Abstract:
Background. Following the successful outcomes of the national team, that finished third in the 2002 FIFA World Cup, and the positive club performance in the UEFA competitions at the beginning of the new millennium, Turkish football was expected to reaffirm and further develop in the following years, exploiting also the favorable economic conditions. However, its growth and evolution did not meet the expectations, and in the latest years several managerial aspects of the Turkish Football Federation have begun to be questioned, which has led the federation itself to reform football in areas such as foreign players’ quota, financial requirements, and stadiums.
Objectives. The main aim of this article is to identify and discuss these issues and how effective the reforms implemented by the Turkish Football Federation have been in the short run.
Methods. The research is done through the application of the historical method and the use of secondary data.
Results. Our results show that these reforms do not seem to have had a significant impact so far.
Conclusion. While some of the reforms likely need more time for their effects to be tangible, the general impression is that Turkish football would need a different approach and more incisive policy interventions.
Machine summary:
Following the successful outcomes of the national team, that finished third in the 2002 FIFA World Cup, and the positive club performance in the UEFA competitions at the beginning of the new millennium, Turkish football was expected to reaffirm and further develop in the following years, exploiting also the favorable economic conditions.
KEYWORDS: Football, Turkey, Reforms, Foreign Players, Quota, Financial Violations, Hooliganism INTRODUCTION Modern football appeared for the first time in Turkish lives at the end of 19th century, when mercantile ports such as İzmir and Selanik were introduced to the new sport by British merchants, that founded the first team - Football Club Smyrna - in 1894 (1).
Once identified the three main areas of reform in Turkish football in the last decade - the foreign players’ quota, the sanctions for financial violations and hooliganism – secondary data from different sources have been collected to understand the rationale for the reform interventions and to conduct and ex-ante and ex-post evaluation of the situation in each of the three areas in order to analyse the effectiveness of TFF’s reforms through a descriptive statistical approach.
As shown in Table 2, the liberalization of the athletes’ labour market experienced by the European Union (EU) countries after the Bosman ruling (9, 10) pushed Turkey – not an official member of EU despite a Custom Union signed in 1996 – to repeated changes in the rule regulating the foreign players’ quota in Turkish football, in an attempt to preserve the international competitiveness of domestic clubs and, at the same time, the development of home-grown talent.