ABSTRACT
At the same time as testing previous periodisations of the history of Turkish football over the course of the twentieth century, this article will show how strong parallels can be observed between the trajectory of international sporting relations of Turkish football and Turkish foreign and diplomatic policy. This will be shown to be true during the earlier periods when football was controlled by the state and the ruling elite, and when it was in the national interest to cultivate relations with the Eastern bloc. The parallel will also be shown to be valid, but different, in the second half of the twentieth century, when Turkish models in culture, political regime and economic system were western and sport was more independent of the state. Finally, building up closer relations with the West and giving west European teams priority in its footballing contacts will be seen to be more complicated than Turkish
football might have hoped, for example, its attempts to join the new European governing body, a tortuous tale involving individual influence, conflict between governing bodies and the contentious issue of Turkey’s very identity.
In Turkish sports historiography, there is a common tendency to examine the early Republican era under two main sub-periods, corresponding to the development of the national sports administrative organisations. Beginning in 1922 with the foundation of the Union of Turkish Sports Clubs (Türkiye İdman Cemiyetleri İttifakı, UTSC), the first period was characterised by an autonomous and voluntary organisational structure in the absence of state intervention. Some historians also interpret the establishment of UTSC as an extension of ‘economic liberalism’ in the field of sport, which was declared by the Izmir Economic Congress in 1923.1 This first institutional sporting body was primarily responsible for coordinating all sports matters on a nation-wide scale until replaced by the Turkish Sports Institution (Türk Spor Kurumu, TSA) in 1936. The establishment of the TSA, which would later give way to the General Directorate for Physical Education (Beden Terbiyesi Umum Müdürlüğü, GDPE) in 1938, represented the beginning of the second period, throughout which the state took the issue of sport and physical education under increasingly strict control.2
