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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 nation...
