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Yağmur Nuhrat MERC Final Report September 2011 This report is intended to explain to the reader the progression of my research after the Interim Report was sent in March 2011 and to present major research findings from my fieldwork on football (soccer) and the question of fairness in Istanbul, Turkey. Before starting this narrative, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to a major event that took place in Turkish football during my fieldwork. On April 14, 2011 the Turkish parliament passed the “law against violence in sports.” Highly influenced by the Taylor Report1, this law is portrayed as an attempt to formally eliminate all unruly behavior in and around sporting events. In addition, according to this law, all incentive bonuses given to teams or players and other acts of match fixing are deemed criminal offenses. A few months after the law was passed and shortly after the football season ended in Turkey, the largest match fixing scandal erupted. On July 3, 2011 we woke up to a morning of accusations whereby various club administrators and training personnel were being taken in for questioning. Currently, the president of standing league champions Fenerbahçe (FB), Aziz Yıldırım is in prison along with Turkish cup winner Beşiktaş’s (BJK) coach Tayfur Havutçu. This law, with its implications about reordering fandom and stadia and also in terms of aiding and legitimizing waves of arrests due to match fixing has been a major focus of my attention in the last part of research. I have had the opportunity to talk to fans about its tenets and about the match fixing scandal in great detail. I shall return to this momentous event and its implications for my research below. At first, I would like to explain how my fieldwork proceeded between April- September 2011 along with relevant findings. Progress and Findings For the last five months of fieldwork, my plan was to conduct more interviews with referees and federation and club officials. Initially, I had also foreseen interviewing amigos (cheerleaders) and conducting in-home participant observation during football games. This, I believed would enhance my understanding of spatiality of football and help me start answering the question “where is fair?” Lastly, I had planned to conduct footballer interviews and additional fan interviews. There have been some changes in this program and below I account for them. Number and composition of interviews/football games In the five remaining months of fieldwork I completed six more interviews with referees, including one with the former president of the Central Committee of Referees and others with some of the most prominent Turkish referees whose names I am unable to disclose due to privacy concerns. I conducted two interviews with the CEO and the football director of one of the three most popular clubs in Turkey. Besides these, I finished ten additional fan interviews, two of which were follow-up interviews with fans I had spoken with earlier. I also made a point of carrying out ongoing conversations about current events in football with the fan contacts I had established earlier in research. Of the fan interviews, three were conducted in the city of Kayseri, where I had the opportunity to attend the Turkish cup final between Beşiktaş and Istanbul Büyükşehir Belediyespor (IBB) and travel with the fans thereafter. In addition to these fan interviews, I also had the chance to speak with 20 fans solely on the subject of match fixing and the scandal in Turkey. Ten of these fans were those I had met earlier during 1 The Taylor Report was published in the UK in 1990 after the Hillsborough stadium tragedy where 96 people were crushed to death in a football game in England. The report is comprised of provisions to convert all stadia into all- seaters and it introduces other rules and regulations whereby fan safety is secured during football games. 1 Yağmur Nuhrat MERC Final Report September 2011 research and the other half were new interlocutors. While it was impossible2 for me to arrange interviews with amigos (cheerleaders), I did conduct two interviews with former and current leaders of fan groups, one of whom is today the museum curator of one of the most popular teams in Turkey. I visited the club museums of the three big Istanbul teams and conducted an interview with the security guard working at the Beşiktaş museum. There is a striking term employed by both international football associations like FIFA and UEFA and by Turkish football authorities when describing the world of football and that is the “football family.” This analogy between the world of football and the family has been very interesting for me since I observed the relations between football actors to not resemble familial relations at all. If anything, football in Turkey constitutes a very dysfunctional family where the members do not listen to each other and definitely are not tied by bonds of love or affection. The referee interviews I held showed me that for those in the position of implicating fairness on the pitch, rules define what fairness is absolutely. As long as there is a legible and accessible penalty for any foul act, it can be legitimized as fair given that it will be reprimanded by the referee. Therefore if a player is feigning injury and wasting time consciously, the referee can book him and will view his act as within the boundaries of the rules of the game, hence fair. Similarly, a player who deliberately gets sent off the game with calculations about which upcoming game to miss might be seen as doing nothing against fair play, since the referee has no chance but to send him off given his respective actions on the pitch. The evaluation of fairness based on the comprehension of rules and their breach has been fascinating for me to consider especially when other football actors, such as fans seem to have different criteria for fairness. Depending on the rival, the particular player, the progression of the game and the team he supports, a fan will evaluate the situations I describe above in different ways. He might think that wasting time on the ground and feigning injury is justified against a certain team and in the presence of a certain referee whereas it might be seen as unjust based on the personal reputation of the footballer or his background. Fans talk about the “unsaid rules” of the game and expect their players to remain within these boundaries that are much more flexible than those adhered to by referees. These unsaid rules shift and are redefined continually to result in variant definitions of what and where is fair. As such, the members of the “football family” hold dearly very different assumptions and priorities which prevent them from conversing on the same plane of thought or reaching meeting grounds. These different assumptions which lead to different configurations and evaluations of fairness and the tensions between official and unofficial rules/ways of the game will constitute an important focus in my dissertation. My initial aim when starting fieldwork was to speak to footballers to gather their opinions and attitudes about fairness especially in dialogue with the trope of professionalism. It proved extremely difficult to get in touch with and arrange interviews with current football players, mainly due to how famous and high profile they are. I went both to football clubs and spoke with other researchers who had/were working on football and no intermediary contacts were able to help me. The training facilities in Istanbul for all the clubs are highly secured and even press affiliates explained to me the difficulty of access. As such, I was able to arrange three interviews with former football players (one of whom is a coach in the Beşiktaş youth squad at the moment) and I was able to gather information from club officials in regard to footballer attitudes and behavior. My aim is to keep pursuing this line of interviews 2 I did have contact information for four amigos but arranging interviews with them proved impossible regardless of which team they were affiliated with. They were absolutely tired of speaking with students and journalists on the issue of fandom and as soon as the match fixing scandal broke out, every football actor was more hesitant to speak at all. I did manage to get a hold of various articles and interviews published about and by these amigos and those have proved quite useful for my research. Also, I was able to talk to some former football players and fans who personally knew the amigos to get a sense of amigo-fan relations and amigos’ outlooks on various issues. 2 Yağmur Nuhrat MERC Final Report September 2011 since I will be going back to Turkey in the writing-up process to touch base with the field and my contacts. The footballer interviews I conducted all came after the match fixing scandal. What was striking about these interviews was a concept all three interviewees mentioned; “match fixing for kindness’ sake” (in Turkish: hatır şikesi). They told me that basically, if you have a close friend in the opposing team, it would be wrong to play hard against that person, especially if your team has nothing to lose or gain and their team has higher stakes. They explained that even without the presence of money, bets or explicit match fixing, there are always informal negotiations and agreements between players which result in footballers’ gearing their game in accordance with their personal relationships with each other. These conversations made me realize how the recently passed law had framed various already existing informal relations as illegal.

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