Turkish soccer: Illiberal President Erdogan’s latest victim
Tayip Recep Erdogan helps carry the coffin of Ulker founder Sabri Ulker to its final resting place in 2012
By James M. Dorsey
Turkish president
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s illiberal policies have targeted the media, the
judiciary, the police, militant soccer fans, and anti-government protesters.
Now they threaten to claim yet another victim: the game of football itself.
In a major blow to troubled
Turkish soccer, Yildiz Holding, a conservative conglomerate known for its
confectionary and biscuit business and close ties to Mr. Erdogan that is one of
Turkey’s largest sponsors of soccer, said in a letter to the Turkish Football
Federation (TFF) that it would no longer fund the sport because of violence and
tensions associated with it and government efforts to politically control the beautiful
game.
The company’s reference to
tensions was not simply a reference to stadium incidents but also to Mr. Erdogan’s
interference in a match-fixing scandal,
attempts to depoliticize stadia, and legal proceedings against members of
Carsi, the militant support group of storied Istanbul club Besiktas JK.
Carsi, one of Turkey’s most popular
fan groups stands accused of being a
terrorist organization whose members sought to overthrow the government. The
charges are based on Carsi’s key role in
the mass-anti-government Gezi Park protests in 2013. The trial was postponed
until April after the first day of
hearings in December.
The charges are part of a
government effort to purge dissent from the pitch. It started immediately after the Gezi park protests with the
banning of chanting or display of banners with political slogans and a demand
that spectators sign a pledge before entering a stadium that they would refrain
from participating in activities during matches that could “trigger mass,
political or ideological events.” Carsi’s
response to the government efforts was to chant during matches,
"everywhere is Taksim, everywhere is resistance."
Match attendance has moreover
dropped dramatically as a result of a fan boycott of Passolig, an electronic ticket system,
that critics charge is designed to give the government access to fans’
personal data. A recent match in Istanbul’s
82,000-seat Ataturk Olympic Stadium between Besiktas and Eskeshehirspor Kulubu
that would normally have been attended by some 20- 30,000 spectators drew only
3,000 fans. Ticket sales for matches of Galatasaray SK, another Istanbul
giant, are
down by two thirds with fans gathering in cafes and homes to watch games
they would have attended in the past.
Yildiz Holding has over the last
decade invested some $215 million in Turkish soccer with sponsorships of major
clubs such as Besiktas JK, Bursapor FC, Fenerbahce SK, Galatasaray and
Trabzonspor FC as well as the Turkish national team.
The company’s decision is not
simply a setback for Turkish soccer but for Mr. Erdogan personally whose family
has a long association with Yildiz and its owners, the Ulker family, who made
their name as successful, religiously conservative entrepreneurs. Yildiz
chairman Murat Ulker moreover was a classmate of Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu
in Istanbul’s prestigious boys' school, Istanbul Erkek Lisesi.
Members of the prime minister’s
family owned in the past up to 50 percent of Emniyet Foods, the distributor of
Yildiz’s Ulker brand, as well as a stake in Ihsan Foods, the distributor of the
company’s dairy products and Yenidogan Foods Marketing, its soft drinks
distributor. Writing in Middle
East Quarterly, Michael Rubin reported that Turkey’s Kemalist military long
refused to buy Yildiz products because of the Ulker family’s religiosity.
Yildiz chairman Murat Ulker
said in his letter to the Turkish federation, according to Hurriyet newspaper that
“I have to let you know that unfortunately, today it has become meaningless to
support teams or games thanks to such a fall in interest and value… When we became a sponsor, what we had in mind was the
development of Turkish football, raising new players and success in Europe and
the world. However, at the end of the day, we could not find what we were
looking for,”
Mr. Ulker asserted elsewhere that soccer’s brand value had
deteriorated because stadia were empty
and the current soccer environment no longer stroked with notions of fair play.
“No one wants their information to be collected,
even by the state; this is disturbing. Many
fan groups have boycotted the practice, which has added to the low attendance
numbers. It is impossible to not admire the spectators in the UK or
Germany. I am very sad for the country. I went to a game in the UK. recently and the atmosphere was great. This is what we
cannot find in Turkey. We should not block the joy from the fans,” Mr.
Ulker said earlier this month in an interview with Haberturk.
The government has sought to
drive a wedge between militant fans and other supporters by arguing that
e-ticketing was a way to combat illegal ticket scalping, increase tax revenues
and ensure that stadia are safe for families.
That portrayal was rejected
by some 40 fan groups who charged in a statement last year
that “the e-ticket system does not only demote the concept of supporters to a
customer, but it also files all our private data. The system aims to prevent
supporters from organizing and is designed to demolish stadium culture and
supporter identity.”
To be fair, Turkish stadia
have a long history of violence. A third of Carsi’s original founders have died
a violent death since the group’s founding in the early 1980s. A truce arranged at a gathering of heavily armed rival
supporters after a Besiktas fan was trampled to death in 1991 by his
Galatasaray adversaries reduced but did
not put an end to the violence. Two Leeds United fans in Istanbul for their
team’s match against Galatasaray were stabbed to death in 2000 during a soccer
riot on Taksim. Stray bullets fired into the air to celebrate the Turkish
team’s victory killed a third person and wounded four others.
The high stakes battle over
e-ticketing goes to the heart of a struggle for Turkey’s soul that erupted with
the Gezi Park protests sparked by Mr. Erdogan’s effort to impose greater
control on people’s lives and restrict personal and political freedom and
unfettered access to information. Fans moreover are irked by the president’s
manipulation of due process in what was the most serious match fixing scandal
in the history of Turkish soccer, a run-up to his squashing of an investigation
into the most serious corruption scandal in his career.
“While Turkey seems to be on
a downward path in democracy, freedom of speech and fighting against
corruption, the situation of the country’s football is no different… If
other sponsors follow Ulker’s footsteps,
accompanied by the continued boycott of the supporters, Turkish football might
have a chance to die in peace, rather than struggling to survive in such dire
conditions. Maybe then we can have a chance to reclaim the ‘beautiful game’
cleared of violence, politics and match fixing,” Hurriyet columnist Ozgur Korkmaz
said in an editorial entitled “Dear sponsors, please let Turkish football die.”
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam
School of International Studies as Nanyang Technological University in
Singapore, co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of the University of
Würzburg and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a forthcoming
book with the same title.
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