gezi seems to be
the only event that make him feel defeated, even after five years. Even though
the movement waned quite rapidly, not having been able to transform to
something else either, it still represents the cultural barrier between Erdoğan and
the total hegemony over the society in Turkey.
Football fandom, in this context and in its current form, constitutes an obstacle
before the culture aspirations of the Erdoğan regime. First of all, much like
leftists and ultra-nationalists, the Islamists had not considered football as a
political field where they could have attracted supporters during the 1970s when
social movements contesting the system were on the rise. Football was a
distraction to these groups; even a semi-professional footballer and a fervent
Islamist militant like young Tayyip Erdoğan could not link these two worlds.
The Islamists’ involvement in football started after they started to hold
institutional posts, like municipalities. Therefore, where the AKP is an
unprecedented power in transforming the social capital into the political one,
their experience covers the mosques, townsmenship (hemşehri) associations and
the everyday life. Stadiums and other places that people gather donning their fan
identities are not the AKP’s home turf.
Furthermore, football and sports in general had been under the secular
regime’s control for decades. Even before the Republic was founded, these
activities imported from Europe along with other modern concepts – like
secularism and nationalism – were intertwined with the young elites who created
the modern Turkey. Accordingly, sports activities in Turkey had always been
organised and supported by the state. The major teams, including the Big Three,
were actively patronised by the state, to the extent that they were eventually
given a legal status comparable to that of the Red Crescent Society. They have
been kept exempt from most taxation, or amnestied if they have not been. Their
stadiums were built by the state and loaned to them for long durations, in a way
they could use and capitalise them as if they were their own property.
Meanwhile, the provincial clubs were professionalised directly by the state’s
initiative in the late 1960s. Their whole existence depended on the state. One
might argue that this inseparable bond between the sports world and the state
might provide an access to the AKP, as the new owners of the state. This is
completely true in the institutional level, whereas not true at all in the social
level, in a way that a major contrast between club boards and fans occurs from
time to time, in regards to their relationship with the Erdoğan regime. One major
example of that is certainly Beşiktaş. During the time the Beşiktaş fans were in
the streets clashing with the police in June 2013, the club chairman Fikret Orman
was actively in contact with the government seeking support for the İnönü
Stadium renovation project, vital to the debt-ridden club’s survival. During the
inauguration ceremony of the new Vodafone Arena (which was changed to
Vodafone Park, after Erdoğan said he did not like the word ‘arena’), Fikret
Orman’s speech went viral on the Internet as he used the words ‘my President’
more than any other word, including Beşiktaş. Orman was also quick to close the
inauguration ceremony to Beşiktaş fans, a move probably sought by Erdoğan’s
aides bearing in mind the rare public humiliation that the Turkish autocrat had to
endure in the Galatasaray’s stadium opening.
The football stadiums in Turkey are secular environments, more so in
Istanbul. The whole Istanbul fandom experience is a secular experience, where
Islam is almost utterly absent, while alcohol and cursing are endemic. The only
exception to this may be Ramadan, as fast-breaking times often coincide with
late kick-offs, people tend to extend this religious practice into the stadiums.
However, the iftar is often an ecumenical experience in Turkey, as practising
Muslims may share the fast-breaking ceremony with non-practising Muslims
and even non-Muslims, since it is a collective meal after all. During the summer
of 2013, which partly coincided with Ramadan, the devoted Muslim groups,
critical of the government and supporting Gezi, organised ecumenical mass iftar
meals on the pavements crossing the Taksim Square, partly in protest of the
pretentious and expensive iftar meals organised nearby by the AKP.1 It should
also be noted that religious events like Ramadan, Kandil or the two major
Islamic holidays are partly secularised in Turkey, partly in line with the
moderate Anatolian interpretation of the Islam and the secular character of the
Republic. Non-practising people celebrating these religious events are very
common. As you will see some examples in our sample, drinking alcohol
through the 11 other months and fasting in Ramadan is also frequent practice. I
will discuss these different practices and how Islamists’ claim that only strictly
devoted practising people should be considered to be Muslims constitute a social
fault-line in Turkey.
Other than the few aforementioned examples, the fandom practices in Istanbul
are absolutely secular, and often in conflict with rigid interpretations of Islam. In
Istanbul stadiums and other football environments, religious practices and
slogans are mostly absent. One brief exception to this rule is the famous ‘Ya
Allah, Bismillah, Allahüekber’ slogan, shared by the ultra-nationalists and the
Islamists. This slogan was frequently heard, especially in the Fenerbahçe stands,
during the 1990s, when football was part of an ultra-nationalist wave.
Fenerbahçe was particularly affected from this wave, as Güven Sazak, the
former ultra-nationalist leader Gün Sazak’s brother, held the club chairman post
in 1993–1994. During his presidency, the MHP youth started to appear in
Fenerbahçe stands, making a slight impact on the slogans. Therefore, meanwhile
‘ya Allah, Bismillah, Allahüekber’ was evidently a religious slogan, it was
mostly used in an ultra-nationalist context. The slogan did not become a staple in
the Istanbul fans’ repertoire and quickly waned, while it resurfaced in Anatolian
stadiums where the fans are most inclined to be religious. This slogan was
infamously used in Konya in 2015, when the conservative national team fans
protested a one-minute silence against the Ankara massacre victims, a terrorist
attack organised by ISIS.
As the football environment and fandom practices are predominantly secular,
especially in Istanbul, the AKP has a hard time dominating or even to
suppressing the dissidence in those places. This does not mean that none of the
football fans support the AKP. As I underlined in the very beginning, almost
everyone in Turkey may qualify as a fan and therefore the simple logic dictates
that the majority of the football fans are AKP voters. What I am discussing here
is rather the cultural production tied to fandom practices. Regarding this field,
the probable fact that there are millions of AKP-voting supporters plays a much
smaller role. The fandom style in Turkey is dominated by the supporters of the
Big Three, the clubs founded in the secular strongholds. Most fans in Anatolia
simply emulate the fandom style in Istanbul. There are exceptions, but those
often arise from cities also dominated by the secular lifestyle, such as Izmir,
Eskişehir, Adana and Ankara. Even Trabzon and Bursa, two conservative cities
with league titles and well-known fan groups, have little effect on shaping the
mainstream football fandom style. Other important football cities where the
AKP dominates, like Konya and Kayseri, what the fans do is mostly unknown to
the mainstream fandom. This overlaps one of the major arguments of this book;
the secular middle classes in the predominantly secular cities and
neighbourhoods are the cultural and intellectual capital owners in Turkey.
Hence, it is no surprise that these groups and these cities overwhelmingly
undertake the culture production in the fans’ subculture. Also, one important
point to remember here is the fact that the vast majority of the football fans are
supporters of the Big Three. Therefore, the Istanbul fans not only have the upper
hand because they are more equipped with certain types of capital to create a
cultural domination in the fandom field, they also have the advantage of holding
the floor that is actively listened to and emulated by millions of followers. What
Beşiktaş or Galatasaray or Fenerbahçe fans shout or chant matters because they
hold the bullhorn of million-strong micro-nations. That is why when Istanbul
fans started shouting ‘everywhere Taksim, resistance everywhere’ in the 34th
minute (34 is Istanbul’s registration code) in every home game after Gezi for a
couple of months, Lig TV, the then-broadcaster of the league had to cut off the
sound.
The AKP is an incontestable organisation regarding social capital and holding
the majority. It is not equally strong when it comes to cultural production and
intellectual diversity that are nurtured by freedom of thought. They do
exceptionally well in amplifying one man’s message to the masses. They
struggle in creating a spectrum of ideas that would support the message. The
lack of intellectual and cultural capital pushed the AKP into coalitions with the
liberals and the Gülenists in the past. However, establishing a total hegemony in
a society entails ruling alone. In fields where these types of capital prove vital,
the Erdoğan regime gets frustrated, even resentful. The ill-fated ‘coup d’etat’
court case against the Çarşı members or the president’s desperate attempt to rally
the AKP crowds for Başakşehir are signs of this frustration. The regime has no
problem in controlling the club boards, but it has also learned that this did not
mean controlling the crowds. One should ask if major clubs are micro-nations
how come the club boards controlled by the AKP have no effect on fans in the
political field. That is a valid question, and this can only explained by a superior
set of beliefs that would supersede the leadership. There, we should refer to the
‘Republican Doxa’, which functions as the unpronounced rulebook of the
secular middle classes and ingrained in the Big Three’s club cultures.
Why does the social media matter?
Even though the use of social media by the social movements has become an
important research topic since the Occupy Wall Street in the USA, the social
movements’ attempts to benefit from new means of communication dates from
further back. As a matter of fact, any means of communication has always
gathered political interest, and the more accessible technologies have been
considered to be opportunities by the more oppressed groups to be heard by the
public. The debates on such uses may be found in the early 20th century; for
instance, Bertolt Brecht’s (1930) ‘Radio as a Means of Communication’
discusses the radio as a new medium that could be utilised for revolutionary
purposes. Even in the Internet age, the social movements of the 2010s are not the
first movements to use this technology for voicing the unheard. In the 1990s, the
alter-globalisation movements used the online media and the offline social
networks as a way of mobilising direct collective action (Juris, 2012). Several
studies (Bennett, 2003; Downing, 2003; Couldry and Curran, 2003; Best and
Kellner, 2003; Kahn and Kellner, 2004 and 2005; and Langman, 2005) underline
that the birth of the Independent Media Centre (IMC – Indymedia) during the
protests against the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1999 constitutes a key
phase in the use of the online media by the social movements. Hardt and Negri
(2011: 2) even argue that Occupy Wall Street and its coeval social movements
worldwide have roots in those protests in Seattle. Entantawy and Wiest also
associate the Tahrir Protests in Egypt with the ‘global justice cyber movement’,
born in Seattle in 1999. Here, I should stress that an important deal of the Gezi
repertoire dates back to the anti-war movement in Turkey, which forced
Parliament to vote against a motion allowing American troops to use the military
bases in the country during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a movement which had
very close ties to the alter-globalisation movements and used the Istanbul branch
of Indymedia to propagate its demands.
In the 2000s, with the broad use of the Web 2.0 technologies that allowed
more user interaction and made online social networking possible, the political
use of social media by under-represented groups reached a new phase. New
platforms like Twitter and Facebook have often been used by the new social
movements of the 2010s, especially during mass protests. One of the first of
such uses took place in Iran in 2009 (Burns and Eltham, 2009; Morozov: 2009;
Ghorashi and Kees, 2009, among others). The political use of social media
reached its peak during the ‘Arab Spring’ in Tunisia, Egypt and other
predominantly Arab countries (Eltantawy and Wiest, 2011; Howard and
Hussain, 2011; Aouragh, 2012, among others).
The use of social media in the Gezi Protests in 2013 has also been a popular
research topic. Kuymulu (2013: 275) underlines that these protests were rapidly
organised with the use of Facebook and Twitter. Gür (2013: 141) claims that
Twitter became a way of circumventing self-censorship implemented by the
conventional media during the protests. Polat et al. (2013: 636) also confirm this
argument by stating that most protesters felt themselves ‘betrayed’ by the
traditional media. The study by Hacıyakupoğlu and Zhang (2015: 461–462)
argues that Twitter created an open space through which information could be
shared during the protests. However, social identification took place mostly on
Facebook and Whatsapp where real identities of the persons using the platform
are more visible, as people could ‘identify the person behind the information’.
According to Gögüs and Mannitz (2016: 18–19), the participation of the ‘Y
Generation’ between the ages of 18–30 rendered Twitter and Facebook even
more important, as these people born into these technologies could use them like
‘citizen journalists’ to diffuse information. The report by Miller et al. (2016: 65)
reveals that the 47% of survey participants think that social media made them
more politically active, the highest ratio after Brazil (48%). However, the report
by the New York University (Barbera and Metzger, 2013: 6) also shows that, as
opposed to its European counterpart where horizontal communication is more
common like the Indignados Movement in Spain, the social communication
during the Gezi Protests shows that there is a vertical communication in which
conventional media personalities and other celebrities had a very dominant role
in diffusing the messages.
Even though the role of social media during the Gezi Protests is a popular
research subject, the use of digital methods in studying it is rather limited. The
majority of the research that analyses social media either discusses it through an
exclusively theoretical scope, or simple quantitative methods like keyword or
hashtag analysis. While keyword and hashtag-based studies are quite common,
longitudinal ‘small data’ studies which have a more ethnographic approach are
very scarce. In this research, I use the messages posted by the participants on
Twitter not only during the protests but before and after the events. To my
knowledge, this has been the only research that analyses data that was created
one year before the Gezi Protests took place.
Digital divide in Turkey
The ‘digital divide’, the inequality of digital access due to different socio-
economic and cultural factors (Attali et al., 2008: 58), is an important concept
for the sociological analysis of new technologies and their use in different social
movements. This issue was defined by the National Telecommunications and
Information Administration of the United States in 1995 (McConnaughey et al.,
1995) for the first time, as the difference between those who ‘have’ and those
who ‘have not’. In the 1990s and 2000s, even the most-developed countries
experienced this type of inequality in a very visible manner, especially in certain
social layers. For example, in the United States of the late 1990s, it was revealed
that the white students were more likely to have a personal computer at home
than the African-American students, and even those who did not have a personal
computer were more likely to have access to the World Wide Web (Novak and
Hoffman, 1998: 391). In France, the equipment for accessing the Web was
present in 82% of the executive families, 38% in working-class families, and
22% in families with a monthly income less than 900 euros in 2008 (Attali et al.,
2008: 47–52). According to Ben Youssef (2004: 185), ‘the digital divide exists
between geographical zones, but also micro-divides exist within the same
territory, based on gender, age, education and income level’. Even during the
‘Arab Spring’, where often a special importance is attributed to the use of social
media, this use was confined to a rather ‘elite and exclusive public’ (Saada,
2011: 3–4), as most Internet users were from wealthier upbringings. Also, the
Internet penetration rate in Egypt and Tunisia in the early 2010s was less than
30% (Internetworldstats.com, 2018). Similar results were found in the research
conducted by Tankeu in Cameroon (2005). As the access to equipment and
connection has become considerably more affordable since the 2000s,
researchers like Thierer (2000), Murdock (2000) and Leighton (2001) do not
consider the digital divide as a critical issue any more, especially in the Western
world. However, the digital divide is not just question of access any more, and
even when it was, the purchasing power was not the sole determinant of it. It is a
cultural question, as much as it is a socio-economic one, a question which
evolves with the new technological developments. Today, it is no longer just
about being connected or not, but about the cultural capacity of users in adapting
themselves to new uses of technology. The lack of such capacity deepens the
digital divide geometrically, as those who are not apt to use the older
technologies have difficulties in using newer technologies. For example, not
being able to use a smartphone alienates a user from platforms like Instagram,
Periscope, Snapchat or Foursquare which operate predominantly using these
environments. Furthermore, in countries where access to certain digital services
are blocked by political decisions, the use of additional software and services,
such as VPN or TOR, is required in order to fully benefit from the new
technologies. Therefore, the digital divide is not only a socio-economic question:
it is very closely tied to the ‘cultural capital’, a Bourdieusian concept that other
researchers like Selwyn (2004: 353) also use when depicting the difference
between having access to a technology and make full use of it.
The digital cultural capital and information and
communication technologies (ICT)
The cultural capital, conceptualised by Pierre Bourdieu (1986), is the whole of
the cultural resources that an individual possesses. It appears in three separate
states: the embodied state which is linked to the body; the objectified state
objectified in material objects and media; and the institutionalised state which is
the objectification of cultural capital in the form of academic qualifications
(Bourdieu, 1986: 17–21). Hence cultural capital is partly inherited from the
family and the social layer and partly acquired in relation to cultural institutions
and products, like school and the media. Even though there is an association
between cultural capital and economic capital, these two values may differ
independently, creating different tastes. In Distinction (1979), Bourdieu presents
a table of certain tastes and professions within French society, based on different
levels of cultural and economic capital.
The capital cultural in the ICT domain, or the ‘digital cultural capital’ exist
also in these three forms. According to Cerisier (2011), ‘these technologies
contribute not only to the evolution of our actions, but also of our values, each
one restructuring our incorporated cultural capital’. This restructuring inevitably
creates a digital habitus, a matrix of individual behaviours online. This habitus
also deals with the accumulation of objectified and institutionalised digital
cultural capital, which affects the incorporated form of this capital. Therefore,
the digital divide should be redefined as the cleavage between those who own a
high level of digital cultural capital and who do not. I should underline that these
types of cultural capital are also in a relationship with the ‘offline’ types of
cultural capital, since the connected world is also associated with ‘offline’
phenomenon. Isolating the digital cultural capital from the ‘offline world’
creates some sort of techno-determinism that would preach that the online world
acts independently from the events in the offline world. In this research, I will
try to avoid this perception as much as possible.
The study by Meyen et al. (2010: 873–882) categorises the capacities and
ambitions of the Internet users according to the social and cultural capitals that
they acquired from their use of the technology. Their research shows that the
users with middle or lower frequencies of Internet use acquire either cultural or
social capital from that use; however there is also another group which uses the
Internet in all domains of their lives and acquire both social and cultural capital
from the Internet, called ‘the Virtuosi’ (ibid., 877). Hargittai (2010: 108–110)
presents a similar concept of ‘digital natives’, noting that adapting to new
technologies depends on social backgrounds. Bengtsson’s research about
Swedish university students (2015: 47–48) reveals that the digital capital-based
differences between users do not only stem from the frequency of use, also the
subject, diversity and level of detail of the content. Zillien and Hargittai (2009:
288) affirm that ‘status inequalities concerning technical equipment and digital
experience were to decline, status based differences in Internet usage would
likely persist’, as the advantaged groups have already more access to a type of
use that would increase online social and cultural capital. In this regard, those
who already own cultural and/or social capital have an upper hand in increasing
the difference with those who do not, as they can easily distinguish the type of
content that would help them acquire further capital. Accordingly, the social and
cultural capital owners are more likely to be organised online and diffuse their
messages more efficiently. The social movements of the 2010s, including the
Gezi Movement, have largely benefited from the collective digital social and
cultural capital to popularise their causes and mobilise crowds, even though they
usually did not have considerable economic capital and/or contested economic
capital owners.
Analysing the digital divide in a cross-national level, Fuchs (2009: 41–58)
compares several economic, social and cultural variables against the ICT access.
According to this study, the GDP per capita appears to be the most important
factor in the digital divide; however, other factors like the social inequality, level
of democracy and the level of urbanisation also play a critical role. Also, gender
and ethnic origin are important factors (Rojas et al., 2004). Tondeur et al. (2011:
151–168) argue that the lack of digital cultural capital also creates difficulties in
adapting to the digitalising daily life and school expectations. Therefore, the
digital divide not only concerns the digital cultural capital but the cultural capital
in general. For this reason, the presence or lack of such capital may prove critical
in a social movement, especially in situations where most democratic channels
are blocked.
One of the most important consequences of the Web 2.0 technologies was the
fact that it irreversibly changed the way we use the Internet, as it removed most
of the differences between being an online producer and consumer. This change
increased the importance of digital capital dramatically, even though it facilitated
the content production for everybody. Before, for an ordinary user, the Internet
use was about having a browser and checking out content prepared by somebody
else. However, now, being able to produce content has become critical in the
online experience. With the Web 2.0, we discovered that all Internet users have
actually an ‘outreach’, a capacity to convey their message. This visibility has
become even measurable, through the number of followers, friends, likes,
retweets, etc. Therefore, the online realm not only allowed user participation but
encouraged it, even depended on it. According to Qualman (2010: xiv), ‘the
currency in social media isn’t euros, pesos, or dollars; meaningful engagement,
participation, and value creation rule the day … And just as in the real world,
true givers are rewarded handsomely’. The currency, to which Qualman refers,
corresponds to the digital cultural capital perfectly, while the reward is the
accumulation of social capital through more retweets, followers and likes, more
outreach, which are convertible even to economic capital, online or offline. The
online capital ownership of any forms, economic, social or cultural, is
interchangeable; for instance, the online social capital can be used to gather
economic capital through offline methods like sponsorship, or online ones like
crowdfunding, as in Kickstarter or Indiegogo. The economic capital can also be
converted to online social capital, through online advertising and campaigning.
The interactions and exchanges of online capital, therefore, are connected to the
offline world. Accordingly, the online cultural capital has political value, online
and offline.
Turkey and the digital divide
Before analysing the digital divide in Turkey, I would like to point out a global
phenomenon, a common obstacle before millions in reaching the information;
the language barrier. According to w3techs.com (2018), the 53.8% of all content
on the Internet is in English while content in Turkish occupies only 1.2% of the
online realm. These statistics clearly show how much the exclusively Turkish-
speaker audience misses out on the Internet. The use of certain platforms also
depends on localisation, or lack thereof. For example, according to a report by
the ad agency PromoQube (2017), when Facebook was localised into Turkish in
2008 its number of users in Turkey skyrocketed from 6 million to 14 million in
one year. Even before that date, browser extensions were developed by third
parties to enable Turkish speakers to use Facebook. Twitter, on the other hand,
was not localised into Turkish until 2011, which delayed its rise into prominence
in the country, limiting its use to the English speakers in Turkey. According to
Bruns et al. (op. cit., 272), Twitter had a similar roadblock in Germany, an
industrialised country with much better language education than in Turkey.
Brooks et al. (2005: 272) underline that the effects of the language barrier are
felt in developing countries much more heavily. The domination of English on
the Internet has global consequences, which affects the Internet use in the non-
English-speaking countries, as well as non-English speakers in English-speaking
countries (Steyaert, 2002: 206). Stanley’s research about San Diego, USA (2003:
408) shows that the Latinx inhabitants attend community technology centres that
offer bilingual instructions (Spanish–English), while they were absent from
centres that only offer instructions in English. In Turkey, according to Aytaç
(2005: 275–284), the language barrier affected the access to open-source
software available on the Internet, as well as the other uses of the technology.
Therefore, the language barrier remains an important factor on the digital divide
regarding access to software, services and information. Furthermore, in the era
of globalisation, foreign language proficiency and technological capacity go
hand in hand in accumulating cultural capital (Draelants and Ballatore, 2014:
123). As a result, a vicious circle emerges, as foreign language proficiency
enables having access to the ICT, while the ICT opens a window on foreign
cultures. The language barrier, as well as the digital divide, is part of the
objectified and institutionalised cultural capital question. It is also a political
issue, as overcoming these issues is a public policy matter.
 During the Gezi Protests in 2013, Twitter users in Turkey may be categorised
into two; those who had been using the platform for a long time, and those who
just arrived to access the information blocked by the government and the
traditional media outlets, also to defend their pro or anti-governmental political
positions. According to the social media agency Insight Radar (2013), between
29 May and 17 June 2013, the number of active Twitter users increased from 1
million to two and a half million. However, the content influencing the events
was mostly created by the habitual users of the platform, including media
personalities and celebrities. This is an important difference between the Gezi
Protests and its coevals in the Western world (Barbera and Metzger, 2013: 6).
Therefore, the digital cultural capital and the language barrier played an
important role during this political battle. That is the reason why it matters who
owns the cultural capital in Turkey and how this transforms to the digital world.
The urban, secular middle classes of Turkey, as a traditionally privileged social
layer since the emergence of the Republic, had always been the owners of the
embodied cultural capital. Moreover, the education system that largely depended
on the public high schools with foreign language education that accepted
students through central exams (Anadolu Liseleri in Turkish, Anatolian High
Schools), created an outlet for this social faction to have affordable education,
while rural masses were mostly blocked off this system as they did not have the
same opportunities to prepare for the entry exams. The students from the upper
classes were mostly divided between private schools and prestigious Anadolu
Liseleri. Since the 2010s, this system has been heavily dismantled by the AKP;
religious vocational schools were heavily promoted, as the importance and
education quality of Anadolu Liseleri decreased. In 2016, students and graduates
of 52 schools of this type, including of the most prestigious ones like
Galatasaray, İstanbul Erkek, Vefa and Beşiktaş Atatürk Anadolu, published
separate declarations protesting against the government for ‘the dismissal of
school officials and teachers, discrimination against female students, the [new]
school officials blocking social activities, abandoning scientific education and
prioritising religious activities’ (bianet, 2016). The Erdoğan regime has also a
well-known feud with the most prestigious public universities that usually accept
students from Anadolu Liseleri, like Boğaziçi University and Middle Eastern
Technical University. In the 2010s, it has become almost customary that the
graduation ceremonies of these universities functioned as massive anti-Erdoğan
protests. In 2018, the METU students who protested against Erdoğan were
briefly arrested, later released after the president dropped the case. The same
year, some Boğaziçi University students were arrested for protested at the
Turkish military offensive against the Syrian Kurds.
The massive transformation in the education system, which used to provide
institutionalised cultural capital to the urban, secular middle classes, is one of the
most critical steps of downgrading the importance of this exceptional social
layer within the society, and also of creating the new, conservative middle
classes who would replace these privileged few of the Kemalist regime.
Statistics on trade union membership among school teachers reveal how
aggressive the Erdoğan regime has been in this transformation. During the AKP
period, the membership for the party-backed Islamist Eğitim Bir-Sen Union
increased by 985%, while the number of socialist Eğitim-Sen members
decreased by 22% (Göktürk et al., 2012:110). These numbers do not even
include the purge that has been going on since the failed coup d’état attempt in
2016.
The replacement of the urban, middle classes by its AKP’s own privileged
social layer is one of the most essential parts of Erdoğan’s ‘New Turkey’ project,
also one of the main reasons why the Gezi Protests could become such an
unprecedented display of dissidence. The new regime’s attempts of social
engineering and the sudden outrage in the big cities of Western Turkey against
Erdoğan in Gezi, were the climax of an ongoing process. According to Tuğal
(2011: 85–112), ‘Islamic mobilization eases the transformation of habitus in a
liberalizing society and the transition from the predominance of social capital to
the predominance of economic capital’; as the antecedent of the AKP, the
Welfare Party converted the social capital of the conservative sub-proletariat that
migrated from rural areas to big cities to economic and political capital, finally
the AKP creating its own elites using this power. According to Pamuk (2008:
269), while this sub-proletariat constituted the electoral power of the AKP, the
rise of the conservative family businesses in Anatolia fuelled the transformation.
On the other hand, according to Navaro-Yashin (2002: 221–253), the
conservative middle-class districts of Istanbul like Fatih, Ümraniye and Üsküdar
took advantage of this transformation and were engaged in the commodity
market for identities, just like their Kemalist counterparts.
According to Ünsaldı (2010: 165–175), the antagonism between two groups
lies in their conception of development; while the Kemalists are ‘obsessed to
catch up with the present’, the Islamists seek for ‘erasing the present for a
glorious future’. This argument is particularly important, as the initial reason for
the Gezi Protests was the AKP’s willingness to restore the old Ottoman barracks
that used to be in Taksim a century ago, which would also function as a
shopping mall. Erdoğan’s plan to replace a modern, recreational area with
‘Ottoman barracks’ was probably among the reasons that drove the masses to the
Taksim Square to protest against the government. The polarisation between the
Kemalists, or more inclusively ‘moderns’, and Islamists is often interpreted as
the antagonism between the wealthy and the poor, or the urban and the rural.
However, in my view, at the heart of issue, there is the conflict between two
middle classes; one that used to be the privileged, and one that is soon to become
the privileged in the eyes of the ruling regime. That was why Gezi could quickly
be transformed into a culture war.
How did the fans join the Gezi Movement?
In order to explain the presence of different layers of football fans in the Gezi
Protests, it is better to historicise it through a chronology. Even though Gezi has
become a symbol of urban, secular, mostly middle-class people’s outcry against
Erdoğan’s autocratic tendencies, therefore it was understandable that it attracted
Istanbul football fans’ attention, a facilitating actor acclimated the football world
to this political event that could have been otherwise neglected by the masses.
This actor was Çarşı, the left-leaning famous organised fan group of Beşiktaş.
Çarşı, founded in 1982, embraced an image that could be compared to the
‘casuals’ in the UK or ‘ultras’ in Europe since the beginning, also adopting
fandom practices of internationally famous fan groups such as the Kop of
Liverpool. The use of humour in chants and slogans, independent and sometimes
radical presence in the stadiums, creation of an autonomous fan identity, and
also political expressions on issues like racism, the Iraqi war or nuclear power
plants have distinguished this group from other fan groups, and the Çarşı group
has become a fan group emulated in the stadiums nationwide. In 1995–1997, the
group also published a fanzine called ‘Forza Beşiktaş’, one of the firsts and the
most successful among such attempts. In 2006, Çarşı became the first fan group
to attend Labour Day rallies, and also collaborated with Greenpeace against the
use of nuclear energy in 2007. Even though it has always had nationalistic
tendencies in some issues like the violence in the Kurdish question, this group
has also been well-received by the left-wing political bodies. Therefore, Çarşı’s
arrival to the Gezi Park even before it became a mediatised event did not bother
the Gezi Movement components. On the contrary, just like their counterparts in
Egypt and Tunisia (Dorsey, 2011: 6), their experience in physical confrontation
with the police proved useful. The Çarşı group’s Kop-style humorous chants and
songs also created a repertoire that would help popularise the movement.
Therefore, Çarşı was not an outsider to the components of Taksim Solidarity
who organised the first protests, but a helpful ally. Its presence firstly attracted
other left-leaning fan groups like Vamos Bien of Fenerbahçe to the Gezi Park,
and then dozens of thousands of Stambulites who wore jerseys and came to
Taksim to protest the government. One of the key argumenst of this book about
the Gezi Protests is that there was a cleavage between Taksim Solidarity and
other political groups who created the discourse of the movement, and the
politically inexperienced, even anti-political masses who popularised it. In
dozens of other protests organised by the same political bodies, the latter had
never participated. Çarşı and other fan groups joining the protests at the early
stage acted as agents that created a bridge between two Gezis.
The chronology of events also confirms Çarşı’s principal role in the
popularisation of the movement. The group arrived in the park at the night of 28
May 2013, to help the protection of the protesters against a probable police
attack. The boisterous arrival of the group to the park with chants and
firecrackers also increased the visibility of the protesters through images
circulated on the social media. Çarşı’s role was also well-acknowledge by the
regime, as the key members of the group were put on trial for ‘staging a coup
d’etat against the government’ but later acquitted. However, it is a very common
mistake among academics that reduce the fans’ presence in the Gezi Movement
to the Çarşı group. First of all, no fan group in Turkey, including Çarşı, is a well-
structured organisation, but rather loosely tied individuals who gather around a
certain identity. The core members of Çarşı may be a couple of dozen, while
those who auto-proclaim to be Çarşı probably number thousands. Secondly, the
fandom in Turkey cannot be understood over organised fan groups. It is a
country where social organisations have been historically weak. Therefore, to
every fan group of a few hundreds, there are independent, individual fans to a
few million in Turkey. Gezi was not an exception to this rule. And finally, the
fan identity is not limited to belonging to a fan group in some countries, like
Turkey and Brazil. Almost everybody is born into a fan identity; the society
dictates that you at least be the fan of the national team, and not supporting any
team is certainly an anomaly. I, by no means, want to underestimate Çarşı’s role
in the events, but I feel that it does not do the sociology of sport any good to
reduce the presence of thousands of people wearing jerseys in political events to
a caricatural version of a fan group. Therefore, this work aims to explain the role
of fan identity in these political events, not the fan groups.
Counter-strategy of the regime
As aforementioned, the AKP launched a massive social engineering project after
having eliminated its secularist rivals within the state with the 2010 Constitution
referendum. This project entailed a set of practices that aim to establish
hegemony over the society in Turkey, using the media, justice system, education
system and police violence. Gezi was a response to the misuse of these elements
by the regime; however, it also was used as a pretext by Erdoğan for escalating
these practices, further polarising society almost half-strictly pro-Erdoğan, half-
strictly anti-Erdoğan. Fethullah Gülen group, the cult-like religious community
that had infiltrated the state, was the closest ally of the emerging regime during
this transformation. However, ironically, they became its toughest rivals soon
after, resulting in a failed coup attempt in 2016 allegedly staged by the Fethullah
group, and a massive purge following that.
Media control by the AKP
In the 15 years that the AKP has been in power, the editorial and ownership
structure of the media in Turkey has changed spectacularly. The Doğan Media
Group, which had had the lion’s share of the media market, as well as a
considerable power over the previous governments, first had to liquidate a
sizeable amount of its media assets after a heavy tax penalty (Kurban and Sözeri,
2012: 54), and finally withdrew from the media industry in 2018, selling its
remaining assets to the pro-government Demirören Group (owned by Yıldırım
Demirören, the TFF president). Another important player of the media market,
Merkez Medya was confiscated to its owner’s debts and sold to the Turkuaz
Group in 2007, the CEO of which was the brother of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s
son-in-law, Berat Albayrak. The other actors in the Turkish mainstream media,
Ciner, Çukurova and Doğuş, have all had ties with the government as their
ventures in other industries often undertake state tenders. The Star newspaper,
which once belonged to Cem Uzan, the Berlusconi-like populist business mogul
who committed the eternal sin of contesting Erdoğan in the 2002 elections, now
belongs to Ethem Sancak, the AKP member businessman who once said he was
in love with Erdoğan. As of 2013, the pro-government companies owning the
half of the Turkish media was preoccupying, today it is nearly 80% of the
market, just five years later.
During the Gezi Protests, one of the loud pro-government sources was the
media group associated with the Gülen group, namely Bugün and Zaman
newspapers, as well as Samanyolu TV and Kanaltürk channels. These media
outlets picked up a critical approach after Fethullah Gülen and his group had a
major rift with Erdoğan in 2013, especially after the public attorneys close to
Gülen launched a corruption operation about the families of some AKP
ministers, including the Erdoğans in December. After this date, the Gülen group
was declared to be ‘a terrorist organisation’, and they are presumed to be behind
the coup d’état attempt in July 2016. After the coup, all Gülen media outlets
were seized by statutory decrees and shut down. Also, Taraf, a liberal newspaper
which had Gülenist reporters that frequently published leaks against the AKP’s
Kemalist rivals in the army around 2010, was shut down.
At the time of the Gezi Protests, the pro-government media (Zaman, Sabah,
Türkiye, Star, Yeni Şafak, Takvim, Bugün, Yeni Mesaj, Milat, Millî Gazete, Yeni
Asır, Today’s Zaman, Yeni Akit and Yeni Asya newspapers) had a 46% share of
the printed press, in terms of copies sold. The mainstream and thematic
newspapers held a 40% share, while the newspapers critical of the AKP (Sözcü,
Aydınlık, Cumhuriyet, Yeni Çağ, Radikal, Sol, Birgün, Ortadoğu, Evrensel,
Özgür Gündem) only had 14%. It should be noted that today, Radikal and Sol are
not published any more, Özgür Gündem was shut down by a statutory decree,
Cumhuriyet changed ownership with an intervention by the AKP, and Ortadoğu
started supporting the government in 2016 as the MHP made an alliance with the
AKP. Also, three socialist TV channels critical of the government, IMC TV,
Hayat TV and Yol TV, were shut down by statutory decrees in 2016, as well as
all the Gülenist channels. Today, the media openly critical of Erdoğan and his
party hold a much smaller share than it did in 2013. Meanwhile, the pro-
government media’s share expanded dramatically, as the mainstream outlets
were unofficially assigned liaisons that would convey the government’s
demands to the media boards, and anti-government journalists were mostly fired.
Among those, Habertürk newspaper decided to stop publication, and Hürriyet
was sold.
The AKP has used different methods to pressure the critical media since 2010,
some of which they borrowed from the military junta periods, and some crafted
by their ally-turned-enemy the Gülen group. Legal pressure is one of the
effective methods among them, especially the long detention periods without
indictment, applied to journalists and other political ‘criminals’. It is hardly an
AKP invention, but we can comfortably say that since the government started to
dominate the justice system in 2010, it has become one of the signature methods.
In the beginning, as in most domains, the AKP had a more libertarian
approach on the justice system, claiming to correct the anti-democratic practices
in line with the EU reforms. In 2004, the government revoked the Special
Security Courts (Devlet Güvenlik Mahkemesi – DGM), which were founded
after 1980 coup d’état to put the dissident political figures on trial. This was a
long-sought reform, especially by the European Union. However, the assize
courts replacing the DGMs just took over their functions and staff (Türkmen,
2008: 156). Also, the post of ‘specially authorised public attorney’ was created,
who had the authority to prosecute someone without seeking permission from
the chief prosecutor (Turkish Penal Code, Art. 250–251). These public attorneys,
who happened to be predominantly Gülenists, launched major investigations,
like the Ergenekon and Balyoz cases against the Kemalist military chiefs, or the
KCK case against the Kurdish politicians. These court cases were often
criticised, and many believed that they were used as a tool by Gülen and
Erdoğan to eliminate their rivals within the state (Jenkins, 2012: 5). At that
period, the journalists systematically detained without indictment created a
negative reaction from the international community. Especially, the detainment
of Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener in March 2011, two journalists critical of the
Gülen group, caused massive controversy (ironically, Ahmet Şık, who is an MP
from the HDP today, had been imprisoned for several months after the 2016
coup attempt, accused of being a Gülenist). The 2010 World Press Freedom
report by the Reporters Without Borders described the situation in Turkey as ‘the
frenzied proliferation of lawsuits, incarcerations, and court sentencing targeting
journalists’. Ahmet Şık’s book against the Gülen group being seized even before
it was published, and his detention was also heavily criticised by the European
Commission’s 2011 Turkey report (6).
In 2012 and 2013, the freedom of expression continued to decline. In its 2012
report (21–22), the European Commission underlined the violations on this
particular civil right, while in 2013 (52), it also mentioned a necessary revision
on the regulations that caused over 32,000 websites to be banned. The
government’s ban on Twitter was also criticised.
Regarding Internet freedom, several red flags were apparent between 2010
and 2014. According to EngelliWeb, the online NGO which recorded the
number of banned websites in Turkey, as of 2014, the Telecommunications and
Communications Authority (Telekomünikasyon İletişim Başkanlığı – TİB)
banned over 20,000 websites in one year and 60,000 in total. Ironically,
EngelliWeb also vanished from the face of the Internet in 2017. The Internet
regulations in Turkey, which has been in effect since 2007, were amended twice
in 2014, after the Gezi Protests and the Erdoğan’s corruption leaks, to give the
TİB authority to censor websites without court orders. Freedom House, an NGO
assessing press freedom in countries, in turn, classified Turkey as a country
where media is not free, for the first time that year.
Controlling the justice system
The court cases, especially against the Kemalists and army members like
Ergenekon and Balyoz, were criticised of being ‘conspiracy theories’ (Jenkins,
2009: 80–81) and created the suspicion of a purge against the secularists in the
justice system and the government. The Constitutional Court and the Higher
Council of Judges and Public Attorneys (Hakimler Savcılar Yüksek Kurulu –
HSYK) were at the core of the controversy (Tayla, 2012: 94). After the election
of Abdullah Gül to the presidency in 2007, more Islamist members were
appointed to the HSYK, and the conflict deepened (Çiftçi: 2013: 163–164). In
order to solidify its domination over the justice system, the government proposed
a set of constitutional changes which also concerned the composition of the
HSYK in 2010. These amendments were of democratic nature in theory, as they
would increase the elected officials’ impact and reduce the role of military over
the justice system. These changes were contested by the CHP and MHP, and a
referendum took place on 12 September 2010, the thirtieth anniversary of the
coup d’état. In this referendum, boycotted by the Kurdish Political Movement,
the government managed to win by 58%. An election was held in the HSYK the
following week, making candidates supported by the Minister of Justice
members of the council. Some marked the new amendments as the ‘end of
separation of powers’ (Tayla, 2012: 94). In February 2011, a new law passed
changing the composition of the State Council and the Court of Appeal (Law
No. 6110).
Meanwhile, the growing conflict between Tayyip Erdoğan and his closest ally
Fethullah Gülen made a massive impact in the course of events. The Gülenists,
who practically started to control the justice system with the new amendments,
attempted to launch an operation against the Intelligence Director Hakan Fidan,
one of Erdoğan’s most loyal officials. The government camp interpreted this
move as a ‘coup d’etat attempt’, and revoked the ‘specially authorised public
attorney’ post, which gave Gülenist public attorneys a huge deal of freedom, in
June 2012. In October 2013, Tayyip Erdoğan declared that the government
would ban the special education centres (dershane) that prepare students to
university entry exams. This move escalated the conflict further, as some of
these centres had been functioning as a recruitment centre for Gülenists for
decades, helping them to attract young followers with high potential. In
December 2013, the Gülenist public attorneys launched a major operation
against the families of four ministers that included the Erdoğan family.
Simultaneously, pro-Gülen Twitter and YouTube accounts started to leak
audiovisual recordings that would incriminate Erdoğan and his ministers, calling
the PM ‘başçalan’, the prime thief. According to these leaks, Erdoğan and the
ministers orchestrated millions of dollars’ worth of corruption, also bribed by a
Turkish-Iranian businessman called Reza Zerrab who conducted illegal dealings
with Iran. Three days after the operations began, the government forced public
attorneys to inform their supervisors before launching investigations. The HSYK
declared that this change was unconstitutional. Near the end of the operation, the
public attorney also tried to detain Erdoğan’s son, Bilal, but pro-Erdoğan police
officers refused to comply with the orders. In February 2014, the government
passed a new law about the composition of the HSYK, reclaiming the power. In
October 2014, the government’s list won the HSYK elections against the
Gülenists. In December 2014, the First Penal Court of Istanbul dropped the
corruption case. Meanwhile, in March 2016, Reza Zerrab was arrested by the
United States officials for breaking the Iranian embargo, and later became a key
witness against Hakan Attila, the former director of a Turkish bank, also arrested
in the US. After the coup d’état attempt in July 2016, presumed to be conducted
by the Gülenists, a new court case was filed in Turkey, this time against the
former public attorney for staging ‘the corruption conspiracy’.
The redefinition of the justice system after 2010 created irreversible tensions
in the Turkish society. While the Ergenekon and Balyoz cases aggravated the
outrage by the Kemalists against the government, the Kurds were targeted by a
series of politically charged cases starting with the KCK trials. The fallout
between the AKP and the Gülenists resulted in further mistrust in the justice
system, as the key members of the justice system elected by the AKP in 2010–
2011 were all purged and/or put in trial as ‘terrorists’ by the same government
after 2016. In the football world, the match-fixing case had a similar fate, the
case was later followed by a ‘match-fixing conspiracy’ case, which turned the
key actors of the investigation into culprits. In my work, I looked at the potential
mistrust of the Gezi participants in the justice system, including but not limited
to the match-fixing operation.
Police violence
The use of police violence to intimidate and control dissident crowds also
increased visibly after the 2010 referendum. This increase has been documented
by the Human Rights Watch reports. In the 2011 report, which covered the
incidents in 2010, the only violence mentioned against a public protest was the
mistreatment of five transsexual activists in a rally in Ankara. In the 2012 report,
the HRW underlined that the police violence in mass protests was a grave issue.
The NGO accused the government of masking the mistreatment by pretexts,
instead of thoroughly investigating the violence claims. The HRW also
mentioned Metin Lokumcu, the high school teacher in Artvin, who passed away
because of a heart attack caused by the heavy use of tear gas in an anti-AKP
rally.
Police violence reached a new peak in the Labour Day rallies of 2013. After
three decades of ban, between 2010 and 2012, the government authorised the
Labour Day ceremonies in the Taksim Square, the emblematic place which
witnessed the rallies of hundreds of thousands of workers in the 1970s that
ended with a presumably government-linked massacre in 1977 which cost the
lives of 42 people. The three rallies between 2010 and 2012 were concluded
without a single incident. However, in 2013, probably a result of the growing
dissent against the government, the governorship of Istanbul banned the Taksim
Square once again, citing the urbanisation projects going on in the area as a
security hazard; 30,000 police officers were assigned to the Taksim area to make
sure the workers would not have access to the square, who used tear gas and
water cannon against the participants for seven hours.
As aforementioned, football has been one of the most powerful tools for
Turkish governments to distract crowds away from political movements that
have been considered to be detrimental to the state. While the major football
clubs have always been supported by the governments, the fans were expected to
cheer for their teams (and consume for their benefit), and also from time to time
convey messages that would reflect the core elements of the official ideology,
such as nationalism or militarism, especially since the 1980 coup d’état. Apart
from that type of politics, any politicisation of fans would not be tolerated.
However, as it can be seen in some examples like the Türk Telekom Arena
inauguration, the secular middle-class sports fans in major cities like Istanbul
had a growing dissent against the government that would threaten their lifestyles
after the 2010 constitutional referendum. Left-leaning fan groups such as Çarşı
of Beşiktaş or Vamos Bien of Fenerbahçe became more and more visible in
protest rallies, sometimes clashing with the police. Also, the three key secular
neighbourhoods of Istanbul, Beyoğlu, Beşiktaş and Kadıköy, which happen to be
birth places of the three major Stambulite football clubs were under the risk of
urbanisation which would directly make an impact on the fandom rituals. The
increasing dissent was instantly met with aggravating police violence, and
resulted in frequent clashes between two groups who traditionally had never
seen things eye to eye. The match-fixing operation further escalated the conflict
between two parties.
Note
1 As might be expected, these anti-AKP iftars were met by police violence, while
famous journalists like Aslı Aydıntaşbaş of Milliyet and Nazlı Ilıcak of Sabah were
actively contributing to the AKP’s PR efforts, just metres away. It is ironic that both
journalists, along with hundreds of others, lost their jobs soon after for not being
sufficiently pro-AKP. Ilıcak was later condemned to life sentence, accused of ‘being
part of the coup d’etat attempt in 2016’.
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Chapter 8
Virtually among the fans
Football as a political subject
Analysing the politicisation of middle-class Stambulite football fans in the AKP
period, three subjects appeared to be critical: the match-fixing operation
launched in 2011 by public prosecutors close to Fethullah Gülen; the
government’s involvement in stadium constructions; and Passolig, the
controversial electronic ticket scheme. These subjects all impacted football clubs
in different ways. Accordingly, the perception of these events and their
interpretation mostly depended on the club people supported. Therefore, it was
vital for me to look for different and conflictual views among fans from different
clubs while treating these subjects with an ethnographical approach.
Methodology
The idea of following a number of football fans that participated in the Gezi
Protests during a long period of time came to my mind when most of the tools
that we use today for this purpose were not yet developed. During the three and a
half years that I conducted my research, I had to change the tools that I used as
some new tools were introduced, while some other were orphaned by their
developers. Also, it was a learning experience regarding research ethics, the
research became more and more delicate as personal freedoms in Turkey
worsened.
In order to conduct such a longitudinal, quasi-ethnographic work, the first task
was to pick a sample size. I decided on 60 supporters, 20 of each Big Three
clubs. The sample size could have been slightly larger, but for a research that I
conducted alone and without funding, I had to stay in the realistic side, as the
number of tweets to analyse could have exceeded millions. To pick users for the
sample, I set three criteria; they should have attended the games of their club,
they should have been in the Gezi Protests (at the Park, in the nearby locations
such as Taksim Square, Beşiktaş, Beyoğlu or Şişli), and they should have used
Twitter actively before, during and after the Protests. A fourth criterium was
necessary to verify these three, they should have used Foursquare, as I used their
“check-in”s to verify location information. In order to find users complying with
these criteria, I browsed through tweets that had the hashtag #DirenGeziParkı
and created a candidate list. In this list, I selected the users with references to
football clubs in their nicknames, avatar and profiles. Among these users, I
selected the ones who posted their Foursquare check-ins on Twitter and verified
whether they were in the games and the protests. To fill the quota, I used
consecutive sampling, meaning the first users that comply with the criteria. The
only exception to this rule was that I picked at least four female users per group,
as this number corresponded to the ratio of women in the stadiums in Turkey.
As the research subject is a sensitive issue that might risk the users, I decided
to set a protocol. First of all, I anonymised all the usernames, even when the user
do not use their real names. I used @bjk1…bjk20 for the Beşiktaş fans, @gs1…
gs20 for the Galatasaray fans, and @fb1…fb20 for the Fenerbahçe fans. I also
altered the time codes in the tweets that I quote through the research, to prevent
reverse search that could make finding usernames possible using the time
information. Through the research, I did not seek consent from the users as they
already made the data I used public by consenting to Twitter. Therefore, I only
used publicly accessible data; in case a user locks or deletes their account, or
erases their tweets, I immediately removed that user from the sample pool,
replacing them with a user from my reserve list.
Initially, I planned my research as a digital ethnography, accompanied with
face-to-face interviews. However, by 2017, when my research neared to its end,
social media users, as well as former Gezi participants, were frequently detained
by the Erdoğan regime and accused of “supporting terrorism” or “insulting the
president.” Also, the Erdoğan regime started pointing the finger at the
academics, especially those abroad, after the Academics for Peace petition,
calling the government to stop civilian killings in predominantly Kurdish
regions. As a result, many participants did not want to speak to researcher in a
French university, or they tried to protect themselves by offering different
versions of events. For instance, one of the sample group members that I met
denied participating in the Gezi Protests and she claimed she was there as a
photographer. Therefore, this data was unusable, and I stuck with the data that I
had already collected, even if it would reduce the ethnographic value of my
research. Currently, it has been a common problem among researchers that try to
conduct fieldwork in Turkey, the climate of fear created since the failed coup
d’etat attempt in 2016 takes its toll on research.
For data frame, I decided to start with one year before the Gezi Protests, 31
May 2012. Originally, I set June 2015 as the data collection freeze date, but
since there were two legislative elections between June and November that year,
I continued until the elections were over. The data collection ended on 15
November 2015. This is a decision that I partially regret today, as in July 2016,
there was a failed coup d’etat attempt, but it was certainly impossible to foresee
that event. In the data collection period, a little more than 210,000 messages
were collected.
One of the main challenges of my research was that, even though the old data
was accessible on Twitter, the Twitter API did not permit collecting retrieving
data older than seven days in 2013, when I started my research. At that period,
there was no open-source software that could access the old Twitter data,
therefore I scraped the messages between May 2012-June 2013 by scraping the
Twitter web pages and later converting them into .csv files, which was a very
tedious work. Much later, I started using GetOldTweets to access such data, a
java code that was developed near the end of my research. I used DMI-TCAT
software to collect real-time data, import old data and for the preliminary
analysis. I categorised the tweets using the PSPP software, the open-source
version of SPSS.
To be able to reveal different characteristics of expressions, I decided on two
types of analysis; thematic and period-based. By thematic analysis, I aimed to
find tweets that would be pertinent to my conception of the “Republican Doxa.”
By the period-based analysis, I wanted to reveal ruptures, continuities and
reactive peaks in the supporters’ expressions. Therefore I used seven periods of
political importance;

1. 31 May 2012 – 28 May 2013: One year before the Gezi Protests to the start
of the protests
2. 28 May 2013 – 30 June 2013: During the Gezi Protests
3. 1 July 2013 – 16 December 2013: From the aftermath of the Gezi Protests
to the Erdoğan family’s corruption scandal
4. 17 December 2013 – 30 March 2014: From the Erdoğan scandal to the local
elections
5. 1 April 2014 – 10 August 2014: From the local elections to the presidential
elections
6. 11 August 2014 – 7 June 2015: From the presidential elections to the June
2015 legislative elections
7. 8 June 2015 – 15 November 2015: From the June elections to the
November elections
The match-fixing operation: Everybody has their own
version
The match-fixing operation launched in July 2011 holds a special place in the
political history of football in Turkey as it was conducted by the same judicial
teams, presumed to have been Gülenists, who launched politically motivated
court cases like Ergenekon and Balyoz against the Kemalist military chiefs or
the KCK case against the Kurdish politicians. After the Gülenist and the AKP
parted ways around 2013 in a very aggressive manner and turned to become
bitter enemies, the public prosecutors who carried out the match-operation case
were accused of conspiracy, in an equally politically charged move. One thing is
certain, though; no matter whether you believe this case was an important
attempt to clean football in Turkey or a conspiracy against the football club for a
political takeover, the sloppy and partisan treatment of the subject contaminated
this important subject so much that another attempt in revealing corruption in
football in Turkey in the future may end before it began. What is left from this
case is a mess: a social trauma that polarised people even further in football-
crazy country, further mistrust against the justice system, and absolutely no
progress in making football corruption-free. The Gezi Protests took place right
after the match-fixing case while polarised opinions on the subject were still
very fresh, therefore it is interesting to take a look at how fans in our sample felt
about this delicate issue and whether they associated it with their participation in
Gezi or not.
After the detainment of the Fenerbahçe chairman Aziz Yıldırım on 3 July
2011, the Fenerbahçe supporters reacted collectively against the match-fixing
operation, claiming it was an attempt to take the club over. As amentioned
before, fans’ media usage appeared to be very influential in popularising this
argument among Fenerbahçe supporters. While the independent fans’ media led
by the now-defunct Papazın Çayırı blog developed the discourse which claimed
the club was under attack by Gülenists and the AKP, the semi-official 12
Numara blog/Twitter account created some sort of personality cult around Aziz
Yıldırım (Irak, 2014: 115). These two fan media outlets were also crucial in
organising mass rallies in front of the Çağlayan courthouse in Istanbul, where
the hearings of the case were held, in Silivri, where Aziz Yıldırım was kept
detained, along with other defendants of the case, and in Kadıköy. During these
rallies, Fenerbahçe fans were often confronted by police violence, the worst of
which happened on 12 May 2012 after the Galatasaray derby in Kadıköy, where
the police tear-gas attack in the stadium resulted in massive clashes in the streets.
Our data collection dates back to 30 May 2012, one year before the Gezi
Protests and a little after these violent clashes and the Aziz Yıldırım hearings.
Therefore, it is easy to see how Fenerbahçe fans were outraged by the police
violence and the hearings that they treated as mistreatment of their club.
Among our selection of Fenerbahçe fans, an important number of supporters
use the designation ‘coup d’etat against Fenerbahçe’ in describing the match-
fixing case. This is important as the wording implies that they perceive their club
as a Republican institution, secular and Kemalist.
For example, @fb9 associates the match-fixing operation with the occupation
of Istanbul by Allies after the First World War, making a reference to the
football games Fenerbahçe played back then against the occupying forces’
teams:

‘#The3JulyCoup The allies and their generals came back to destroy Fenerbahçe. It
will not be destroyed, you will not be able to destroy it, you shall not destroy it.’ –
@fb9, 2012-06-21 09:50

Describing the solidarity of Fenerbahçe fans after the match-fixing operation,

@fb6, a female supporter, makes a reference to a well-known expression of the
Turkish official ideology, ‘being in unity and togetherness’:1

‘The Great Fenerbahçe supporters, I am proud of you, I will never forget the 3 July
coup, we have been in unity and togetherness since then.’ – @fb6, 2012-08-09 00:17

The political importance attributed to Fenerbahçe by its supporters is also

accompanied by the claim that Galatasaray, the biggest rival of Fenerbahçe, was
an ally of the government in staging the ‘coup’ against the club, as @fb10
explains:

‘You build a stadium for Galatasaray, you bring tax amnesties for them, and stage
the coup of 3 July against Fenerbahçe, who crushes Galatasaray in all sports. Fuck
your justice.’ – @fb10, 2013-08-11 12:38

During the Gezi Protests, some Fenerbahçe supporters associate the movement
with the reaction the fans showed against the match-fixing operation:

‘Resist Taksim! Be resilient! The 3 July resistance, the Kadıköy people, the
Fenerbahçe supporters come from the Bağdat Street2 to join you!’ – @fb19, 2013-
 06-01 01:28
‘The ‘çapulcu’s3 supporting other teams, did you finally realise what we went
through in Çağlayan and Silivri?’ – @fb10, 2013-06-07 14:57
‘We have been in resistance since 3 July, all the men and women, young and old.’
– @fb5, 2013-06-08 10:47
‘Keep on being inspired by our unbowed Fenerbahçe fans and our slogans.’ –
@fb8, 2013-06-23 07:31
‘We were declared rebellious on 3 July, and terrorists on 12 May. They do the
same against Çarşı now. We cannot leave them alone. We are all Çarşı.’ – @fb14,
2013-06-17 10:55

As seen in most examples, the belief that the match-fixing operation was staged
to take over Fenerbahçe had become a unifying myth among the club’s fans after
3 July 2011. While the fans’ were right to emphasise that the operation was
conducted by a group known for politically charged cases, the narrative of
Fenerbahçe fans goes beyond that and creates a confrontation between the new
regime and the club as the last protector of the old one. This final battle is
unmistakably similar to the classic discourse of Turkish nationalism which treats
almost every issue through a perception of ‘worldwide conspiracy against
Turks’. In our sample, there is not even a single Fenerbahçe fan who questions
the ‘Fenerbahçe vs. everybody’ narrative.
On the other hand, Galatasaray fans also stick to their guns on this subject,
often expressing their unquestionable belief on how Fenerbahçe is at the heart of
all the corruption in football:

‘We win with effort, not with match-fixing, you can never understand what it means,
Fenerbahçe fans.’ – @gs13, 2012-06-16 16:10
‘Now, everybody should shout out loud: Fenerbahçe is corrupt’ – @gs1, 2012-07-
02 10:01

As Fenerbahçe fans tend to believe that the operation is a coup attempt against
their club, Galatasaray fans are equally convinced that the match-fixing is real
and Galatasaray is the only club that stayed out of it.
‘For this league where match-fixers shame football, you have too much honour,
Galatasaray.’ – @gs4, 2012-07-03 13:46
‘Sorry but we’re French4 to match-fixing, better ask Fenerbahçe, they are the
posterboy of it.’ – @gs1, 2012-07-05 13:29
‘Galatasaray is corruption-free, clean as a whistle.’ – @gs17, 2012-10-21 11:38
 The claims by the Fenerbahçe fans that the match-fixing operation is an anti-
Republican coup against Fenerbahçe, staged by Gülenists, are largely ignored by
the Galatasaray fans. There is only one Galatasaray fan who cares to respond to
those arguments:

‘I will be relieved if someone could explain to me how match-fixing is about

Atatürk, and the operation is tied to the Gülenists.’ – @gs11, 2014-01-31 13:09

As we have seen, Fenerbahçe fans often tie Gezi to the police violence and the
‘injustice’ against their own club. Among Galatasaray fans, there is not a single
mention of it. Being together in Gezi with the Fenerbahçe fans does not change
their view on the match-fixing case.
Meanwhile, the Beşiktaş fans generally chose not to comment on the match-
fixing case. This may be explained by a couple of factors. On one hand, the
match-fixing operation also aimed some Beşiktaş board members, but the
Beşiktaş fans did not defend them the same way that the Fenerbahçe fans
defended Aziz Yıldırım. Çarşı, the famous fan group, made a declaration on 13
July 2011, and called on the defendants to ‘clean their names and come back’.
Therefore, a ‘wait and see’ approach is popular among the Beşiktaş fans. On the
other hand, it should be noted that the rivalry between Galatasaray and
Fenerbahçe is far more fierce than their rivalries with Beşiktaş, partly because it
is a club know with its modest character (even though it changed after their
legendary chairman Süleyman Seba resigned), and partly because it joined
football a bit later than the other two clubs as it was founded as a gymnastics
club in 2013. In a way, Beşiktaş is like Atletico Madrid to Barcelona and Real
Madrid. It is often called to be ‘everybody’s second favourite club’. For all these
reasons, the Beşiktaş fans are not as invested in discussing the match-fixing
operation openly. In our sample, the majority thinks that Fenerbahçe committed
those acts, but they are not interested in confronting Fenerbahçe fans about it, as
the Galatasaray fans are.
In this delicate issue, we can comfortably see that the views of supporters are
exclusively shaped by the club they support. All the Fenerbahçe fans think the
operation is a conspiracy, and all the Galatasaray fans believe that Fenerbahçe is
guilty of all the crimes in the football world and their club is completely
corruption-free. The political and legal arguments are very secondary in this
debate and they are often (mis)used to reinforce the claims of their camps.
Bearing in mind these uncompromised and opinionated attitudes, it is interesting
to see both camps joined in the same movement in July 2013 in a very
spontaneous way. The supporters tend to justify the political identity with their
fan identity, using the same methods but different arguments. For instance, a
Fenerbahçe supporter may explain their participation in Gezi with his intolerance
against the lack of justice, and a Galatasaray fan may perceive the movement
against corruption. Even though the arguments tied to their clubs are different,
they have the same common and superseding values; like secularism or
allegiance to the Republic, and other elements of the ‘Republican doxa’.
Stadiums given to the clubs by the government
The allocation of stadiums to football clubs is an equally controversial subject.
In Turkey, the football grounds have generally been owned by the Directorate
General of Sports and loaned to clubs with long-term contracts in order to build
and operate stadiums. In the AKP period, this policy took another turn and the
Housing Administration (TOKİ) started to take part in stadium construction
projects through public–private joint ventures, a practice often used by the AKP
in its construction spree, mostly as a tool for crony-capitalism to support pro-
government firms. The Türk Telekom Stadium, Galatasaray’s venue since 2011,
is a particular example of this practice. The terrain in Seyrantepe, where the new
ground was built, was given to Galatasaray, in exchange for the old Ali Sami
Yen Stadium, located in a valuable commercial district where TOKİ would build
a skyscraper complex in the old ground through a public–private joint venture.
TOKİ also undertook the completion of the new stadium when the club’s
construction plans came to a deadlock. During the inaugural ceremony of the
new stadium, the TOKİ chairman Erdoğan Bayraktar called Galatasaray ‘a club
not even capable of paying the old ground’s rent’, he and Tayyip Erdoğan were
booed out of the stadium.
The Fenerbahçe supporters like to remind everyone that the stadium was
completed by TOKİ, calling the Galatasaray venue as ‘TOKİ Arena’. The
Fenerbahçe fans believe that they are the only club that does not need the
government to build a stadium, or their newly constructed summer training
complex in Topuk Yaylası.

‘I would like to know if the shameless Gay-Se would also demand a training
complex like Topuk Yaylası from TOKİ.’ – @fb10, 2012-07-10 16:23
‘Their stadium comes from TOKİ, their cups are given by the government, their
logo is counterfeit, their chants are stolen. #miserablesaray #thiefsaray.’ – @fb15,
2013-04-19 18:48
‘They are so-called ‘conquerors of Europe’ but they owe their stadium to TOKİ.
Get out of there.’ – @fb19, 2014-02-07 13:25

The Galatasaray fans also have a conflict with the Beşiktaş fans in this issue.
The Beşiktaş stadium, İnönü, was put out of commission in 2013 in favour of a
new and modern stadium named Vodafone Park, and it was briefly proposed that
the club would share the Türk Telekom Stadium with Galatasaray. Some
Beşiktaş fans claimed that their team had every right to play there since it was a
stadium built by the government. The Galatasaray fans responded:

‘All the stadiums belong to the Directorate General of Sports, if you look that way,
you imbeciles. The stadium is ours, you shameless Beşiktaş people.’ – @gs13, 2012-
06-24 10:39
‘OK, I get it. They try to show they are politically powerful enough to bring
Galatasaray down. Go play in Fenerbahçe’s field.’ – @gs14, 2012-06-28 07:27

The Beşiktaş fans are less vocal also in this subject. They are also divided if they
should play in somebody else’s home ground:

‘Instead of playing in stadiums given to these sons of bitches, play in the streets and
we support you from the pavements, Beşiktaş.’ – @bjk2, 2012-06-26 19:07
‘Playing in TT Stadium would be a pleasure. I would definitely buy a season’s
ticket there, even if I wouldn’t go that often.’ – @bjk15, 2012-06-23 17:37

The club rivalries often translate into claims that the other clubs are protected by
the state. It is partly true as all major clubs are given the status of ‘public interest
association’ by law in the 1990s, including the fans’ own club. Therefore, the
clubs have certain advantages, like tax immunities in realties. They also benefit
from frequent tax amnesties and are given fields to build and operate. These
advantages were granted to major clubs to make sure that they were financially
sound enough to represent Turkey in Europe. Their successes generate waves of
national pride, which is very easy to use politically (Irak and Polo, 2018: 659–
676). Also, it is a way of keeping football clubs, always beneficial in
consolidating public support, on a short leash.
The feeling of others being protected by a superior power is a very familiar
theme if you know how Turkish nationalism works. In the nationalistic
discourse, different rivals, such as Greece, Serbia or Israel are described as ‘the
West’s spoiled child’, against Turkey ‘which has always been mistreated’. This
almost-paranoid conspiracy theory is core to the Turkish nationalism associated
with militarism. In the micro-nationalistic realm of Stambulite football clubs, the
elements of the narrative as replaced while the conspiracy theory is kept. The
rival nations are substituted by rival clubs, the West by the state, and the
militarist nationalism by the solidarity of fans who fight against this conspiracy.
The Turkish nationalism plays a double role in football fandom in Turkey; not
only it is integrated in fan discourses but it also serves as a model to micro-
nations in constructing their own myths and rivalries. In order to see how
nationalism and other elements of the ‘Republican Doxa’ functions among fans,
I will extend my analysis to these core subjects.
Passolig: The big dilemma
The controversial e-ticket scheme Passolig is among the most debated subjects
in the sample group. The overwhelming majority of the fans are against the
system; as a matter of fact, none of the sample group members supports it.
However, boycotting the system, therefore the games, is another matter. In 2014,
after the Passolig system was introduced, there was a massive decrease in
attendance for Istanbul teams, due to some of the biggest fan groups and
thousands of independent fans boycotting the system. In that period, boycott
appears to be the popular choice in my sample group of football supporters:

‘I first wanted to get Passolig, but I did not have the heart. If the terrace spirit will
end, what is the purpose of going to the stadiums?’ – @bjk2, 09/04/2014 10:35
‘Don’t touch our terraces!’ – @gs4, 16/04/2014 09:32
‘I go to the Passolig website, read their terms of conditions, swear to each one of
them, I relax.’ – @fb12, 15/04/2014 14:55
‘I won’t get e-ticket, I won’t let others buy it, the fans should unite against it, just
like in Gezi.’ – @gs16, 16/04/2014 12:15
‘What the fuck is e-ticket, which country has it? It’s a way of getting some AKP
guy rich.’ – @gs14, 03/06/2015 16:58

However, the boycott is not a unanimous choice. Some other fans just cannot
leave their team:

‘It’s easy not to buy Passolig, if you have never been to an away game.’ – @fb10,
19/04/2014 13:00
‘Yeah, go on protesting, don’t come to the game against Trabzon, leave the team
alone …’ – @bjk20, 17/08/2015 15:17

There are a couple of reasons of the boycott not holding up. Firstly, the
supporters hoped that the Constitutional Court would annul the Passolig
regulation; however the Court upheld the system in November 2015. Also, in
2015, clubs, partly with Passolig funding, started to bring world-class players.
One fan sarcastically points at this fact:

‘If the club transfers Robin van Persie, things will change, you change, I change, we
all change (went and bought Passolig).’ – @fb12 04/07/2015 06:15

Obviously, for avid fans, boycotting the games is a big dilemma. ‘Not leaving
the alone’ is often the reasoning for getting Passolig. Also, I should underline the
lack of political experience among the supporters. They do not have any
experience of boycotts or strikes. Their actions are overwhelmingly reactive and
prone to fade away as the time passes. That was exactly the case in the Passolig
boycott.
Topics related to the Republican Doxa

Kemalism: The founding ideology of the Republican

The allegiance to Kemalism, the principles created by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is
an essential element that brings the fans in our sample together. This complete
allegiance manifests itself to such an extent that people tend to identify
themselves through devotion to these principles. According to many, the
existence of the nation, the Turkishness, and even existence of individuals who
belong to the nation depend on Atatürk. This quasi-mythical belief that
completely excludes other sociopolitical facts from the equation and ties the
entire nation-building process to a cult of personality is also vocally pronounced
by some members of our sample:

‘If you did not exist ATAM,5 we would not be able to live in a secular way. You left
us a gift but nobody is aware of that.’ – @fb6, 2012-11-10 11:30
‘If Mustafa Kemal Atatürk did not exist, you would have searched who your
father was in countries like France, England, Greece or Armenia.’ – @fb3, 2012-09-
04 22:22
‘If you did not exist ATAM, we would have been TURKS.’ – @bjk18, 2012-11-
10 07:45
‘If you did not exist, nor would have we. We are invincible custodians of your
heritage.’ – @bjk2, 2013-11-10 19:26
‘They say if it was not for Atatürk, somebody else would come up. MY ASS! If
you believe in destiny, you will believe in Atatürk too. It should have been him and
it was him! You shall accept that! Don’t get smart with it!’ – @fb19, 2013-11-15
20:06

These messages attribute an almost religious role to Atatürk. According to

Navaro-Yashin (2002:188), this phenomenon may be explained by the
transformation of Kemalism into a ‘secular religion or ritual’. Another common
theme in those messages about Kemalism is that it is often positioned to oppose
Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP. There is a strictly dualist perception in the
messages posted before and after Gezi, which does not allow a third political
option.

‘This is our national holiday that ATAM gave us, not you, you sons of bitches of the
AKP!’ – @fb6, 2013-10-29 15:34
‘I don’t support the AKP because I am loyal to the Atatürk reforms and I love my
 country, not sell it.’ – @gs18, 2012-10-18 22:44
‘We are all disciples of the Great Atatürk, if we give up this objective, may Allah
make us AKP supporters. We will never forget you, THE SUPREME TURK.’ –
@fb3, 2015-09-01 19:17
‘I do not vote for the AKP, because I am grateful to Mustafa Kemal, our martyrs
and the soldiers conspired against [in Ergenekon and Balyoz cases]. I don’t vote for
the AKP.’ – @bjk5, 2015-10-30 07:03

It should also be noted that positioning the AKP directly to the opposite of
Kemalism is a mutual practice, as the party also aims to dismantle Kemalism to
promote its own conservative flavour of authoritarism (Tombuş, 2013: 313–
314). Meanwhile, the discourse of the Gezi Movement, crafted by the Taksim
Solidarity, never succumbed to this dualism and tried to create a third,
democratic, alternative. Overtly anti-Kemalist organisations such as the Kurdish
movement or the Anticapitalist Muslims were part of the movement, as well as
ultra-Kemalist ones such as the Turkish Youth Union (Türkiye Gençlik Birliği –
TGB). The rallies were never dominated by a Kemalist discourse, to the extent
that protests were held about the young Kurd assassinated by the Security Forces
in Lice, Medeni Yıldırım, in the Kemalist strongholds of Istanbul, namely
Beşiktaş and Kadıköy. However, this pro-democratic pluralism of the Gezi
Movement is not observable among the members of our sample, which suggests
that these newcomers to the movement did not really embrace its core discourse.
It is also one of the strong indicators which reveal the cleavage between the
organisers of the movement and its newcomers.
As for the bond between Kemalism and football fandom, our sample produces
interesting data. Previously, I mentioned that one of the main objectives of the
rivalry between three Istanbul clubs is to prove which club is more Kemalist or
nationalist than the others. Accordingly, it is possible to see that some fans
believe that only their team is Kemalist and others support the AKP.

‘You speak about Islam, you insult ATATÜRK, and you support this French team of
Galatasaray.’ – @bjk10, 2013-11-15 12:32
‘Unlike the Fenerbahçe supporters who founded a republic within the Republic,6
we, the Galatasaray fans, are children of the Turkish Republic, founded by Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk.’ – @gs4, 2013-02-06 09:51
‘One cannot be a Galatasaray fans and a Kemalist, you are a Kemalist or a
Galatasaray fan, son of a bitch.’ – @fb3, 2012-07-13 16:14
‘We do not say in vain that Beşiktaş and Fenerbahçe belong to Atatürk and
Galatasaray belongs to the French.’ – @fb19, 2013-04-05 20:55
‘We are Beşiktaş, we are the people, we are Kemalists.’ – @bjk20, 2015-09-09
 12:18

Another heated discussion point is the club that Atatürk supports. All three
clubs’ fans claim that the founding father of the Republic was a supporter of
their club, even though there is absolutely no evidence that Atatürk was even
remotely interested in football.

‘The love that Mustafa Kemal had for Galatasaray is documented by the letter he
wrote to Galatasaray, and by his visits to the Galatasaray High School.’ – @gs20,
2013-02-28 11:21
‘Atam, we are your disciples, we are supporters of Fenerbahçe as you were.’ –
@fb3, 2015-05-19 11:43

Through all the messages posted by the fans in my sample, I observed that
Kemalism is the most common element, even though the emphasis given to this
ideology varies from fan to fan. I may comfortably say that there is a very strong
allegiance to Kemalism among these fans, completely in line with the
‘Republican Doxa’. The strong bond between Kemalism and the fan identity also
show how fandom is interwoven with the ‘Republican Doxa’.

Turkish nationalism: The core of the doxa

Turkish nationalism is one of the most central but controversial themes in
Turkey. The country is composed of a dozen of different ethnicities, the most
important being Turks and Kurds. Since the foundation of the Republic, the
relationship between these two ethnic group has been very complex and
conflictual, since the state imposes the Turkish identity on all ethnic groups as a
national identity. This practice is problematic, as the word ‘Turk’ designates an
ethnicity and the citizenship at the same time. Article 66 of the Constitution
indicates that ‘Everyone bound to the Turkish State through the bond of
citizenship is a Turk.’ However, since the beginning, the word ‘Turk’ is also
used to designate an ethnic group, even in some legal documents, like the 1934
Immigration Law which grants immigration rights exclusively to people ‘from
Turkish origin and culture’ (Kirişçi, 2009: 6). In the early 2000s, an important
debate on Turkishness started with the help of the democratic reforms of the era,
and some intellectuals proposed the wording ‘Türkiyeli’ (‘from Turkey’) to
designate citizenship, instead of ‘Türk’. This idea was also embraced by Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan, who used liberal ideas to gain support from the international
community while taking over the power.7
 The Kemalist nationalists often perceive this wording as a direct attack to the
Republican value. This perception is solidified further after the word ‘Türkiyeli’
was used by Erdoğan. This type of view is quite dominant in our sample as well.

‘Everything started when the AKP imposed the TÜRKİYELİ concept to replace
TÜRK. The professional tactic to divide a nation starts by diving the people.’ –
@gs7, 2012-08-22 11:20
‘In Turkey, the home of the TURKS, it is an IDIOT who would refuse the word
“Turk,” he either attempts to create a society ignorant of its history, or does not
know what death means.’ – @fb19, 2014-06-09 18:39
‘This country only belongs to TURKS and who feels like a TURK. That’s all!’ –
@gs18, 2012-08-09 23:54
‘The only friend of a TURK is a TURK. How happy is he who can say I am a
Turk!’ – @bjk7, 2012-07-21 11:36

The Kurdish Question

The Kurdish Question is, without a doubt, the most complicated part of the
nationalism issues in Turkey. Even though the Kurds are often considered to one
of the founding elements of the Republic, there has been a century-long conflict
between the Turks and the Kurds, regarding identity, civil rights and political
representation. The Turkish state has always been controlled by the Turks, and
the fundamental rights and liberties of the Kurds have often been neglected. The
first Kurdish revolt in Turkey was rather of religious nature, like the Cheikh Said
revolt in 1925. In the 1960s, a secular and modernist Kurdish nationalism
emerged among the young intellectuals often in collaboration with the Turkish
left. This new wave of Kurdish nationalism gradually resulted in an armed
organisation founded by Abdullah Öcalan in 1978, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party
(PKK), as a reaction to non-violent and democratic channels being closed to the
Kurds. This organisation launched a guerrilla warfare in 1984, and since then
there has been an ongoing violent conflict between the PKK and the Turkish
Army, costing tens of thousands of Turkish and Kurdish lives, including
civilians.
Among the Kurdish and Turkish nationalists, the perception about this war is
completely opposite. The Turks believe that the PKK is a terrorist organisation
that murders civilians without a reason and does not represent the Kurdish
community, while for most nationalist Kurds, the organisation is the only
legitimate organisation that fights against the Turkish state oppression. These
two groups are not really eager to accept the wrongdoings of their own camp,
and they are even in conflict in describing the issue. The Turkish nationalists
rarely qualify the violent conflict as a war (as they consider the PKK militants as
terrorists and not guerrillas), while the Kurds tend to describe the situation as a
war between two sides.
In the AKP period, between 2009 and 2015, the government launched
negotiations with Abdullah Öcalan, the incarcerated leader of the PKK, in order
to put an end to the violent conflict. During the negotiations the clashes
continued, except brief periods when Öcalan demanded that the armed PKK
militants leave Turkish territories in April 2013. In this period, the government
also took some steps in granting cultural rights to the Kurdish people, like the
use of the Kurdish language in municipalities of predominantly Kurdish towns.
The negotiations reached an impasse, after the Kurdish Political Movement,
legally represented by two political parties (Peoples’ Democratic Party – HDP
and Democratic Regions Party – DBP) decided to challenge Erdoğan in the 2014
presidential elections, under the slogan ‘we won’t let you be the President’. The
HDP also passed the national 10% threshold in the June 2015 elections and
blocked the possibility of another single-party AKP government. While Erdoğan
decided to take the country to another election after this defeat, the government
launched a massive military operation, accompanied with curfews, in the
Kurdish regions. Between August 2015 and March 2016, the military operations
caused the deaths of 310 civilian Kurds (The Foundation of Human Rights of
Turkey Report, 2016).
The Turkish nationalists critical of the government severely criticised the
peace negotiations when they were held. The members of our sample also
criticise these peace talks, and even the newly granted cultural rights heavily and
mostly believe that only a military solution is possible to the Turkish/Kurdish
conflict.

‘Now, they are offering elective Kurdish courses. Congratulations, really. You made
Kurds part of the government, now you’re taking Kurdish to schools, to get into the
heads of our future generations.’ – @fb14, 2012-06-13 02:20
‘These Kurds cry for Kurdish language. Are those the only majority in this
country? Why do the others not make a fuss?’ – @fb19, 2012-06-19 19:47
‘This country does not fight terror, they just deceive the people.’ – @gs20, 2012-
09-05 01:36
‘They desecrated the flag of this country. Shove your peace solution with them in
your ass.’ – @gs6, 2014-06-10 09:05
‘They will make our soldiers cry. You’re shameless the PKK, and so is who
negotiates with you.’ – @bjk1, 2013-12-08 17:29
 ‘We don’t want peace or negotiations, we should burn and raze everywhere until
the PKK is finished.’ – @bjk7, 2012-08-20 22:32
‘The only solution is to hang Apo,8 as long as he is alive, there is no peace for us.
After he is dead, I don’t care even if the PKK declares war.’ – @fb6, 2012-08-09
07:59
‘The terrorists are human and we are animals?’ – @gs1, 2013-04-28 16:46
‘They offer human rights to the PKK and tear gas to the workers and football
supporters. This is supposed to be the democracy.’ – @bjk5, 2013-05-01 14:42
‘We should use napalm against the PKK militants and burn them all.’ – @fb16,
2014-10-25 20:06
‘I miss ATAM, who burned down the town of Menemen for one dead soldier.’9 –
@fb16, 2014-10-25 20:06
‘I miss Mustafa Kemal who ordered the burning of Menemen for a single martyr.
Come ATAM, your soldiers are becoming martyrs.’ – @fb6, 2012-09-16 10:15
‘Who burned Menemen down is a WORLD LEADER, not the one who let his
soldiers die.’ – @fb3, 2014-10-29 17:59

Only one person slightly differs from the rest in our sample. Even though he is
against the negotiations handled by the government, he believes that peace talks
are necessary.

‘They say who negotiates with a terrorist is shameless, I don’t agree with that. We
cannot understand unless we have a martyr in our family. What is done is necessary.’
– @gs14, 2013-01-08 08:51

Another important subject regarding the Kurdish Question is the

bombardment or massacre of Roboski (Uludere in Turkish), where the Turkish
fighter jets bombarded 36 Kurdish civilian smugglers to death in the Iraqi border
in December 2011. This incident was brought to the mainstream agenda by the
persistent Kurdish social media users, even though there was major censorship in
the media. While this incident is a turning point of the conflict, few users
mention it. Three people among them offer their sympathies, while two others
believe that those civilians deserved to be killed.
A similar negligence can be observed in the Medeni Yıldırım case. Yıldırım
was a young Kurdish person who was killed in Lice (Diyarbakır, predominantly
Kurdish city of Southeastern Turkey) by the Security Forces during protests that
were held simultaneously with Gezi. While Yıldırım is one of the eight
protesters killed during the summer of 2013, only five users mention his name.
Another user, @fb19, who describes himself as a Turkish nationalist, says:
 ‘Those who claim Medeni Yıldırım was a martyr of Gezi deserve a worse ending
than Hitler. Those who oppose the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal cannot be one of us.’–
@fb19, 2014-02-20 23:13 et 2014-04-27 20:03

While the vast majority of my sample is anti-PKK and against the peace talks,
their comments about the Kurds generally do not hold racist tones, except two
openly anti-Kurd users. As a matter of fact, ‘being against the PKK, not the
Kurds’ is part of the official discourse in Turkey. In the discourses of three
mainstream political parties – the AKP, CHP and the MHP – this argument is
recurrent. While the Turks consider this argument to be anti-violent and solidary,
for most Kurds, it means a denial of their political representatives. This is the
difference between two perceptions, a ‘war against terror’ and an ‘independence
war’. While the Turks’ argument seem to be comprehensible, it should be noted
that this argument can be and often is extended to the legal representatives of the
Kurdish Political Movement or any Kurds with national sentiments. This
argument often functions as a non-racist, therefore acceptable, way of keeping
distance with the Kurds. The HDP, founded in 2014, has directly challenged this
argument, as the first Kurdish party to address to all the Turkish citizens,
especially other oppressed groups (ethnical minorities, LGBTIQ, women,
workers …). I will present how my sample interprets the HDP experience later,
along with other political parties.

The Armenian Genocide: Ghosts of the past

One other important aspect of the Turkish nationalism is the Armenian question.
This issue is treated in Turkey around two subjects; the Armenian Genocide in
1915 and the killing of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink by a young
ultra-nationalist in 2007. While these issues have been lively debated in Turkey,
the comments of my sample are rather limited.
Regarding the Genocide, the points of view are quite diverse. However,
among those who comment on the issue, there is a common tendency to reduce
the importance of this incident. The users either directly deny the importance of
the incident, or they compare it with other events, in some sort of
‘whataboutism’ attempt. Especially, the Khodjaly killings, where 613 Azeri
civilian were killed by Armenian armed forces in 1992, is often referenced as a
point of comparison. Turkey, until very recently, officially denied the Genocide
and claimed that the majority of the killings at the period were conducted by
Armenian rebels against Turkish civilians. While there is a more nuanced
interpretation of the events now (even though the denial continues), this
comparison between the Genocide and the Khodjaly massacre functions as
another way of negationism. I should also underline that nationalist Turks and
Azeris often use the term ‘genocide’ for Khodjaly to create equivalency.

‘Allah is great, Armenia is murderer.’ – @fb20, 2013-02-26 08:54

‘The Mexican parliament recognised the Khodjaly massacre as a genocide, and
France recognised the so-called Armenian genocide. We should know who are our
friends and foes.’ – @fb19, 2013-12-08 21:32
‘You are Armenians or sons of bitches to ignore the Khodjaly massacre. HOW
HAPPY IS HE WHO CAN SAY I AM A TURK!’ – @bjk5, 2014-02-26 09:57

Another method of denial is to reduce the importance of the Genocide or

claim that it was necessary at that particular period:

‘12 countries attacked us, they had killed us for 30 years, exploited us for 60 years,
the whole world was silent about that; we killed some sons of bitches and they blame
us for a genocide.’ – @fb19, 2014-05-02 22:23

I should however underline that @fb19 is a person who accepts to be a ‘racist’

and is rather an exception to the sample. He often expresses extreme views about
the Genocide or other events, while others have less radical views:

‘Genocide and forced deportation is not the same thing. Come on!’ – @gs20, 2013-
05-21 09:15
‘Fuck genocide. It’s the past and who is dead is dead. I am sick of this subject.’ –
@gs8, 2015-04-24 10:09

There are some users with more sympathetic feelings about the events; however,
no one among them accepts that it was a genocide. It is striking that their
sympathy about the Armenian people is revealed when Erdoğan makes an anti-
Armenian comment.

‘RTE’s insult against the Armenians is often used as a pride symbol in this fascist
country. I am disgusted by those people.’ – @fb14, 2014-08-06 07:40
‘I apologise to our Armenian friends for that disgusting comment [of Erdoğan’s].’
– @gs11, 2014-08-05 22:39

The killing of Hrant Dink is also a source of sympathy. Dink, the prominent
journalist, was known to be a leftist intellectual, as well as an Armenian.

‘Hrant Dink was not the first and I believe he won’t be the last to be assassinated in
 my country. The number of people who live in our hearts increases.’ – @bjk3, 2014-
01-19 10:59
‘Hrant Dink, we won’t forget you. You are the victim of a treachery.’ – @fb7,
2013-01-19 11:34

The anti-Armenian feelings in the sample are limited to a few people with
ultra-nationalist tendencies. There are also some people who are more
sympathetic to the Armenian people. However, the Armenian Genocide
continues to be a taboo. I do not know if the supporters in my sample who are
openly positive about the Armenians accept the Genocide in private, but it is
certain that they do not in public.
In comparison with the Kurds, the views about the Armenians are much more
positive. However, it is mostly because there is no actual violent conflict with
the Armenians, while the Kurdish issue is still very heated. It is impossible to
know whether such a violent conflict would have created anti-Armenian
sentiments or not. However, I did not come up with messages that would suggest
a latent anti-Armenian sentiment is present in this sample, even though the
MHP-style ultranationalism often expresses such sentiments. The majority of the
sample is closer to the mainstream Turkish nationalism than its fringe versions,
which is also an indicator that they stick to the Republican Doxa.

Greeks, Arabs, Jews and other ethnic groups

Regarding other minorities in Turkey, negative sentiments are almost completely
absent in the sample, except for @fb19, @gs8 and @bjk5, three supporters with
ultra-nationalist tendencies. @gs8 openly supports that Turkey should enter the
Syrian war, @bjk15 and @fb19 express anti-Semite views, as well as anti-Arab
and anti-Greek ones. These three users sometimes make borderline racist
comments:

‘The Arabs are traitors and a disagreeable community.’ – @bjk5, 2015-06-18 19:31
‘Show no mercy to Syrians, or they will eventually fuck you.’ – @gs8, 2012-07-
22 15:02
‘Those Hitler opposed were the Jews, the freemasons, lobbys, obscenity, politics,
trade unions and capitalism. Those who controlled and stupified the world.’ –
@fb19, 2013-07-05 21:08

These three users (and maybe @fb3) can be considered to be exceptions, and
their participation in Gezi, a movement with a very inclusive discourse, is
intriguing. I believe that is another indicator which confirms my hypothesis that
a considerable number of newcomers did not embrace the movement’s
discourse, but wanted to restore the old regime.

Secularism and religion: Secularism alla turca

Secularism is one of the key elements of the Republican Doxa, also the one most
threatened by the new regime. The secularism in Turkey is quite an interesting
concept, since it does not separate religion from the state, but makes the former
part of the latter. An acceptable version of the Sunnite Islam is proposed through
the Diyanet, the governing body of religious affairs, and all other practices are
almost completely disregarded, except Jewish and Orthodox Christian faiths,
protected by the Treaty of Lausanne, ratified in 1923. This flavour of secularism
and the Diyanet had functioned as a security valve against the radical Islamism
during the old regime. Today, the Diyanet is completely under Erdoğan’s control
and it acts like one of his propaganda tools. For example, through the night of
the failed coup d’état attempt in 2016, all mosques controlled by the Diyanet
aired prayers through speakers in support of Erdoğan and invited Muslims to the
streets to resist against the coup. This is unprecedented in the history of the
country.
The religion has become a central part of Erdoğan’s culture war, especially
during the Gezi Protests. Erdoğan unsubstantially claimed that the protesters,
who took refuge in a mosque against the police violence in Beşiktaş, consumed
alcohol there. The pro-government media also claimed that ‘a veiled woman
with a baby was violently attacked by a group of semi-nude Gezi Protesters with
leather gloves’ (Star, 13 June 2013). Evidence for none of these claims has been
produced, as of today. On the other hand, the protesters at the Gezi Park were
quite sympathetic with religious practices during the protests which coincided
with the holy month of Ramadan. Religious events like fast-breaking were held,
and religious holidays like Kandil were observed during the protests as
ecumenical events.
In my sample, the majority of the supporters have Islamic faith. Only one
person openly declares to be an atheist, and another claims to be ‘an agnostic
from a Sunnite family’. While only one person declares to be Alevite, five
people observe Alevite holidays (which are also observed by most Sunnites).
The Sunnites Twitter users in the sample criticise the anti-Alevite discourse of
Erdoğan.
The Sunnites in the sample observe religious holidays in varying degrees.
Some users only mention the religion in the holidays, such as Ramadan and the
Kandil days. One of the most interesting days during the period of my data
collection is the day of Miraj in 2013 (the day the prophet Mohamed is believed
to start his nocturnal journey from the Mecca), as it was observed at the Gezi
Park while the protests were still in place. For that day, the organisers of the
protests demanded an alcohol ban to respect people who observe the day,
especially the Anticapitalist Muslims, an emblematical group of the movement:

‘I don’t mind drinking ayran [non-alcohol yoghurt drink] for one day, but tomorrow
bring on the beer kegs to the Park.’ – @fb12, 2013-06-05 07:56
‘My resisting brothers at the Park. If you are still there, I will come to share simit
[the Kandil bread] with you.’ – @bjk15, 2013-06-05 15:03
‘The Park is more beautiful today than the other days. We celebrate Kandil like a
feast.’ – @bjk10, 2013-06-05 20:59
‘This revolution changed me as well. Normally, I don’t care about Kandil. Today,
I called my family to celebrate.’ – @gs9, 2013-06-06 07:05

One of the major claims of the Gezi Movement was to create an environment of
respect and diversity among different beliefs and ethnicities. Regarding
ethnicities, this argument hardly affected my sample. However, the religious
tolerance is more widely accepted by the supporters in the sample. There may be
different reasons for this nuance. Firstly, the majority of the sample holds the
Sunnite faith. Their observation of Sunnite holidays is not surprising. However,
the religiosity in the public sphere has always been a delicate subject in Turkey.
Normally, public observation of a religious event in a secular environment might
have been the source of tension, but the solidary environment at the Park
somehow transcended that. The Islamic night of Kandil was celebrated as a
secularised, ecumenical event, which included non-believers and non-practising
Muslims, as well as devout ones. In my observation, a Christian or Jewish
holiday might have been celebrated in a similar spirit in the Park. I believe that
this is one of the most important parts of Gezi; for a brief moment in time, a
democratic secularism with more tolerance towards religious practices could
have been experienced. This is one of the most important aspects of Gezi which
challenged the Republican Doxa, and this new definition of a more inclusive
secularism was perceived positively by my sample as well. It should be also
noted that this manifestation of tolerance was instantly refuted by Erdoğan, who
continued to claim that Gezi was against the Islamic religion.
Another front of the cultural war between Erdoğan and the ‘moderns’ is,
indeed, the alcohol consumption. This subject is culturally and politically
important for various reasons; for instance, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is a well-
known connoisseur of rakı, the national alcoholic drink. The alcohol
consumption, which has often been tolerated in the moderated currents of
Turkish Islam for centuries, is often perceived to be a barrier in front of the
Islamisation of the country, and also a sign that Turkey belongs to the Western
world. This barrier is frequently challenged by Erdoğan, who imposed important
restrictions on the use of alcohol. He often expresses his disgust against tobacco
and alcohol.
Alcohol is an important point of discussion regarding Gezi, as two major
incidents directly related to the subject took place right before the protests.
Firstly, a new regulation passed in Parliament which brought a set of major
restrictions on the use and sale of alcohol in May 2013, after Tayyip Erdoğan
declared that ‘the Turkish national drink is ayran,’ not rakı. Secondly, on 28 May
2013, the day before the Gezi Protests took an important turn, he called two
founding fathers of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal and İsmet İnönü, ‘two
drunkards’. These two incidents brought the alcohol issue front and centre in the
culture war, right before Gezi.

‘1 – Ayran does not even qualify to be a drink. 2- Tayyip does not even qualify to be
national.’ – @fb3, 2013-05-04 06:11
‘One of the most striking articles in the new law; we cannot consume alcohol
openly. Are we gonna drink like high school students?’ – @bjk4, 2013-05-10 16:27
‘Step by step, we’re becoming Iran.’ – @fb1, 2013-05-23 20:17
‘As a person who does not drink alcohol, I think he should not mess with people’s
liberties.’ – @gs4, 2013-05-24 10:56
‘Who are those “two drunkards,” Recep? We all know about whom you talk, but
you don’t have the guts to say it.’ – @gs16, 2013-05-28 14:15
‘In ten years, we will say “two sons of bitches” for you.’ – @gs8, 2013-05-28
20:02
‘You banned alcohol at the wrong moment, Tayyip, WE ARE SOBER NOW,
YOU’LL SEE.’ – @fb6, 2013-05-31 17:36

Alcohol, especially rakl, is very symbolic for a lot of supporters in my sample.

Especially women have a different relationship with the drink, often sharing
photos with raki glasses in their hands, as a symbol of their modern identity and
liberation. Rakı is often associated with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The
relationship of my sample with religion and alcohol is mostly very typical of the
secular, urban middle classes. They have Sunnite faith, they somewhat observe
religious holidays but they also view alcohol as part of their lives. A person
‘who drinks for 11 months and observes Ramadan too’ is almost a Republican
cliché in Turkey, very typical of the acceptable Muslim aimed by the old regime.
This happens to be a very critical part of the Republican habitus and any
challenge made by Erdoğan against these practices are met with outrage.
Another important point is; the protesters in my sample or not are not anti-
religious, and they are also more tolerant towards religious practices in public
space than expected. I believe that this was an indicator that the public displays
of religion, unlike the common belief, could be negotiated during the old or new
regime, to create a more tolerant and durable version of secularism. The old
regime’s over-sensitivity about secularism triggered the Islamist backlash which
created the AKP. The new regime could have still negotiated for a democratic
secularism but instead it opted for a pious hegemony over the whole society.

Militarism: Mustafa Kemal’s soldiers?

One of the defining aspects of the old regime in Turkey was the role attributed to
the Armed Forces. The Republic of Turkey was founded by the military
bureaucracy, and the tutelage of the army in the political life was preserved until
very recently. During the early years of the AKP period, the role of the army was
a major source of tension, especially during the election of Abdullah Gül, one of
the founding members of the AKP, to the Presidency of the Republic in 2007.
The Armed Forces, before the elections, published an online declaration,
reminding the deputies who would vote for the presidential elections their
Republican duties. This e-memorandum created an inverse effect, despite the
Republican rallies organised by the Kemalists in April and May 2007, the AKP
recorded a landslide victory in the July 2007 elections, receiving 46.58% of the
votes. After this date, as the AKP continued its rise, the government started to
contemplate on eliminating the role of the army in the political life. With the
2010 referendum, the military appointees in the key bureaucratic positions were
eliminated and replaced by government appointees. Before this referendum,
important court cases were filed against prominent members of the Armed
Forces who were accused of staging coups d’état against the government. Two
of these court cases, ‘Balyoz’ (‘Sledgehammer’) and Ergenekon, especially
created controversy, as they were conducted by Gülenist prosecutors in a very
politically charged manner. These cases were often associated by other cases
filed by the Gülenist prosecutors, including the match-fixing case. The
incarcerated Fenerbahçe chairman of the era, Aziz Yıldırım, also claimed that
‘the match-fixing case was invented because the Gülenists could not get him for
Ergenekon’.
 In our sample, especially Fenerbahçe fans share this view:

‘Hit like a “sledgehammer”, Fenerbahçe’ – @fb6, 2012-09-20 11:04

‘If you object Ergenekon, Balyoz, you are attacked in Gezi, and you still support
the match-fixing sentences against Fenerbahçe and Beşiktaş, you’re an idiot.’ –
@fb10, 2013-06-26 09:23
‘That’s the same thing. If you object Ergenekon and Balyoz, and support the
match-fixing case, that would not do it.’ – @fb19, 2013-07-02 12:18

Even though the fans from other teams also criticise these court cases,
Fenerbahçe fans are visibly more sensitive about them and they tend to associate
these cases with the match-fixing case. That sort of tendency is not present
among other fans.
One important part of militarism in Turkey in the ‘martyrdom’ concept. As we
have seen before, this concept is often used in the nationalistic discourse. While
the main use of this term is reserved to the soldiers killed during the clashes with
the Kurdish guerrillas, it may be used for other non-military occasions; for
instance, the eight young people killed by the police during the Gezi Protests are
often called as ‘the martyrs of Gezi’.
My sample mostly uses the term for slain soldiers in clashes with the Kurds:

‘They sell the country, imprison the military chiefs and journalists, instead of taking
care of our martyrs.’ – @gs8, 2012-08-02 18:47
‘Sebahat Tuncel, the BDP deputy (Peace and Democracy Party, pro-Kurdish), was
just sentenced to eight years and nine months for terrorism. Is it the worth of our
hundreds of martyrs?’ – @fb16, 2012-09-18 14:27

The militarist tendencies of the sample are also predominantly limited to the
Kurdish Question. For example, except one person who is for, the majority are
against the Turkish involvement in the Syrian war.
During the period that I collected data for this research, the Kurdish conflict
was in a violent phase despite the peace talks. Therefore, it is comprehensible
that the nationalistic and militaristic tendencies about this subject are more
visible. It is also interesting that, even though most users complain about soldiers
being killed, they oppose the peace talks and support military options. It is
understood that the majority view the resolution of the conflict as the eradication
of the ‘other’, and prefers a violent military victory to a peaceful civilian
solution. This is completely in line with the Republican Doxa that features the
slogan ‘all the Turks are born soldiers’. Bearing in mind the antimilitarists were
an important component of Gezi, and it was a non-violent and inclusive
movement, it is really difficult to say that these newcomers share these values of
the Gezi Movement.

Democracy: The ultimate goal?

The comments of my sample about democracy are concentrated in certain
periods. One-third of the messages about democracy were sent between June and
September 2013, during the protest:

‘It is true that the elections define the majority in a democracy, however the rights
and liberties of minorities should also be protected by that majority.’ – @gs11, 2013-
06-03 08:40
‘The democracy is as vital as bread and water for everybody.’ – @fb5, 2013-06-05
11:36
‘If there was democracy in this country, we wouldn’t be in the streets now.’ –
@fb14, 2013-06-12 09:42

Except this period, the number of democratic demands is rather weak and
negligible. The lack of interest in a democratic debate is also an indicator of anti-
politism. For instance, among the 60 users in our sample, only 7 showed an
interest in the park forums (similar to the Occupy Wall Street meetings) that
followed the Gezi Protests, which took place in different parks in big cities. Only
three users participated in Gazdanadam, the festival organised by Kemalists and
nationalists after Gezi in Kadıköy. It is completely observable that most
members of the sample entirely lost their interest in politics after Gezi, and their
discouragement is reflected in their messages. This sudden change of interest in
politics can be explained only by a rooted hostility against politics and political
bodies that I qualify as anti-politism.

Politicisation, apolitism, anti-politism

The relationships of the sample with the political organisations and actors is
another important aspect of this research. In the previous chapters, we have seen
that the members of the sample had little interaction with political actors over
Twitter, and they lost their interest in politics after the evacuation of the Gezi
Park by the police as few users were invested in park forums that continued the
Gezi Movement. Furthermore, the periodic research showed that the sample
users’ political expressions fluctuated between periods in a circumstantial
manner, increasing in crisis moments which threatened the AKP regime and
rapidly decreasing after the ruling party circumvented the issue. While these
findings already strongly suggest the lack of enduring political engagement,
views on political organisations and actors may be the missing piece of the
puzzle that would help us understand the nature of the relationship of our
middle-class, Stambulite football fans with politics.
While analysing the supporters’ relationship with Kemalism and nationalism,
we have seen that the fans tended to establish a close bond with these concepts
and their fan identity. The supporters did not shy away from expressing
politically, when football is part of the political debate. However, political
slogans being heard in football games after Gezi remained to be a controversial
subject among fans:

‘I don’t even want to see the game anymore, let’s just chant ‘Everywhere is Taksim,
resistance is everywhere’ instead. The politics should enter the sports world.’ –
@fb9, 2013-08-11 18:11
‘There should be a solution for the political slogans. Either we should chant these
slogans before the games, or UltrAslan [the Galatasaray fan group that opposed
political slogans in the stadiums] should respect the political slogans for a few
minutes.’ – @gs6, 2013-08-19 21:07
‘Fuck us all if we don’t mix politics with sport during tonight’s derby.’ – @gs9,
2013-08-11 09:50
‘Fenerbahçe fans’ “Erdoğan the thief” slogan is not a political slogan, it’s just
stating the facts.’ – @bjk1, 2014-01-21 20:04

In these messages, it is clearly seen that these fans support political slogans
during the games. Whilst ‘not mixing sports with politics’ is an expression often
pronounced by the sports executives in Turkey (similar to ‘stick to sports’ in the
US sports), the fans do not seem to agree with it. They consider football and
fandom as a political field to defend against the AKP. Even though they are not
interested with political movements, they are not against expressing political
views in the stadiums; they may even consider it as their only way of being
involved in politics. However, it is very likely that the political expressions are
confined to the limits of the Republican Doxa. For instance, the AKP’s attempts
to prevent political slogans in the stadiums are often interpreted to be against
nationalistic and Kemalist slogans:

‘So, maybe we shouldn’t sing the national anthem because it is political, eh, sons of
bitches? Since you hate Atatürk …’ – @fb14, 2013-12-06 15:52

This perception, on the other hand, does not come out of nowhere. In December
2013, the TFF decided to sanction Fethiyespor, a Second Division club, because
of wearing T-shirts that read ‘The Great Atatürk’. Therefore, the fans’ reaction
to keep Kemalist messages in the stadiums is amplified by the attempts of the
AKP to exclude them. After Gezi, the AKP’s pursuit to dismantle the Republic
Doxa continues to be a great source of reaction for the fans included in the
sample.

Apolitism and anti-politism: ‘Gezi is a civil resistance’

While the fans support political expressions, within the lines of the Republican
Doxa, in the stadiums, they are not as open to the political actors appearing in
the same places where they express their political stances. This includes Gezi as
well; the hostility of the fans in the sample against the political organisations in
the Park is quite striking:

‘Those in Taksim, remove the political party banners. The government will use them
against us. Only Turkish flags and Atatürk photos should be there!’ – @fb19, 2013-
06-01 13:41
‘I don’t want to see political party banners in the Gezi Park, or anywhere where
Gezi is supported. This is a civil resistance, Gezi must be without banners.’ –
@bjk10, 2013-06-07 19:29
‘It should be the people that counts, not the leftist groups in the Park.’ – @bjk7,
2013-06-07 19:59
‘No slogans, no banners, long live the passive resistance. Is it a crime to want to
see the Turkish flag?’ – @bjk3, 2013-06-17 20:59

This hostility against political banners, which was not limited to the football fans
during the protests and shared by many newcomers, also extended to the
political identity of the movement:

‘Don’t associate this event with the CHP, MHP, BDP or Kemalists. This resistance is
the resistance of all political views. As a matter of fact, this event is the resurrection
of the TURK!’ – @fb7, 2013-06-01 00:20
‘Someone wrote ‘We can protect religion without the AKP, Atatürk without the
CHP, the homeland without the MHP, the Kurds without the BDP. We are the
people!’ I like that.’ – @fb2, 2013-06-04 11:17
‘The perfect slogan I saw at the Gezi Park today, “We can protect religion without
the AKP, Atatürk without the CHP, the homeland without the MHP, the Kurds
without the BDP. We are the people!”’ – @fb14, 2013-06-01 16:15
‘The Park has become tense after the BDP and the TKP [The Communist Party of
Turkey] came.’ – @gs2, 2013-06-01 18:51
Considering themselves as ‘the people’, many newcomers, including the fans in
my sample, refuse any involvement of political organisations in the movement.
This is an interesting indicator of the cleavage between the Taksim Solidarity
and the newcomers, as the Gezi Movement was originally created by this
coalition of political organisations. Also, the wording is striking, since the
newcomers belonging to a minor (but influential) fraction within the society
qualify themselves as ‘the people’. This claim of representing the entire nation
surely stems from the status of ‘privileged protector of the republican
cosmology’ (Akdeniz and Göker, 322) attributed to this social layer by the old
regime.

The CHP: Kemalist opposition

Among countless interpretations of the Gezi Movement, it is frequently
expressed by commentators close to the government that the majority of the
participants of the protests were the sympathisers or militants of the CHP, the
Kemalist, centre-left, main opposition party. In my sample, while the vast
majority of users declared to have voted for the CHP, only two persons were
directly associated with the party; the great majority of the sample members
were very critical of the party and its leadership. However, they continued to
vote for this party, as they consider it as the sole opposite of the AKP.

‘As the elections are over, I can go back to my criticism; sod off CHP!’ – @gs9,
2014-04-23 13:35
‘The CHP thinks that we vote for them because we trust them. We vote for them,
because we are desperate. And this was the last time.’ – @gs14, 2013-07-10 14:25
‘All these happened to us because the CHP and the MHP let us down.’ – @gs18,
2013-05-31 11:02
‘I am too old for voting for minor parties. I would never vote for the AKP, BDP or
MHP. Voting CHP is a way of suicide, so this time I vote BLANK.’ – @fb19, 2013-
09-27 00:04
‘According to the CHP, the results of the Presidential elections is because of
people who didn’t vote. Yeah, brother, everyone is to blame but you.’ – @gs11,
2014-08-10 20:16
‘If the MHP were more popular than the CHP in my district, I would vote for them
in a heartbeat.’ – @fb10, 2014-03-30 03:29

The users are also very disillusioned by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the CHP leader.

‘As long as Kılıçdaroğlu stays, I won’t vote for the CHP.’ – @gs3, 2013-04-12 10:04
 ‘The Gezi youth is against all idiots. They hate Kılıçdaroğlu and Bahçeli [the
MHP leader].’ – @gs14, 2013-07-02 11:42

CHP MP Muharrem İnce was one of the few politicians that the sample
interacted with. There are also some messages of support for İnce, who would
eventually challenge Erdoğan in the Presidential elections of 2018:
‘If the CHP changes its leadership and make İnce the chairman, I can finally vote for
them without regret.’ – @gs18, 2013-06-27 21:36
‘İnce has nothing to lose. The CHP should keep him activated.’ – @fb3, 2014-09-
05 13:51
‘Everything depends on a spark. The people wants a leader, a solution. They want
to get rid of this government. Do something @vekilince.’ – @gs8, 2012-08-22 18:29

These messages also show that the users in the sample, while criticising the CHP
and regret voting for them, are invested in the party and its internal affairs. This
may mean that they consider the CHP, the party founded by Mustafa Kemal, as
their own, even though they are not affiliated with it. This is normal as being a
party sympathiser is very common in Turkey, while being a party member is not
(except for the AKP, which is a great exception in the political history). The
CHP has hardly over 1 million of members, even though they easily surpass 10
million votes in every election. The second option is that the sample users are
invested in the CHP, because they consider it as the only party powerful enough
to replace the AKP one day. Of course, these two options may be both true
together. The limits of this research prevents us from really knowing, but it is
obvious that the supporters in my sample treat the CHP differently than the other
political parties.

The MHP: the ultranationalists

The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the ultra-nationalist opposition party,
received very little attention from the users in my sample during the data
collection period. In the messages which mentioned this party, sample members
accused the MHP of being too passive (especially the users with nationalistic
tendencies), of being complicit with the AKP. These reactions reached their peak
when the AKP lost its majority in Parliament after the June 2015 elections and
the MHP refused to enter into a coalition with the CHP and HDP. This led to
Erdoğan calling snap elections in November 2015 and regaining power. The
MHP later went into an alliance with the AKP in 2017, but that happened after
my data collection period, so that event is not included in the comments. Among
the sample users, there is only one person who declared to vote for the MHP, but
there are some others who said it would be possible under certain conditions,
mainly if it was the way to get rid of the Erdoğan government.

‘I am not surprised Bahçeli gave the AKP the front seat by not cooperating with the
HDP.’ – @fb9, 2015-11-01 20:16
‘If Mansur Yavaş [the mayoral candidate for the CHP in Ankara, a former MHP
member] wins in Ankara, I will vote for the MHP in the next elections.’ – @gs20,
2014-03-30 22:21
‘I really prefer to keep the MHP out of the Parliament, but it’s the lesser evil. If
the AKP loses at the end, all the whiskies are on me!’ – @fb12, 2015-06-06 12:39
‘As long as a useless party like the MHP exists, this country is junk.’ – @gs14,
2015-06-30 15:47
‘The AKP needs to go, but the CHP and MHP need to change as well, they should
leave these parties to people under the age of 35.’ – @gs18, 2013-06-15 22:50

The Kurdish parties (HDP-DBP-BDP): Undesirable allies

Previously, I showed that there is common hostility against Kurdish politics in
my sample, based on the argument ‘we are against the PKK, not the Kurds’.
Therefore, it is interesting to see how these football supporters approach to the
pro-Kurdish political parties, the legal representatives of Kurdish politics in
Parliament. In the June 2015 elections, the HDP among these parties became
particularly important, as this party crossing the 10% national threshold to be
represented in Parliament meant the AKP losing its vast majority.
Until these elections, I observed a strong negative sentiment against Kurdish
political parties, to the extent that some users even encouraged violence against
them.

‘If there is a fire in a BDP office, I fuck the firefighters who put it down.’ – @fb17,
2012-08-20 20:36
‘With the AKP’s authorisation, the BDP meets Öcalan regularly. The CHP et
MHP should set everything on fire, but they turn a blind eye.’ – @gs20, 2013-02-21
21:10
‘The BDP demanded Bursaspor club should be shut down after they fans attacked
their party meetings. You sons of bitches, you’re not shut down yet, and you demand
Bursaspor should?’ – @gs6, 2013-03-12 09:59
‘The Alevite organisations in Europe [diasporas] declared to vote for the HDP. I
wouldn’t even speak to my mother, if she voted for those terrorists. May Allah bring
trouble to them.’ – @gs18, 2015-03-20 22:23
 ‘OK, it has come to that, I will go to the nearest BDP office and give them a final
warning. Tag along if you want.’ – @fb19, 2012-07-27 22:54
‘All the BDP offices should be attacked, all the PKK militants should be set afire
alive.’ – @gs8, 2012-09-16 20:34
‘There is no ugly woman, there are the HDP militants.’ – @bjk5, 2015-06-24
13:57
‘If you’re not Kurdish but voted for the HDP, you’re a son of a bitch. If you’re a
CHP sympathiser and voted for the HDP, you’re double fag.’ – @fb16, 2015-06-07
17:03
‘I want to know who are these bastards who vote for the HDP under the pretext of
peace and freedom. The only way to solve this problem is to eliminate them.’ –
@fb20, 2015-07-23 14:04

Before the June 2015 elections, the co-chairman of the HDP, Selahattin
Demirtaş (now imprisoned, along with the other co-chairwoman Figen
Yüksekdağ and other former MPs) launched a campaign against Tayyip Erdoğan
under the slogan ‘We will not let you become the President’, a direct reference
to Erdoğan’s ambitions for a regime change that would eliminate Parliament’s
executive role. This campaign included inclusive elements addressing the left-
leaning Turkish voters, borrowing many discourse elements from Gezi. Some
components of Taksim Solidarity also joined the party. As a result, the party
gained a little more than the Kurdish candidates generally received in the
elections and managed to enter Parliament with 80 deputies in the June 2015
elections, making the AKP lose its majority. While this electoral campaign
created few positive reactions towards the HDP in my sample, the majority
remained very negative:

‘I fuck the mothers’ of all who voted for the HDP under the pretext of democracy
and human rights, and to appear as fake intellectuals.’ – @gs7, 2015-04-21 21:13
‘The regions who voted for the HDP should secede from Turkey, and those who
voted for them should go and live there.’ – @fb10, 2015-05-10 17:42
‘You cannot be a TURK and a HDP voter at the same time.’ – @bjk5, 2015-05-26
17:59
‘You the traitors, because of you the HDP made it into the Parliament, you’ll soon
let Öcalan join them too. What a sad day for our martyrs.’ – @fb16, 2015-06-07
17:23
‘The HDP had more votes than the MHP in Istanbul. We should destroy this city,
Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror would be ashamed of you.’ – @fb6, 2015-06-07
18:02

Among the sample supporters, two people declared to have voted for the HDP,
and three said they would not be bothered if the HDP were represented in
Parliament:

‘You want to make the HDP voters feel guilty, but my conscience is clear. Why
should I help the dirty works of the government?’ – @fb14, 2015-07-22 13:38
‘We know that you’ll be there representing all the oppressed, if you do, you’ll not
lose our votes, Mr. Demirtaş.’ – @fb12, 2015-06-07 19:55
‘To all those who criticise the HDP voters and mention the martyrs; you should
take into account that they will now be in the Parliament for politics, not in the
mountains [for guerrilla warfare].’ – @gs14, 2015-06-07 16:39
‘I did not for the HDP, and I never will, but Demirtaş’s discourse was really
powerful.’ – @gs16, 2015-10-11 08:52
‘I agree with Demirtaş completely, his discourse was perfect.’ – @fb3, 2015-10-
11 11:32
‘I think the CHP and MHP should enter into a coalition, and the HDP should
support them from the outside. Like that, we can hold those thieves [the AKP]
accountable.’ – @fb10, 2015-06-10 22:49
‘We need a coalition with them, even if there are a few guilty types among them.
We cannot ignore 7–8 million Kurds.’ – @gs8, 2015-06-09 20:10

It is interesting that some of these users are people with nationalistic tendencies
who were completely opposed to the HDP before the elections. There may be
two reasons in this change of heart; firstly, the strong willingness of the party to
get rid of the AKP and Erdoğan, and secondly Demirtaş’s powerful discourse
which eventually led to his arrest in November 2016. These two factors may
have played a role in the HDP’s rise in the big western cities of the country. In
my sample, the effects of this political strategy are visible but limited. The
dominant anti-Kurdish discourse in my sample continues after these elections,
like it did before and after the Gezi. Therefore, in my view, it is completely fair
to estimate that while the Gezi-like inclusive and anti-AKP discourse of the HDP
affected the core elements of the movement, its effect on the ‘newcomers’ was
limited.

Other organisations
Among the organisations that were visible in Gezi, only one received
considerable support from my sample. That organisation is the Youth Union of
Turkey (Türkiye Gençlik Birliği – TGB), an ultra-nationalist Kemalist fringe
group. I should underline that I started to see the support for the TGB mostly
before Gezi. This support continued during the Gezi and after, but it did not
increase, despite the fact that the TGB often uses a similar discourse to my
sample’s predominant views regarding issues like Kemalism or the Kurdish
issue. This shows that even a discourse very approachable for the newcomers did
not break their distance to the political organisations. As a matter of fact, in my
sample, I did not a see a single indicator of change concerning the sample
football supporters’ relationship with political organisations that was caused by
Gezi. If they were distant to political organisations before Gezi, they continued
to be so. If they were more open, they kept on being open. This may partially
explain the 5 million Gezi participants’ absolute silence in the following five
years, and how effective anti-politism is among the newcomers. I say, partially,
because it is obvious that the climate of fear created by Erdoğan between 2013
and 2018 played a massive role in silencing dissident voices.
Conclusion
This quasi-ethnographic research showed that the middle-class, modern,
Stambulite football supporters in my sample became politically active in a very
reactive manner, when an important event that could change the course of
politics takes place. Very few sample members regularly expressed political
views. And after every disappointment, they suddenly lost their appetite for
politics, and went back to post about football or everyday life. The only time
they can be consistently political is when the political matters directly affect
their club.
In the thematic analysis, we can see that Kemalism, nationalism and anti-
politism dominate the political perception of the sample users. Their religious
beliefs display a typical picture of moderated Sunnism that had been advertised
as the acceptable form of religion by the Turkish state. There are very few points
where the majority of the sample stray away from the Republican Doxa, and
come closer to the Gezi discourse that challenge the new regime, and the old one
alike.
The anti-politism of these supporters, which they probably share with other
modern, urban, secular middle classes, is a defining factor in their political
actions and strategies. For most, politics is corrupt, disgusting and something to
avoid. There is not one single political organisation that they support
wholeheartedly, or become part of to change. Even the CHP, the party incarnate
of the Republican Doxa, does not appeal to them too much. Instead, they convey
their political views through their fan identity. The fan identity plays a surrogate
role for the political identity. For them, their clubs represent the Republic, and
being a fan means being Republican, no matter which team they support.
Wearing a jersey in Gezi or in polling stations is a political statement for them.
As I tried to show through the political history of football in Turkey, this is
not something the fans invented themselves. In many ways, Beşiktaş,
Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe represent the modern Republic of Turkey.
Historically and socially, they are echoes of the Turkish modernity. They are
founded and have been organised in three emblematically modern districts of
Istanbul: Beşiktaş, Kadıköy and Beyoğlu. These districts are the cultural and
social centres of Istanbul and Turkey that connect the country to Western ideals.
Therefore, it is completely impossible to separate the fandom practices that go
on in those districts from the urban, secular, middle-class lifestyle, which is a
product of an habitus shaped by the Republican Doxa, as a heir apparent of the
failed ‘modern society without classes, without privileges’ experiment.
Furthermore, the Big Three of football in Turkey were born within Turkish
modernism. They were created to represent the Turkish nationalism and the
emerging modern state. They became popular because they defended these
values, even before there was a Republic of Turkey. Now, these clubs have
millions of supporters from all walks of life and all political views. However, the
practices that define fandom are still experienced in those three districts of
Istanbul, predominantly by people who were born into the habitus of the
aforementioned social layer. Therefore, I am confident to claim that football
fandom in Istanbul is interwoven with the Republican Doxa, it amplifies the
habitus created by that doxa, and it replaces the lack of political organisation
within that part of the society. That is why, in Gezi, the most visible identity
among hundreds of thousands of protesters was the fan identity. The dominant
colours against the AKP were not the party banner ones, but those from the club
banners. The fan identity functioned as an identity that linked the political views
shaped by the Republican Doxa and the public sphere. It also created legitimacy
for many in an anti-political environment where becoming part of a political
movement is often considered to be repulsive. For thousands of people, and also
for individuals in my sample, it was not OK to carry political party banners, but
it was acceptable to wear a jersey.
What I have seen with this research is not politicisation. The fans are not more
politicised than before, and they were not non-politicised before the Gezi
Protests anyway. For them, politics is not something to be displayed or
expressed, it is a set of principles to be experienced in the everyday life. Even
though they keep themselves away from political institutions deliberately, they
are political. Their lifestyles, daily relationships are adjusted according to their
political values. It is very intrinsic to their identity. While the AKP has more
than 80% of total party members in Turkey, it frequently bumps into a wall of a
50% opposition. A political party that has not experienced a single defeat in the
last two decades, normally, should not have any difficulties in controlling the
society, bearing in mind that it controls the media, has also eliminated the
separation of powers, as well as checks and balances. The AKP owns the
country and the state, but still not the cultural field. The lack of cultural
hegemony continues to frustrate Erdoğan. Penetrating into people’s identities
and changing them is a tough task, even for the new regime in Turkey.
In the last Presidential elections, Tayyip Erdoğan received 52% of the votes.
In Beşiktaş, he could only get 18.4% and 20.3% in Kadıköy. In the modern
neighbourhoods of Beyoğlu like Cihangir or Kılıç Ali, he could not receive more
than 16–17%. The inhabitants of these neighbourhoods are not interested in what
Erdoğan offers. Most prefer moving abroad, instead of caving in.
Period-based research
In order to detect continuities and ruptures, as well as sudden peaks of reaction,
in the sample football supporters’ online political expressions, I decided to
analyse the data based on different periods of political importance. During the
data collection period between May 2012 (one year before Gezi) to November
2015 (two and a half years after Gezi), Turkey was shaken by important political
events, such as local, presidential and legislative elections, a major corruption
operation, a massive military offensive and a mine disaster costing hundreds of
lives.

Before Gezi: 31 May 2012–2028 May 2013

In the year before the Gezi Protests, the messages posted by the football
supporters in the sample group were predominantly football-related. In this
period, the most debated event was the Fenerbahçe–Galatasaray game of 12
August 2012.
The first and the most debated political event in this time interval was the
PKK attack on four security posts in Hakkari (a predominantly Kurdish city in
Southeastern Turkey) on 5 August 2012, which resulted in the death of four
soldiers and 14 PKK militants. As I mentioned in the thematic analysis, in this
type of events, the sample supporters are inclined to blame the AKP government
(for being ‘too soft against the PKK’) and the Kurdish political organisations.

‘May Allah give trouble to this government, our soldiers are dying and nobody
cares.’ – @gs8, 2012-08-05 07:07
‘We should attack and eradicate them without giving martyrs. Why are we waiting
to be attacked to act?’ – @fb14, 2012-08-05 09:11
‘We need a massacre, not a military operation.’ – @fb6, 2012-08-05 09:57

This type of outrage demanding extreme military violence against the Kurdish
militants is a recurring thing after each clash between two camps that results in
military losses. These reactions have two distinctive characteristics: firstly, in
this conflict, all the sample users support the Turkish state unreservedly.
Secondly, solutions other than military ones are vehemently rejected, especially
the peace talks held between the government and the imprisoned Kurdish leader
Abdullah Öcalan. The negotiations are especially a major source of criticism
against the government.
 Another important subject of this period is the legal hearings of former
military chiefs accused staging coups d’état against the government. These
cases, conducted by the public prosecutors close to the Gülen group (the AKP’s
most important ally at that period), are considered to be politically motivated. In
my sample, the imprisonment of or purge against former military members is
often associated with the losses against the PKK, and the peace negotiations,
implying that the government declared war against the Kemalist military chiefs
in accordance with its secret deal with the Kurdish organisations.

‘The terrorists are among us, those who fought against them are in prison. Where is
the justice? Freedom for the Kemalists!’ – @gs4, 2012-09-21 08:52
‘The terrorists are crying victory, as our military chiefs are imprisoned. Sleep, the
nation of TURKS, sleep … Peacefully …’ – @gs3, 2013-03-21 12:14

Another political event of this period is the alcohol restrictions proposed by

the government in May 2013, a couple of weeks before the Gezi Protests. In the
thematic part of my analysis, I already gave some examples about the
expressions of fans on that matter.
To sum up, the three themes that dominate the political agenda of the sample
supporters are connected to nationalism, militarism and the secular lifestyle; the
elements that are inherent to the Republican Doxa and the urban, secular,
middle-class habitus.

During the Gezi Protests: 28 May 2013 – 2030 June 2013

The two months of the 2013 summer requires particular attention, as this period
represents the most important mass protests of the recent history in Turkey. It is
also the period where all of the sample supporters tweet from the streets,
sometimes while clashing with the police.
Starting with the dawn of 28 May, the reactions of the supporters about the
events already become observable.

‘Good morning, while eating breakfast, we bid farewell to the Gezi Park.’ – @gs8,
2013-05-28 05:33
‘These are just the roadworks around the Gezi Park. The big intervention is yet to
come.’ – @bjk15, 2013-05-28 06:08
‘Don’t destroy my city with shopping malls and bridges. Don’t touch Taksim,
Sarıyer, our greens …’ – @gs4, 2013-05-28 10:06

As it may be clearly seen, at this moment, the concerns are exclusively

environmental and limited to a few users. The other users mainly talk about the
‘two drunkards’ statement of Erdoğan, in which he made a thinly veiled jab at
Mustafa Kemal and İsmet İnönü, two founding fathers of the Republic.
During the night of 28 May, the reactions start to popularise and shift to a
more political tone:

‘Use these hashtags and announce our cause to the whole world.
#geziparkıiçintaksime [To Taksim, for the Gezi Park], #occupygezipark and
#dinleistanbul [Listen Istanbul].’ – @bjk3, 2013-05-28 20:06
‘Karl Marx once said the capitalism would cut down the tree if it couldn’t sell the
shadow! The Taksim Square is an example of that.’ – @bjk10, 2013-05-28 20:33
‘You mess with the drink I drink, the park I walk, my children and our love for
ATATÜRK. You mess with everything.’ – @fb17, 2013-05-28 20:46

I should underline that the majority of sample is not still interested in the events
around the Taksim Square, at this point. It will be the police attack against the
tents of the sleeping protests at the dawn of 30 May 2013 that will create the
major interest, and also Tayyip Erdoğan’s statement ‘Whatever you do, we made
up our mind and we will implement it’, regarding the demolition of the park and
the shopping mall construction.

‘What is this raid at 5AM? Are those people terrorists?’ – @bjk3, 2013-05-30 07:00
‘He says whatever you do, we made up our mind. Those who cause this arrogance
deserve it.’ – @gs7, 2013-05-30 08:01
‘These infidels [the AKP] think that they will get away with it. They believe that
Allah belongs to them. Allah will punish them all.’ – @gs14, 2013-05-30 09:52
‘Even though they stopped the public transportation [to block support to
protesters] and there is tear gas, we should keep on resisting, the Park belongs to us,
not to shopping malls.’ – @gs16, 2013-05-30 10:36
‘At 5AM, you attack people who protect trees with tear gas, and you burn down
their tents. This type of evil is unprecedented, even against the enemy during the
wars.’ – @fb10, 2013-05-30 11:26
‘Çarşı is against the lightbulb! [The AKP’s symbol]’ – @bjk18, 2013-05-30 13:05
‘I want to go to the Gezi Park after work.’ – @fb3, 2013-05-30 13:33

Apparently, the 5am police raid in the Park is a breaking point for the sample
users. At that point, the environmental concerns are rapidly associated with the
police violence and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s autocratic tendencies. During the
night of 30–31 May 2013, the first clashes between the protesters and the police
kick off. This is also the time that the Çarşı group of Beşiktaş supporters starts to
take part in the movement. The first person in my sample that confronts the
police violence is @bjk4, Beşiktaş supporter and one of the more left-wing
members of the sample, who probably arrived in the Park earlier than others in
the sample group.

‘There is tear gas, it makes you throw up. My eyes went all red.’ – @bjk4, 2013-05-
31 03:25
‘The police stays away from the Park, they should know what is in it [tear gas].’ –
@bjk4, 2013-05-31 03:27

After each police attack in the Park, the messages posted by the supporters
become more and more radical.

‘When will Uncle Tayyip die? I will piss on his grave.’ – @gs8, 2013-05-31 06:45
‘The priority of the Turkish police is to protect the AKP, not the people. They are
like the enemy of the people.’ – @bjk7, 2013-05-31 07:01
‘Tonight, we should gather hundreds of thousands of people, maybe even more.
The victory is so close.’ – @fb14, 2013-05-31 08:41

On 31 May 2013, the organised fan groups of three teams make a spontaneous
call on Twitter for the supporters to come to Taksim and resist against the police,
under the hashtag #SezonunSonOmuzOmuzasıGeziParkında [The last ‘shoulder-
to-shoulder’ of the season is at the Gezi Park].

‘The one who remains silent against injustice is the mute Satan [an Islamic citation
often attributed to the followers of the Prophet Mohamed.’ – @gs4, 2013-05-31
09:07
‘There is no colour or club difference, no political difference in this resistance.’ –
@gs16, 2013-05-31 09:16
‘Resist against the structure which turned this country into a Police State!’ –
@gs20, 2013-05-31 09:38
‘There you go, the real fans have come to play!’ – @gs14, 2013-05-31 09:49
‘The supporters of the Big Three should be united under our [Turkish] flag
tonight.’ – @gs18, 2013-05-31 10:04
‘The fan groups, which everyone treated to be hooligans, joins the resistance.
Don’t forget, football is never just football.’ – @gs3, 2013-05-31 10:21
‘Welcome, my hooligan spirit!’ – @fb3, 2013-05-31 12:56

The organised fan groups’ call to Taksim for a rally is a major turning point in
the popularisation of the Gezi Movement, in our movement and in general. One
defining factor about the importance of this call is its non-partisan nature. The
underestimated anti-politism in Turkey, especially among urban, secular, middle
classes, was thus circumvented through a vague definition of ‘the people’ and
other legitimising identities like the fan identity. In my sample, there are
frequent references to these two non-political designations:

‘The only partiality accepted at the Taksim Square is that of the football supporters,
and even they are shoulder to shoulder. There is no political party here! Understand
this, we are the people!’ – @fb14, 2013-06-03 10:55

From the Gezi Protests to the Erdoğan family’s corruption scandal:

1 July 2013 – 2016 December 2013
After the Gezi Protests were violently dispersed by the police, the political
expressions in the sample suddenly decreased and were replaced by comments
on football, especially after the Süperlig and the Champions League started. The
supporters’ interest on politics did not completely vanish, yet they were limited
to reactions when political events concerned football. One example for such
intersection is the Stambulite fans’ anti-government protests during the 34th
minute of home games; and another one is the pitch invasion of the pro-
government ‘1453 Eagles’ Beşiktaş fan group during the Beşiktaş–Galatasaray
derby game in September 2013, which forced Beşiktaş to play behind closed
doors for a couple of games.
After the Gezi Park was evacuated violently by the police on 15 June 2013,
the movement continued in two separate forms of political expression; the public
forums held in the parks of Istanbul, and the anti-government and pro-Gezi
slogans of the Stambulite football fans in the 34th minutes of every fan game (34
is the licence plate number of Istanbul). In my sample, the supporters’ protests
were much more popular compared to the forums that the sample users almost
had no interest in.
The park forums appeared as an important element for the continuation of the
Gezi Movement, not only regarding the dissident public gatherings, but also the
public use of the repertoire of collective action, developed at the Gezi Park
during the protests, partially inspired by the other, mostly Western, social
movements like Occupy Wall Street, from which the park forums borrowed the
hand gestures used during the debates. Some of these forums, like the one in
Abbasağa (Beşiktaş) and Validebağ (Kadıköy) evolved into local political
bodies, while others quickly evaporated. The forums appealed mostly to the core
members of the Gezi Movement and could not keep the newcomers mobilised,
maybe except for a couple of weeks. Therefore, their impact on the institutional
politics remained very limited. However, in some cases, they could provide
alternative political channels especially for environmental causes, like in the
example of the consumption collective of Kadıköy (Uğurlu, 2016). As it may be
expected, in my sample which comprises Gezi newcomers, the participation
level to the park forums is very low, and even those who participate do not
believe that it may lead to political change:

‘The bitter truth about the park forum gatherings is; when September comes they
will all be forgotten, the decisions we take in the forums will just concern those who
participate.’ – @fb19, 2013-07-02 20:23

The disinterest and mistrust in park forums are certainly associated with anti-
politism. The moment the mass protests transform into political organisations,
the fans disappear, along with the other members of their social layer.
On the other hand, the fans are much more interested in the 34th minute
protests.

‘I love it, in Kadıköy, everybody chants ‘Everywhere is Taksim, resistance is

everywhere.’ – @fb12, 2013-07-06 19:27
‘Everywhere is İnönü, everywhere is Beşiktaş. Everywhere is Taksim, resistance
is everywhere!’ – @bjk14, 2013-08-18 20:42
‘No matter what you do, cut off the sound or interrupt the coverage, ALİ SAMİ
YEN [the Galatasaray stadium] shouts EVERYWHERE IS TAKSIM,
RESISTANCE IS EVERYWHERE.’ – @gs16, 2013-08-19 18:53

This last message is about the Lig TV, the Süperlig broadcaster of the era,
which cut off the ambiance sound in the 34th minute of the games in Istanbul
when there are protests. Other TV platforms such as D-Smart also resorted to the
same practice to make anti-government voices unheard.

‘Everywhere is Taksim, Resistance is everywhere. Cut off the sound, D-Smart, you
fucker!’ – @fb9, 2013-08-21 19:20

Another reason for the fans being more invested in these protests than the park
forums may be the fact that these protests take part in the stadiums where the
fans are more used to express themselves, even though those expressions are
rarely political. Before the Gezi period, we have also seen that the supporters are
more inclined to be interested in political events if they are involved in the
football world, like the match-fixing operation.
Another incident, in which the football world directly intersected the political
world, is the 1453 Eagles’ pitch invasion. Right after Gezi, a pro-government
fans’ group named ‘1453 Eagles’ (1453 Kartalları in Turkish) suddenly
emerged, the 1453 number making reference to the conquest of Istanbul by
Sultan Mehmed II. The motto of this fan group was ‘keep your politics at home’,
a direct jab at Çarşı that was active in Gezi. As a matter of fact, the 1453 Eagles
was not the first after-Gezi attempt by the AKP to prove not all supporters were
against them. Before, in June 2013, in one of the anti-Gezi rallies of Erdoğan,
some Beşiktaş banners with the name Çarşı (without the anarchy symbol in the
original logo of the group) appeared. The 1453 Eagles group’s sole action was to
invade the pitch during the Beşiktaş–Galatasaray derby on 22 September 2013,
causing the club to receive a four games’ suspension, thus keeping the Beşiktaş
dissident fans out of the stadiums for about two months. The group later
disappeared silently, and its leader was arrested for a petty crime months later.
In my sample, supporters from all teams defended Çarşı and other dissident
fans against the 1453 Eagles.

‘Those 1453 fans who invaded the pitch are Tayyip supporters. Çarşı should
intervene.’ – @gs8, 2013-09-22 18:21
‘Do not mix those 1453 Eagles with Çarşı. Who are these people? The AKP’s
dogs, that’s who they are!’ – @fb7, 2013-09-22 18:34
‘This is a provocation. A trap against the Beşiktaş supporters.’ – @bjk1, 2013-09-
22 18:45

It is very probable that the 1453 Eagles was a one-time act to keep Beşiktaş
supporters out of the stadiums, when protests were still active. The government
made a very similar move during the Mediterranean Games in Mersin, in the
same week. The tickets for the opening ceremony of the games in this
opposition-dominated city were taken out of sale, and distributed to the AKP
youth branches, as buses filled with young AKP members who held tickets to the
events surfaced on the social media.

17 December 2013 – 2030 March 2014: From the Erdoğan scandal to

the local elections
The operation against corruption, launched by the Gülenist public prosecutors
against Erdoğan and three other ministers of the government in December 2013,
concerned the sample as much as the rest of the country.
Even though the sample members were satisfied by a corruption operation
against Erdoğan and other AKP ministers, they were fully aware that it was
launched by the Gülenists (or the Cemaat, the congregation, as the Gülenists are
often called) and they showed absolutely no support for this group that they
deemed as dangerous. The Fenerbahçe supporters were particularly critical of
the Gülenists as they also conducted the match-fixing operation that imprisoned
the chairman of their club, Aziz Yıldırım.

‘I love this chaotic situation. The Cemaat and the AKP are fighting like stray dogs.’
– @gs3, 17/12/2013 14:58
‘The Cemaat is trolling the AKP:D.’ – @fb14, 17/12/2013 08:46
‘Apart from the funny situation, it is certain that a fight between the Cemaat and
the AKP would drive Turkey to a massive destruction.’ – @fb19, 17/12/2013 09:19
‘They [the AKP] called it democracy when Zekeriya Öz [chief public prosecutor
close to Gülen] arrested the military chiefs, now they call it a conspiracy when it is
their ministers. Yeah right …’ – @fb15, 17/12/2013 16:40
‘Tayyip calls Gülen a traitor. Gülen calls Tayyip a thief. Finally, we agree with
both of you.’ – @gs4, 25/12/2013 13:22
‘The system is the problem. I won’t support the Gülenists just because they are
right this time.’ – @bjk3, 25/12/2013 18:12

After the pro-Erdoğan police officials resisted against the Gülenist

prosecutors’ orders and the latter would be dismissed, the sample group lost their
interests in the subject. However, this does not mean that they supported the
Gülenists, on the contrary, most users were critical of both sides while no user
supported Gülen. They are rather interested in politics when the government
might fall. When they realise it is not the case, they just go back to their daily
agendas.
After the operation against the AKP failed, the Gülenists started leaking
clandestinely recorded phone calls that would criminalise Erdoğan, his family
and ministers on Twitter and Youtube, hoping that they would cost the AKP the
local elections of 30 March. The users in my sample were not too impressed.

‘We are stuck between two dirty sides, everywhere is full of filth.’ – @bjk15,
24/02/2014 22:13
‘It is a disaster if the recordings are genuine. It is also a disaster if they aren’t. We
are laughing at all of this, because it is delirium.’ – @gs11, 24/02/2014 21:45
‘We, the looters [what Erdoğan calls the Gezi protesters], are relaxed and we
watch the operation eating popcorn. How about you?’ – @gs3, 17/12/2013 13:41

In this period, the date of 3 February 2014 is important. This is the date of the
first hearing for the suspected murderers of Ali İsmail Korkmaz, the 19-year old
Gezi protester who was lynched by the police and local shopkeepers in Eskişehir
during the protests. Ali İsmail Korkmaz, like Berkin Elvan (another victim, 15
years old), became one of the symbols of the Gezi Movement. Before the first
hearing, a hashtag campaign was launched to demand justice for Korkmaz, who
was also an avid Fenerbahçe fan, participated by many members of the sample
group.

‘All the police officers in this country would not make one Ali İsmail. And we trust
our lives to these bastards.’ – @fb7, 03/02/2014 10:44
‘If the death of the 19-year old does not bother, it means that you lost all your
humanity.’ – @gs4, 03/02/2014 10:56
‘Ali will die only if you forget about him.’ – @gs8, 03/02/2014 11:26

Another important development of this period was the Twitter ban on 20

March 2014, ten days before the local elections, and one day after Tayyip
Erdoğan vowed to ‘eradicate’ it. It is interesting to note that, during the ban, the
number of users that were active on Twitter increased to 43 users, even though it
was difficult to access the platform. This is parallel with the country-wide
statistics, as after the ban, the Twitter use increased by 38% in Turkey, mostly
due to people curious about the banned content (The Guardian, 21 March 2014).

‘A dictator is born before our eyes. We knew his childhood.’ – @bjk4, 20/03/2014
16:30
‘The man without a character is fearful of 140 characters [the number of
characters per tweet on Twitter].’ – @fb12, 20/03/2014 16:40
‘We circumvented the block and we are here. The PM, who is scared of Twitter, is
a son of a bitch, by the way.’ – @bjk2, 20/03/2014 21:55
‘The fear blocked Twitter.’ – @fb16, 20/03/2014 22:33

The Twitter ban forced my sample group to express their political opinions,
more than the corruption scandal or any other political development. This shows
the importance of this site for them, and how they feel ‘at home’ as ‘digital
natives’.
The campaign for the local elections was also important in this period. Even
though, the vast majority of sample supporters expressed support for the CHP
candidates, it can mostly be explained by the fact that they contested the AKP
candidates. As before, the political parties did not gather any particular
sympathy.

‘Everybody should vote for Sarıgül in Istanbul and Yavaş in Ankara. It is not about
 party politics.’ – @gs8, 30/03/2014 08:48
‘The people has not trust in the CHP or the MHP, we just want to destroy the
AKP.’ – @gs14, 16/03/2014 10:42
‘It’s not about political parties. Be it the CHP or the MHP, we will vote for the
strongest party against the AKP.’ – @bjk5, 17/03/2014 07:42

Another common view, especially among Beşiktaş and Fenerbahçe

supporters, is to associate the anti-AKP vote with the team that they support:

‘Fuck all the Beşiktaş supporters who still vote for that party.’ – @bjk4, 15/03/2014
17:54
‘We put on our jerseys and went to vote.’ – @fb16, 30/03/2014 10:34
‘I voted with a Fenerbahçe jersey, that would make clear for whom I didn’t vote.’
– @fb9, 30/03/2014 12:27
‘We display our colours and go to vote. Beşiktaş, Çarşı, Sarıgül, the CHP.’ –
@bjk18, 30/03/2014 11:20

The main reason for associating club identity with political choices may be
considered to be the court case filed against Çarşı (for staging a coup d’état by
participating in Gezi) and the match-fixing operation. The Galatasaray fans in
the sample do not think much differently than the others; however, they are not
as passionate in associating their political view with their club. One Fenerbahçe
supporter believes that this is because of the Galatasaray fans’ support for the
AKP.

‘I walked around Kadıköy today. I saw dozens of supporters wearing Fenerbahçe

jerseys and 4–5 Beşiktaş supporters going to the polling stations. I haven’t seen a
single Galatasaray fan with a jersey. They are the AKP’s sheep.’ – @fb10,
30/03/2014 14:03

From the local elections to the presidential elections: 1 April 2014 –

2010 August 2014
After the landslide victory of the AKP in the local elections, the number of users
tweeting about the political events sharply decreased in my sample. As a matter
of fact, the decline did not kick in right after the elections, but two days later,
after the Ankara race was concluded in the AKP candidate Gökçek’s favour. It is
striking that the sample users, after political defeats, do not express
disillusionment; they just stop tweeting about political matters. They either do
not tweet at all, or tweet about football and daily matters. In this period, the
number of tweets is particularly low, except two football-related events; the
Fenerbahçe–Galatasaray derby of 6 April 2014 and the Fenerbahçe–Çaykur
Rizespor game after which Fenerbahçe clinched the Süperlig title.
The lack of interest in political events ended with one major disaster in May
2014; the Soma mine accident. On 13 May 2014, a mine explosion that
happened because of severe negligence cost the lives of 301 miners in Soma,
Manisa (western Turkey). The accident was widely interpreted within a political
context as the mine belonged to a pro-government company. Furthermore, Yusuf
Yerkel, an Erdoğan aide violently attacked a victim’s relative and kicked him
severely when soldiers kept the person in the ground. Erdoğan also, allegedly,
shouted anti-Semitic slurs against the victims’ relatives protesting against him
and punched one person (Libération, 16 May 2014). The mine disaster caused a
major shock in Turkey, in my sample group alike:

‘Erdoğan goes to Soma. As in the Hollywood movies, the murderer always comes
back to the crime scene.’ – @fb19, 2014-05-13 22:13
‘This is our way of taking measures. The workers are still below the grounds, and
the police is setting barricades against the protests.’ – @gs11, 2014-05-13 23:11
‘We have a PM who calls death the destiny of the miner’s profession. May the
Devil take him.’ – @fb4, 2014-05-14 06:46
‘Above the ground is darker than below the ground.’ – @fb12, 2014-05-14 07:37
‘The ministers say it is destiny. I am curious, what type of destiny they will have.’
– @fb6, 2014-05-14 12:00
‘It is normal that the aide kicks someone, as the PM punches another.’ – @gs16,
2014-05-15 09:56

After the Soma disaster, the tweets decrease once again until the presidential
elections. Even during the electoral campaign, few users tweet politically. In
these elections which had Tayyip Erdoğan, Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu (a lesser
known conservative nominated by the CHP and the MHP) and Selahattin
Demirtaş (the Kurdish leader) as candidates, the sample users do not
wholeheartedly support any candidate.

‘The only reason that the CHP supporters approve Ekmel is because he is running
against Erdoğan. That’s why Tayyip always wins.’ – @fb14, 2014-08-03 17:35
‘The nationalist Kemalists criticise Ekmel, but what will they do in the elections? I
swear, I won’t vote this time.’ – @fb19, 2014-08-09 19:21
‘Neither that son of a bitch Erdoğan, nor Ekmel criticise the ISIS.’ – @fb10, 2014-
07-06 10:35

On the other hand, some supporters declare voting for İhsanoğlu, just because
not to vote for Erdoğan or the Kurdish candidate, Demirtaş.

‘I see some people prefer the PKK member Demirtaş to Ekmel. It wouldn’t be
possible to say that ten years ago.’ – @gs20, 2014-07-26 19:00
‘One candidate [Erdoğan] murdered our youth, and another [Demirtaş] murdered
our soldiers. There is no reason why not to vote for Ekmeleddin.’ – @gs8, 2014-08-
09 08:35
‘Those who vote for the PKK candidate Demirtaş are sons of bitches.’ – @fb20,
2014-08-10 10:25

In these elections, as well as many others, it is the Republican Doxa that

makes the choice for many. In my sample, it is very clear that no one supports
İhsanoğlu as a candidate, as they do not know him and he is from an Islamic
pedigree (İhsanoğlu is the former general secretary of the Islamic Cooperation
Organisation). However, in order not to vote for Erdoğan or a Kurdish politician,
they feel compelled to vote for İhsanoğlu. Ironically, İhsanoğlu, after having lost
the presidential elections became a MHP deputy in 2015, and later became a
Tayyip Erdoğan supporter.

From the presidential elections to the June 2015 legislative

elections: 11 August 2014 – 2017 June 2015
Erdoğan’s victory in the presidential elections, as in the local elections, caused a
massive decline in sample users’ who posted about political matters, or tweeted
in general. Once again, their silence was broken with a football match, the
Fenerbahçe–Galatasaray Supercup final on 25 August 2014.
Before the 7 June 2015 legislative elections, the number of sample users
tweeting about politics is slightly higher than in the presidential elections of the
previous year. In these elections, the pro-Kurdish HDP appeared to be the most
active party with its pro-Gezi and anti-Erdoğan discourse. However, only two
users in the sample group, @fb14 and @fb12, declared to vote for this party.
This is interesting as the HDP, passing the 10% national threshold for the first
time, became the third most popular party in Istanbul. While the party increased
its votes in the big cities of western Turkey with a dynamic strategy embracing
the Turkish youth, my sample did not stray away from its anti-Kurdish discourse
too much, as I discussed before.

From the June elections to the November elections: 8 June 2015 –

2015 November 2015
The June elections provided a massive shock as the HDP passed the national
threshold and blocked the AKP from taking the power singlehandedly again. It
was also possible that the opposition parties could form a coalition: however,
President Tayyip Erdoğan refused to designate the opposition leader Kemal
Kılıçdaroğlu to form a government, and the MHP also rejected all the coalition
offers. Therefore, the President announced the snap elections that would be held
on 1 November 2015.
The football supporters in my sample group rarely discussed the possibility of
a government without the AKP, and seemed to be disillusioned with politics
completely.

‘The only coalition that I care is made with rakı, calamari and turnip juice [a drink
often consumed along with rakı].’ – @gs16, 2015-08-11 20:15
‘Who cares about the coalition, Fener will play tonight.’ – @fb3, 2015-08-14
09:31

Meanwhile, between two elections, the interim government launched a

massive military operation in the Kurdish regions, along with month-long
curfews. During this campaign dozens of soldiers, guerrillas and civilian lost
their lives. It is striking that not even one user commented about these bloody
events that could be considered to be exceptional, even per the violent standards
of the conflict. This may be due to the lack of media coverage, especially
regarding the dozens of Kurdish civilians killed during the operations. The
reason why these events were disregarded by the sample group may also be
about their indifference towards the violence that has become ordinary. I do not
have enough data to have a verdict on this question. However, the lack of
interest in political matters in this period also covers the elections. In the election
night, only 37 people in the sample group tweeted, much lower than the other
election nights. Therefore, it is perfectly possible that they were so disillusioned
that they just stopped caring for anything political.

Notes
1 ‘Birlik, beraberlik içinde olmak’
2 The emblematic chic street of the Kadıköy district where Fenerbahçe fans often meet.
3 Çapulcu means ‘looter’ in Turkish; it was an expression first used by Tayyip Erdoğan
against Gezi participants, later appropriated by them.
4 In Turkish, ‘to be French to something’ is the equivalent of ‘it’s Greek to me’ in
English. The Galatasaray supporters use this expression, also to mock with
 Fenerbahçe fans’ claims that Galatasaray is not Turkish enough, but French, because
the Galatasaray High School, the graduates of which founded the club, is the biggest
French-teaching institution outside France.
5 Atam means ‘my ancestor’ in Turkish and is almost exclusively used for Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk.
6 The Fenerbahçe supporters often call their club the ‘Fenerbahçe Republic’.
7 Even though Erdoğan gave up liberal ideas in the 2010s, he continued to use the word
‘Türkiyeli’, which he also used during his victory speech after the presidential
elections in 2014.
8 Apo is the nickname for Abdullah Öcalan.
9 The Menemen incident is an Islamist revolt in 1930, in which a young military officer
was decapitated by the rebels. This incident triggered a military operation and heavy
prison sentences against the convicts.
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Conclusion

Throughout this book, I have tried to draw the picture of football as a popular
and political phenomenon interwoven with the Turkish modernity. Football,
since the emergence of the modern Turkey with the Second Constitutional
Period, has always shown all the characteristics, subtleties and discrepancies of
the country’s modern transformation. Unresolved issues tied to the uneasy
relationship with the Ottoman past, ethnic and national rivalries, the never-
ending love and hate relationship with Europe, the Army’s role in political life,
the coups have all translated into the football world somehow. Trying to explain
this century-long mess through one of the most exceptional events in the history
of this country was certainly a tough nut to crack. However, both the Gezi
Protests and the participation of thousands of people wearing football jerseys
needed explanation. The whole movement was done and dusted within half a
year, and not much was left behind. The complete silence after the events was as
intriguing as the suddenness and the intensity of them. Unfortunately, there was
little data to work with, except for the social media, which was instrumental
during the protests.
The Gezi Protests were the last exit before the bridge for Turkey. In ten years,
Turkey became a polarised country on the verge of autocracy from a promising
underdog trying to catch up with the Copenhagen criteria. In the 2000s, the
youth in Turkey, especially the middle-class youth in big cities like Istanbul, was
connected to the world more than any other period in history. The political
atmosphere and the technological developments permitted them to get to know
the world and become a part of it. They started travelling, participating in
exchange programmes, read and watch the globally acclaimed cultural products
at the same time with anywhere else. Cheap train/plane tickets, the Internet, the
Erasmus programme became accessible almost simultaneously with the
democratisation reforms. Civil society mushroomed, for the first time in history,
on 1 March 2003, the public could pressure the Parliament to vote for its
interests. However, the fragility of the institutions that had been kept under
military tutelage proved to be crucial when the power was taken over by the
elected, from the appointed. With the 2010 referendum, the AKP led by Erdoğan
eliminated its rivals within the state, but kept their tutelage intact, just to be
taken over. From then on, he went onto building almost an Islamist version of
the Kemalist regime. Turkey never had the institutions to block this
transformation; the whole system was designed, ironically by the Kemalists, to
give the power holders a fail-safe rule. This was coupled by the AKP’s
popularity among conservatives and the lower classes, and created an electoral
authoritarianism.
Before the Gezi Protests, the urban, secular middle classes responded to the
AKP with the Republican Rallies in 2007. However, these rallies were away
from keeping up with it the zeitgeist. What they claimed was exactly the old
regime, and they were as hostile to the country’s democratisation as they were to
the AKP. The Kemalists’ obsession with the status quo was so strong that the
AKP was often misperceived to be progressive. The backlash that the
Republican Rallies and the e-memorandum given by the army that year created
fuelled the AKP’s electoral power even further.
The main difference between the Republican Rallies and the Gezi Protests is
the fact that they came from different origins and demanded different things. The
Gezi Movement was the climax of every democratising attempt in the previous
decade. It was an inclusive movement that demanded more democracy, liberties
and tolerance for everyone. It was an almost bizarre experiment that LGBTIQ
communities and radical Muslim organisations could coexist. It was an
unprecedented solidarity for a better future, for the first time for everyone. I do
not think Gezi will ever lose its value regarding this aspect.
On the other hand, unlike how it has often been described even in academic
works, this perspective created at the Gezi Park that held a couple of thousand
people at once was not shared with all the participants of the protests which
exceeded a few millions. While the Gezi Park created a powerful discourse and
propagated it with full force on site and on social media, the politically
disorganised and inexperienced crowd of individuals each had their own
agendas. These individuals, nevertheless, acted like they had a common vision,
yet this vision was not necessarily the same with the one in the park. My initial
observation that I later structured as my principal hypothesis was that a set of
rules kept these individuals in a collective direction that was different from the
movement’s own direction. I conceptualised these rules as the Republican Doxa.
The urban, secular, middle-class habitus is something you experience in
Turkey, yet it is still very hard to concretise. People who do not know each other
can make exactly the same comment about the Kurdish issue, or the Armenian
Genocide, or the Syrian refugees. In the streets, it is hard to track it. On the
social media, it is much easier. It may be claimed that the media may set the tone
of the current agenda; however the AKP-controlled media often contradicts with
this social fraction’s views and tries to reshape them.
That is why I tried to see if it was the Republican Doxa who shaped these
people’s common actions and strategies. I picked the independent football
supporters as my corpus, because what could have represented the urban,
secular, middle-class neighbourhoods of Istanbul better than Beşiktaş,
Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe? What other identity than the fan identity could be
as intrinsic to this social faction? And also, who could have ignored the fact that
these people specifically wore football jerseys when going to the streets for
protesting? After all those years, as a fan, a sports journalist and an academic, I
still cannot paint a better picture of the ‘modern’ middle class of Istanbul than
the football fans hanging out at Kadıköy Balıkpazarı, Beşiktaş Köyiçi or
Beyoğlu Nevizade.
Football in Turkey is an exceptional and complicated case. It is a sport that
was imported as part of modernisation attempts of a fallen Empire. As such,
from the beginning, it was not treated as a mere athletic activity, but like any
other modern conception that would later shape the new nation state which
would be the Republic of Turkey. Football was, and still is, as elemental to
modern Turkey as nationalism, the Turkish Army or the Republic itself. From
the first day, it became part of how this new nation defined itself. Even before
the Turkish Armed Forces existed, the Big Three of football played against ‘the
enemy’, first the occupying forces in Istanbul, then the non-Muslim ethnic rivals,
and then European counterparts. In a country where the final objective was to
prove that it belonged to the Western world, football has always been vital.
Accordingly, the Big Three of Istanbul, Beşiktaş, Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe,
are not simply football clubs. They are micro-nations with millions of followers
in Istanbul, in Turkey and everywhere where a Turkish speaker exists. They are
among the founding actors of modern Turkey. They are the Republican elite.
In this setting, the political value of these football clubs is immeasurable. This
political value is often translated into the relationships between the club board
members and the political actors. Undeniably, these relationships play a huge
role in the dance between football and politics in Turkey. However, I believe
that the real political value of football in Turkey comes from its subtle role of
amplifying the political codes of the country. The Turkish modernity aimed to
create an urban, secular society, but mostly failed as it could not find ways to
deal with the vast rural population and its social capital based on religion,
township and traditional relationships. The football world, however, appeared to
be an ideal form of the modernism project. As football fandom was completely
dominated by the Istanbul clubs, it appeared as a secular and urban practice, the
rural traditions had effect on it. Even when a vast wave of migration from rural
to urban areas started with the 1950s, football fandom was mostly reserved to
urban middle classes. Even if the rural migration could have had an effect on
fandom practices, the hyper-commodification of football with the 1980s made it
impossible. Attending football games became less and less affordable for the
lower classes. They continued to follow football through the media, but did not
have too much access to the stadiums.
The divide between the rural newcomers and the urban middle classes in the
big cities of Turkey is a cultural and political one. In today’s Turkey, this divide
mostly defines the current political polarisation. From the epicentre of this divide
also emerged the Gezi Protests. The events were a battle between a political
power that has risen into prominence with the votes of the rural population and
tried aggressively to take the cities and the urban, secular, middle class who tried
to save urban spaces with the cultural codes attached to them. Football could not
have been separate from what was happening, as fandom practices in Istanbul
shared the same urban spaces and same cultural codes.
However, more importantly, because of the role of football during the
emergence of modern Turkey, there are interchangeable political perceptions
between the football world and the political world. These clubs that I call as
micro-nations are not only coevals of modern Turkey, they came out of the same
mould with it. The way they define themselves and their opponents through a
defensive nationalism is similar. During the AKP period, for the first time, both
realms collided as the new regime which wanted the replace the old, secular,
Republican regime also intervened in the football world and the fans’ lifestyles.
The threat perception that is central to both worlds became activated by the same
actor. What the AKP tried to do to the old regime overlapped what it tried to do
to the football world and the fandom practices. It was completely logical that it
did, since the ruling party started to actively seek a complete hegemony over
society in Turkey. The urban, secular, middle-class football fans felt that what
the AKP was imposing on the country was proven with what it was imposing on
the football world, and vice versa. Therefore, the period between the match-
fixing operation and the Gezi Protests was a period of amplified threats for these
fans. Their fandom practices were interfered with, their clubs were taken over,
so were their urban spaces. What they saw in the micro scale confirmed what
they felt happening in the macro scale. That was the main reason behind the
football fans’ rapid politicisation before the Gezi Protests.
Moreover, what is more important than football fans being politicised is the
fact that the fandom identity became part of active politics. When it comes to
Turkey, the difference between the two is crucial. In Turkey, football fandom is
reserved to organised group of fans, fans’ associations or match-goers. Even
though the level of engagement differs, the attachment and solidarity are strong
more often than not. This is partly because more than 80% of the country
supports the Big Three of Istanbul. Since these clubs have fans everywhere, it is
a given that not everyone can have the same fandom experience. Football games
are not physically accessible for millions, nor are they affordable. This does not
mean they love their club and identify themselves with less than others. As in a
nation, there is an imaginary bond between the club and the fan. What lacks in
reality is supplemented by the imaginary. Therefore the identity often plays a
bigger role than the actions and practices. Being part of Beşiktaş, Fenerbahçe or
Galatasaray is a feeling that does not require to be validated by going to the
matches. Most fans do not see their team live even once in their lifetime. It is a
long-distance relationship. And the tone in this relationship is set by the fans in
Istanbul, those who have access to the games and the rituals around them. They
create the chants, slogans, who to pick on, what to do before and after the games
and the others emulate. Therefore when the fandom identity becomes politically
active in Istanbul as it did between 2010 and 2013, it impacts a larger crowd that
most political organisations usually cannot reach. Furthermore, the secular
neighbourhoods of Istanbul, where fandom practices are created, are
overwhelmingly loyal to the old regime, whereas in the national level, probably
half of each teams’ fans are the AKP voters. Therefore, when the fans in Istanbul
start to convey political messages critical of the new regime, those messages can
reach a crowd that is carefully isolated from dissident politics by local agents
and tight media control. For instance, a conservative young person from
Anatolia may not necessarily know any of the anti-government political banners
seen during the Gezi Protests, but they would surely recognise the team banners.
Even dissident fandom may become something to emulate. Indeed, it was not in
vain that Erdoğan wanted people with Çarşı banners in his rallies during Gezi,
then tried to prosecute the famous fan group of Beşiktaş, and then approached
the Beşiktaş president to support the new stadium construction. He quickly
realised that football fandom was becoming a gateway drug to political activism.
When we talk about fans in the secular strongholds of Istanbul, we are not
necessarily talking about fan groups. As everyone may qualify as a fan, we
should really be talking about the urban, secular, middle-class people hanging
around in these neighbourhoods. The football fans in these neighbourhoods are
by no means isolated or different from the other members of this social layer
with particular importance. They share the same cultural capital, they adhere to
the same doxa and display the same habitus. Therefore, their participation in the
Gezi Protests is not different than the participation of this social layer, in terms
of reasoning. However, choosing to participate with the fan identity and not
some other identity (like a political one) should be questioned.
The results of my quasi-ethnographic research clearly show that the political
manifestations of these fans do not indicate a durable politicisation. They are
outraged by the cultural transformation that the Erdoğan regime dictates, and
they want him out, but they are so hostile against political organisations and
being involved in politics, they would rather stay silent if an event that could
make the regime fall would not arise. Their political involvement lives and dies
with such events. One area that they always remain interested in politics is
football. If football gets politicised, so do they. It is not because they are not
interested in other domains, they are, but football brings legitimacy to the
political actions.
What I deduce from the results of this research is that the football fan identity
acts like a surrogate for political identity. The political expressions are often
deemed to be illegitimate, unless they go through football. Wearing a football
jersey is perceived to be a political statement, if though those clubs also have
millions of fans from the opposing end of the political spectrum. For the
Beşiktaş, Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe fans of this social faction, their club
represents the same political identity that these fans have, even though the club
boards fully cooperate with the Erdoğan regime, or any other political power.
Wearing a jersey somehow means ‘I am a Republican, I am modern, I am
against Erdoğan’, no matter which Stambulite jersey it is.
The political reactions of football fans are reactive and prone to fade away.
However, the political identity remains interlaced with the fan identity. As long
as the fan remains a fan, that outlet always has potential to be activated
suddenly, just like in the Gezi Protests. The power of the relationship between
the fan identity and the political identity lies in the ‘modern’ habitus and
lifestyle, powered by the Republican Doxa. Being a fan is a key part of that
lifestyle.
The football fans may seem powerless and their actions may appear as trivial.
But they still represent a social layer on which the Erdoğan regime could not
impose hegemony. The football fandom world still remains to be dominated by
the secular strongholds of Istanbul, much to Erdoğan’s chagrin. His attempts to
replace Beşiktaş, Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe (or rather the districts of Beşiktaş,
Beyoğlu/Şişli and Kadıköy) with Başakşehir have potential in the league, but are
completely fruitless off the pitch. Başakşehir has less fans in the stadium than a
bistro in Beşiktaş has clients in a match day.
The fans in the modern neighbourhoods of Istanbul represent a minority, but a
powerful one. They set the tone for the fandom in Turkey. They have the cultural
capital to create all the fandom practices and instinctively combine them with the
habitus of their social layer. Their unwillingness and inexperience regarding
politics keep them from becoming a major political force, but they can
popularise any movement that they are attached to. The Gezi Protests was a
prime example of it.
How the football fandom may function as a catalyst between the anti-political
modern middle classes and the political movement is often overlooked. Today,
the climate of fear created by the Erdoğan regime has blocked any street
movement, therefore it may appear to be moot right now. However, I believe
that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is one of the few people who can understand the
fans’ political potential, as he never stopped trying to control the football world
and create his own flavour of football fandom.
The social media, despite throttling and detentions en masse, is still the only
remaining democratic channel in Turkey. Twitter, in particular, is the only type
of media where dissident views are still expressed, albeit anonymously and very
cautiously. It is also the stronghold of ‘moderns’, as they continue to hold the
digital cultural capital. The AKP’s transformation of the education system is a
massive failure in terms of quality, therefore a takeover of this particular capital
does not seem too likely. Therefore, social media remains an interesting platform
to observe political cleavages in Turkey.
I should also note that we no longer have the same Turkey that we had in
2013. In the last five years, the civil and personal liberties and freedoms have
regressed beyond imagination. Especially the 2016 failed coup d’état attempt
that Erdoğan’s former close allies Gülenists allegedly staged functioned sort of a
Reichstag fire, ‘God’s gift’ (by Erdoğan’s own words) to eliminate all political
opponents regardless they are connected to the coup or not. Since 2016, there
have been almost no mass protests, the LGBTI Pride rallies are banned, dozens
of political activists including elected officials, as well as their attorneys, are
imprisoned, most of the media outlets critical of the government are shut down.
People are fearful, thousands of well-educated individuals from big cities fled
the country with their families. ‘Insulting the president’ is a trivial reason for
detaining people for social media posts, ‘supporting terrorism’ is another one to
detain academics, journalists and lawyers. The country had one Constitution
referendum, one presidential and one legislative election under the state of
emergency, and these elections the credibility of which are often disputed by
international observers led to a regime change. Today’s Turkey is a country
where everything is officially tied to Erdoğan’s massive palace where things are
run arbitrarily. Five years after Gezi, the Gezi supporters succumbed to
resignation; however, Erdoğan does not fail to accuse them for everything wrong
and they even are still being put on trial.
In the football world, the repressive policing and the club board’s active
collaboration practically ended all sorts of dissident activity in the stadium, be it
against Erdoğan or the club chairman. The looming economic crisis affected the
Big Three, but not Başakşehir, Erdoğan’s favourite club that happens to have
lots of pro-government sponsors that pay for expensive signings. By the time
this book is out, Başakşehir is quite likely to have clinched its first league title.
Despite Erdoğan’s calls, their stands are still almost completely empty.
Turkey is a country where dissident people are afraid to speak, or forced to
leave. There are no longer protests like the Gezi Protests, nor are the ministers
booed in the stadiums. Even on Twitter, people tend to lock their accounts to
public. Even the new Süper Lig leader is approved by the ruling party. But does
that mean hegemony for Erdoğan?
There is no hegemony without consent. What the dissidents feel and show
today is not consent, it is resignation. They are desperate and they do not have
any course of action. Their political activities, as usual, are restricted to voting in
the elections, which do not mean much anymore, since there are no checks and
balances to ensure fair and transparent elections. However, I do not think any of
these even slightly changed how the urban, secular, middle-class people like the
football supporters I worked with are loyal to the old Republican Doxa. On the
contrary, their allegiance to those principles is probably the last thread that keeps
them going. Therefore, I do not think there is an established hegemony in
Turkey today. Underneath the eerie silence and desperation lies anger and
contempt. A casual observer may think Erdoğan has 100% support at first
glance, but he needs the ultra-nationalists’ support even to reach 50%. It is hard
to predict what will happen next in Turkey, but if a change will be in order one
day, you can bet you will see the first signs of it around the Istanbul stadiums.
However, what that change would lead to is a whole other question.
Index

AKP, see Justice and Development Party

Alevism 95–6, 101, 146, 156.
Armenian genocide 5, 93–4, 125, 143–5, 175
ANAP, see Motherland Party.
Ankaragücü 11, 62, 65–6, 71, 74–5.
Ankaraspor 71, 74–5
Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 26, 33–4, 55, 65, 87, 137–9, 142, 147, 149, 154, 162

Basaksehir (district in Istanbul) 76, 78

Basaksehir (sports club) 76–8, 107, 179–180
Besiktas (district in Istanbul) 2, 12, 19, 128, 138, 146, 160, 165, 176, 179
Besiktas (sports club) 4, 15–18, 25, 27, 31, 34, 35, 38–43, 60, 62–66, 70, 78, 80,
84–88–89, 105–106, 115, 122, 129, 133–135, 139, 149, 159, 163–4, 166, 176, 178,
179
Beyoglu (district of Istanbul) 2, 12, 33, 88, 122, 128, 159–160, 176, 179
Black Stocking 23–4, 37
BTGM, see General Directorate of Physical Education

Çarsi 3, 15–19, 80, 88–89, 107, 115–116, 122, 132–3, 166, 169, 178
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) 8, 25, 92–4
cultural capital 6, 9, 13, 90, 101, 107, 110–4, 126–7, 179
CHP, see Republican People’s Party
CUP, see Committee of Union and Progress

Demirel, Süleyman 45–47, 53–55

Demirören, Yildirim 17, 82, 117
digital divide 6, 109–113, 125–7
Diyanet, see General Directorate of Religious Affairs
DYP, see True Path Party

Erdogan, Recep Tayyip 1–2, 4–7, 17, 19, 55–7, 73–85, 87–89, 92, 94–99, 102, 104–5,
 107, 114–5, 117–120, 124, 129–130, 134, 138, 140–1, 144, 146–8, 152, 154–8, 160,
162–4, 166–8, 170–2, 175, 178–181
Evren, Kenan 53, 55, 66

Fenerbahçe 25–29, 31, 34–44, 60, 62–3, 66, 70, 78–80, 84–89, 106, 116, 122, 129, 131–5,
139, 149, 152, 159–160, 167–173, 176, 178–9

Galatasaray 24–5, 27, 31, 33–8, 41, 44, 60, 62–4, 67, 69–70, 78, 80, 83, 88–9, 105–6,
114, 129, 131–5, 139, 151, 159, 160, 164–6, 169, 171–2, 176, 178–9
Gençlerbirligi 60
General Directorate of Physical Education (BTGM) 36
General Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) 96, 146
Gezi (movement) 1–6, 18–19, 81–3, 86–91, 97–111, 113–119, 121, 128–134, 136, 138,
143, 145–54, 156–80
Gökçek (family) 71, 74, 75, 77, 169
Gülen (religious group) 78–81, 84–6, 107, 117–21, 128, 130–1, 133, 149, 161, 166–7,
180

HDP, see Peoples’ Democratic Party

Islamism 49, 51, 93–95, 100, 103, 146

Justice and Development Party (AKP) 57–8, 71, 73–90, 92–96, 99, 101, 104–7, 113–5,
117–8, 121–4, 127–8, 130–1, 134, 136, 138–141, 143, 148–9, 151–163, 166–9,
171–2, 175, 177–9

Kadiköy (district of Istanbul) 2, 12, 19, 23, 26, 80, 86, 88–9, 122, 131–2, 138, 151,
159–160, 165, 169, 172, 176, 179
Kurds 5, 9, 47–8, 54–6, 58, 71, 85, 92, 94–5, 97, 101, 103, 114–5, 119–121, 123, 129,
130, 138–143, 145, 150, 153, 155–8, 160–1, 170–2, 175
Kurdish Political Movement 48, 95, 97, 103, 141
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) 15, 48, 56, 71, 94, 140–3, 155–6, 160–1, 170–1

match-fixing 76, 79–81, 84–7, 121–2, 128, 130–4, 149, 166–7, 169, 173, 177
MHP, see Nationalist Movement Party
militarism 122, 136, 149, 149, 161
Motherland Party (ANAP) 51, 53–58, 66–69, 71, 74, 76

Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) 15, 50–1, 54–7, 71, 74, 79, 92, 95, 106, 118, 120,
143, 145, 153–5, 157, 169–171

Öcalan, Abdullah 48, 140–1, 156–7, 161, 172

Osmanlispor 75
Ottoman Empire 4, 9, 19–29, 93
Özal, Turgut 51–5, 57, 66–71, 74, 76

Passolig 75, 81–2, 128, 136–7

Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) 56, 92, 95, 97, 103, 119, 141, 143, 155–8, 171
Republican People’s Party (CHP) 10, 14, 39, 44, 46–8, 51, 53–4, 58, 60, 63, 79, 92, 95,
103, 120, 143, 153–7, 159, 168–170
PKK, see Kurdistan Workers’ Party

religion 5, 11, 40, 55, 90, 93, 95, 138, 146–8, 153, 158, 176
Republican Doxa 5–6, 89–90, 107, 130, 134, 136–7, 139, 145–7, 150, 152, 158–9, 161,
171, 175, 179, 181

Seba, Süleyman 17–8, 133

secularism 4–5, 11, 54, 91, 95–6, 101, 104, 123, 126, 134, 146–8, 173
social media 6, 86, 97, 100, 102–3, 107–9, 112–3, 116, 122, 124–6, 129, 142, 166, 174–5,
179, 180

TFF, see Turkish Football Federation

Trabzonspor 14, 62–5, 70, 76, 80, 85
True Path Party (DYP) 53–57
Turkish Football Federation (TFF) 17, 27, 31, 42, 59, 64–9, 71, 75–6, 79, 82, 84–5, 117,
152

Yildirim, Aziz 79–80, 84–6, 131, 133, 149, 167