Three Musketeers

You know, writing about football is extremely hard for Turkish football columnists when there is no game to watch. It is like the unbearable lightness of being for them, without the awful content, they are not able to write awful pieces. Thus, most of the time, breaks like this week results in a confession for them, an opportunity to blame "mysterious" people who are responsible for the breakdown of Turkish football. Even though they might be sincere about their concerns, their way to investigate it is not only naive but also harmful. For instance, Bağış Erten from Cumhuriyet newspaper accused "unnamed" traitors of Turkish football for being "sneaky, greedy and egoistical." He may even be right, but without directing those critics to TFF, traditional coaches and the old football club (aka the Turkish football media), the whole piece is meaningless.

However, if anyone is truly sincere about finding the reasons of the disastrous situation of football in Turkey, he should see the mechanism behind Turkish football. Basically, there are three main parts of traditional Turkish football: Greedy and shrewd executives, ignorant and conservative coaches and the loyal wingman, Turkish media. This kind of administration of football is mainly constructed by military juntas in Turkey in order to create a profitable, corrupt industry. Added to that, the superficiality of football in Turkey was a great apparatus for distracting masses. Nevertheless, today, there is no point of sticking to the old ways of football; both the world and Turkey have changed. Thus, what we need is a complete change in the administrative system of football.

First of all, financial fair play standards will allow us to clean all "businessmen" from football, who only benefit from extreme spending and monstrous budgets. Given these standards do not allow teams to spend millions on new transfers while having a lot of debt, football will not be so beneficial for those executives. Nonetheless, there is an imminent threat for Turkish teams due to these standards and risk of getting banned from Europe. Turkish teams continue to waste huge amounts of money on unnecessary transfers. Therefore, we should internalize these standards with a domestic law and make it impossible for Turkish teams to dodge it.

Secondly, the alienation of Turkish coaches from global football and their ancient ways mostly are derived from the fact that many Turkish fans do not care about the quality of the game, but only the score. This score obsession prevents reformist figures to rise and makes Turkish football bound to traditional ways. Furthermore, the glorification of shrewdness and short-cuts makes the game quality even worse. The only thing that we can promote is the bone breaking toughness of Turkish football. Hence, until the way that Turkish fans approach to football changes, the main paradigm of Turkish coaches will not change easily.

However, the Turkish football media should have guided fans to a better football by now, but they were too busy with covering all the mess their business partners created. Their main goal has always been manipulating the masses to not expect more and distracting them with unimportant details. What needs to be done is basically fighting against their pointless arguments every day, until they lose strength. Otherwise, this endless cycle will continue forever.