Problems of Turkish Football-2

A few of my friends called me after the article I wrote yesterday. They said that I had almost never touched on the problems of Turkish football in the article and that it would have been better to write an article focussing on these problems. In fact, my article was a political view of the problems rather than a technical one. Maybe the title could have been different, but when I thought about it, I agreed with them. Taking the criticisms and suggestions received into consideration, I found it appropriate to write a second article focusing on the problems of Turkish football in technical terms.

About the Current Situation of Turkish Football

Unfortunately, Turkish football is looking for its old times day by day. Why is Turkish football, which saw Galatasaray winning the UEFA Cup in 2000, Fenerbahçe playing the semi-finals of the UEFA Europa League in the 2012-2013 season and Beşiktaş's undefeated Champions League group stage in the 2017-2018 season, having so much difficulty in achieving success on a club basis? The comments I will make other than the data I will share in this article are entirely my personal opinion.

It is possible to evaluate the problems of Turkish football under many headings. However, in this article, I will touch upon four topics that I consider important.

1. Training of Coaches

While talking about this subject, I believe that we should briefly talk about Germany first. Germany, a giant football country that has won the World Cup and European Championship, was drawn in Group A of Euro 2000 with England, Portugal and Romania. The Panzers, who suffered a rare defeat in their history, finished last in their group and said goodbye to the tournament. Immediately after this poor result, the Germans decided on a structural reform of football. As a result of this decision, the Hennes Weisweiler academy, which was to train the teachers of German football, was modernised and seriously improved. As a result, Germans started to produce very successful teachers and coaches from that academy. And what was the result? In 2014, just 14 years after the decision to modernise the academy, the Germans won the World Cup. At this stage, Jurgen Kloop, who revolutionised both Dortmund and Liverpool, Hansi Flick, who changed the face of Barcelona, Thomas Tuchel and Joachim Löw, the coach of the 2014 world champion team, are just some of the names that graduated from this academy. You can call me a dreamer, but I believe that Turkish coaches and trainers are at least as successful and knowledgeable as German coaches. In the current structure, the Turkish Football Federation has trainings that train coaches and trainers and technical directors. However, these trainings need to be modernised and further developed according to the requirements of today's football. As a matter of fact, while we have new coaches such as Okan Buruk, İlhan Palut, Çağdaş Atan, whose football mentality I find great, I think it is important to focus on this issue, to support the development of coaches and coaches and to increase the number of successful coaches.

2. Infrastructure and Young Players

I am probably not the only one who feels uneasy about the fact that young players are not given enough chances and value in our country. Although there are rules such as the ‘foreigner rule’ to produce young players, we are far behind European countries such as the Netherlands, Portugal, England and Spain in terms of producing and polishing players from the infrastructure. I leave the right or wrongness of the rules to your discretion, but it is obvious that there are not enough matches where our players get enough chances. In addition to this, the culture of importing old players from abroad instead of raising players from the infrastructure unfortunately causes serious damage to the football of the country and the financial situation of our clubs. To proceed with examples, when you look at the income and expenditure of Ajax club, one of the giants of Europe and the Netherlands, we see that it made a profit of 158 million Euros in the 2019-2020 season. I would like to remind you that this figure is at a level that can cover almost half of the debts of our clubs per club. Sold for 85 and 86 million, Frenkie De Jong and Mattias De Light are two of the great products of the Ajax infrastructure. When we consider that there are many such talents in our country as well, it is not impossible for an Ajax or a Benfica to emerge among our clubs. As long as we can change our outdated ‘football culture’. Speaking of our young players, in the last 10 years we have seen that our young players do not play badly when they have the opportunity. Values such as Ozan Kabak and Kerem Aktürkoğlu at Galatasaray under Fatih Terim, Semih Kılıçsoy at Beşiktaş under Şenol Güneş, Arda Güler at Fenerbahçe show us how effective our young players can be if given the chance and that we can become one of the football factory countries of Europe if we take the right steps as a country.

3. Squad Engineering and Stability

Let's talk about the most problematic issue for our clubs. There are too many seasons when we do not take squad engineering seriously enough and the machine that works with the ‘good player is good, he will play anyway’ perspective breaks down. The most recent example of this is the signing of Mbappe by Real Madrid, last year's Champions League champions. Yes, Mbappe is a player that no one can say no to, but if you have a working machine, even if you throw diamonds into it, they will get caught in the gears of the machine and prevent it from working. Mbappe has had this effect for Real Madrid and the team has not started well this season. So, why is squad engineering so important and why is stability so linked to it? A good example of this is the club Atalanta. Atalanta is a mid-table team in the Italian league with no European success in its history, except for the UEFA Cup quarter-finals in the 90-91 season. The team must have realised in 2016 that success would come with a long-term and proper squad engineering, as Gianpiero Gasperini, who took over the team in 2016, is still in charge of the team 8 years later. Atalanta finished 13th in the league the season before Gasperini arrived. The team, which entered the European pot in the following 5 seasons, finished the 2018, 2019, 2020 seasons in 3rd place. They are also ranked 1st in the league as I write this article. Is it over? Of course not, after the club first adopted the tradition of going to Europe regularly, they focused on the success to come in the long term and they reaped the fruits of this by winning the UEFA Europa League in the 2023-2024 season. Let's take a look at the great successes of our clubs and examine the engineering of the teams that won those great successes. Galatasaray crowned its championship in 4 consecutive seasons between 1996-2000 with the UEFA Cup and the Super Cup, the biggest success in the history of the country on a club basis. In that team, all the players complemented each other so well that the 2002 World Cup third place of the national team, of which that squad formed the skeleton, was one of the most important indicators proving this. While Fatih Terim offered us examples of ‘gegenpressing’ that would mark European football with Jurgen Klopp years later, Galatasaray had a coach and a football mind that did not change for four seasons. I won't go through the players in order not to make this article too long. I will share that in another article. When we look at Fenerbahçe in 2012-2013, after Aykut Kocaman took over as sporting director in 2009 and took over in 2010, Fenerbahçe, which was dominated by an unchanging football mind and mentality for four years, was like a perfectly functioning machine. As a matter of fact, by narrowly losing the semi-final in the UEFA Europa League in the 2012-2013 season, Fenerbahçe showed that success comes with long-term patience and proper squad engineering. When we look at Beşiktaş; Şenol Güneş, who took office in the 2015-2016 season, added his own contributions and football mind to the roster planning carefully made since the 2013 Feda season, and Beşiktaş became the first and only Turkish team to finish the Champions League group stage without defeat in the 2017-2018 season. It is no coincidence that we are again faced with a technical director who stays in office for at least 3 years, an unchanging football mind and a quality squad engineering phenomenon. If we agree that in a system where the coach and the whole team changes every year, success will come by chance and will not be permanent, let's move on to the next item.

4. Real Fans

Surely you too sometimes complain that your stadium is empty when your team is doing badly or that you sit in the stadium without being interested in the match. One of the biggest advantages of football in our country is the love for football and the feeling of true fanship. In no other country in Europe do you have the chance to see fans who are so devoted to football, who support their team throughout the match and never shut up. In every European match, giant teams from abroad compare the pitches of our clubs to hell and make statements about how problematic the environment is for an away team. As a matter of fact, we see this with the results. Galatasaray's win over Real Madrid, Fenerbahçe's win over Manchester United, Beşiktaş's win over Liverpool are proof of how important the fans are at home. However, since our clubs have increased ticket prices in order to earn more money, unfortunately, real fans have started to have financial difficulties in coming to the stands. Clubs also see this as income and they may be right in themselves. However, let's accept that the real owners of the clubs are the fans. Therefore, in a match, the club may earn 100 thousand Euros from ticket revenue, but it may be deprived of the success revenue that it would have earned more when it wins the match with the fans. In my opinion, earning more money with success and recognition and leaving the stadiums to the real fans who are devoted to that club is one of the most important solutions for the future of Turkish football. After all, we all watched how unpleasant and mediocre football played without fans during the pandemic period. Of course, the filling of the stands by the football audience should be seen and evaluated as an element that will contribute to the brand value of Turkish football.

Although Turkish football has many more problems, I have tried to mention some of the problems that I consider important as much as possible. In fact, it was only possible to reflect a few of the problems that could be written a book on. Let's end by stating that in order to maintain the balance of a four-legged table whose legs are the state, the government, the clubs and the fans, each leg must be in its place and in its measure.