Ultras in Turkey: othering, agency, and culture as a political domain

Abstract

Football administrators and non-fans or non-ultra fans in Turkey tend to posit ultras as either the ‘fire of the show’ or write them off as instruments of violence guided by irrationality. These two stances are the two sides of the same coin which points to a fascination/fear discourse that serves to produce ultras as the perfect other. The financially powerful actors of football tolerate and accommodate ultras so long as they don’t challenge dominating commercial or political interests. This relegates ultras to the supposedly innocuous realm of culture divorced from politics, especially in the aftermath of the Gezi Uprising of 2013. However, through organizations like the Fans’ Rights Association and in their everyday practices of fandom, ultras reject subjectivities assigned to them by the fascination/fear discourse, they agentively engage with their own spectacularization and othering as well as the legal or administrative efforts to contain and confine thesm.

Notes

1. Beşiktaş, Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe are the three most popular football teams in Turkey. They are all based in Istanbul and are commonly referred to as the ‘big three’. Bursaspor is the football team from Bursa, one of the two other teams to have ever won the league title in the country.

2. Stadium stands are referred to as ‘tribunes’ (tribün) in Turkey.

3. The term ‘amigo’ is used to refer to stadium and/or fan group leaders in Turkey after the self-labeling of the first group of such leaders.

4. Ekşi Sözlük is a collaborative online wiki with approximately 400,000 registered users. On the wiki, there is a topical thread for nearly every football game, among other issues, where members discuss issues pertaining to that game in their entries.

5. I don’t specify rank and I use pseudonyms for all of my interlocutors for privacy reasons.

6. Çarşı means ‘marketplace.’ çArşı is the most prominent Beşiktaş fan group, named after the Beşiktaş marketplace. They consider themselves to be leftist and anarchic even though some members admit that it is difficult to substantiate those claims today. Regardless, they spell the word çarşı with a capital ‘A,’ mimicking the symbol of anarchy. I follow that spelling in this paper. For more on çArşı, see: Kytö (2011), and McManus (2013a).

7. Here, I refer to the Beşiktaş İnönü Stadium, the reconstruction of which lasted for three years until its reinauguration in 2016.

8. For more on the Gezi Uprising see Yıldırım and Navaro-Yashin (2013).

9. Kurds in Turkey have been engaged in peaceful political movements and armed struggle since the 1980s towards social and legal recognition and the establishment of an autonomous government. The routine recital of the national anthem before every domestic match is a practice that started in the 1990s in response to the activities of PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) – classified as a terrorist organization by the Turkish State.