In the Galatasaray club museum, there’s a film dedicated to their victory in the 2000 UEFA Cup final. They remain the only Turkish team to win a European trophy, so they’re rightly proud of the achievement.
The final, against Arsenal, went to penalties after ending goalless, and the film shows the shootout in full. Well, almost in full. We see Ergun Penbe, Umit Davala and Gheorghe Popescu all score for Galatasaray. We see Ray Parlour score but Davor Suker and Patrick Vieira miss for Arsenal.
There’s one penalty missing. Galatasaray’s second one has been edited out. It was the penalty taken that night in Copenhagen by the club’s record goalscorer. Who is also the Turkish Super Lig’s record goalscorer. And the Turkey national team’s record goalscorer.
Gone. Erased. Vanished. As if it never existed.
If you wanted an example of just how much Hakan Sukur has been blanked out from Turkish football and indeed broader society there, that probably sums it up the best.
Sukur celebrates Galatasaray’s win over Arsenal in the 2000 UEFA Cup final (Stephane Mantey/Getty Images)
You may have heard about another example, at the most recent World Cup two years ago.
When Hakim Ziyech scored after four minutes of Morocco’s group game against Canada, TRT (the Turkish state broadcaster) commentator Alper Bakircigil noted it wasn’t the earliest goal in the tournament’s history — as that record is still held by Sukur, who scored after 11 seconds in the third-place play-off against South Korea in 2002.
Just for saying Sukur’s name, Bakircigil was removed from the broadcast at half-time.
“I guess I’m like Voldemort — he who shall not be named,” Sukur tells The Athletic. “But a good version.”
It’s been nearly a decade since Sukur left Turkey.
Had things taken a different turn, he might have been high up in the government there today. After retiring from a playing career that was mostly spent with Istanbul’s Galatasaray, but also took in spells with three clubs in Italy and a brief stint with Blackburn Rovers in England, he was elected to the Turkish parliament in 2011, while being a regular presence on TV there as a football pundit.
But his exile stems from his connection to two men, both of whom can be seen in pictures from the former footballer’s first wedding, in 1995.
21. Yıldönümü anısına..❤️❤️❤️
İyi ki varsın, iyi ki eşim, çocuklarımın annesisin.@beydasukur
#YeniProfilResmi pic.twitter.com/DkObKK6qWn— HAKAN ŞÜKÜR 👑 (@hakansukur) June 10, 2020
One was the then mayor of Istanbul, a former amateur footballer with a clipped moustache who was just making his name on the national political stage. You’ll know him as the current president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The other was a man called Fethullah Gulen, who is slightly difficult to describe, but probably the easiest way to refer to him is as a religious preacher who had a sizeable following, once upon a time. There will be others who would call him almost a cult leader. Still others will claim he was the architect of a coup attempt that almost toppled Turkey’s government in 2016.
Turkish president Erdogan (Yavuz Ozden/ dia images via Getty Images)
Gulen’s movement, known as Hizmet — Turkish for ‘service’ — was ostensibly centred around a series of schools, the idea on the face of it being that children could be helped by education with an Islamic influence. His milder critics suggested his aim was to turn the country away from secularism and to a religious state. We’ll get to his less-mild critics later.
For a while, Gulen was hugely significant and influential in Turkish society.
Plenty of footballers counted themselves as followers. Many were recruited to his cause and used for PR, which worked in a manner of speaking, because by the early 2000s the movement was so significant that Erdogan and his AKP party, who by now were in power nationally, made an alliance — which was often uneasy — with the Gulenists.
Sukur was the footballer with the closest ties to both. His popularity was harnessed by Erdogan: when the Queen and a delegation of British politicians, including then foreign secretary David Miliband, visited in 2008, Sukur took a public training session and engaged in a kickabout at the British ambassador’s residence. When he was elected to parliament three years later, it was to represent the AKP.
Miliband and Sukur playing football in Turkey in 2008 (Anthony Devlin – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)
Then, around 2013, things started to turn.
The unsteady alliance between those Gulenists and Erdogan started to topple. A corruption scandal broke out involving many members of the government. Gulenist prosecutors were among those who accused ministers close to Erdogan, as well as his sons Bilal and Burak, of various offences. Sukur resigned from the AKP in December of that year, publicly stating that his reasons were to do with the government closing some Gulenist schools.
By this stage, the Gulenist movement had become known by many in Turkey, the government in particular, as the ‘Fethullahist Terror Organisation’ — FETO for short. In December 2014, a warrant was issued for Gulen’s arrest, accused of running an ‘armed terrorist group’. He was suspected of plotting to overthrow the government. Erdogan spoke of a “parallel state”, run by Gulen.
Sukur refused to renounce his support for Gulen. He tried to stand for parliament as an independent in 2015, but was unsuccessful. Later that year, sensing which way the wind was blowing, he moved to California in the United States.
In early 2016, he was charged with posting ‘insulting content against Mr President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his son’, for which he potentially faced four years in jail. But the real trouble came that summer, when an attempted coup against the Erdogan government took place. Gulen, who had himself been in semi-self-imposed exile in the U.S. city of Philadelphia for years, was accused of orchestrating the coup from the other side of the Atlantic, and thus anyone who followed him was similarly tarred with that brush.
Sukur denies any involvement in the coup attempt, but by now he was cast as an enemy of the state. He was told, by people from the AKP, that if he distanced himself from Gulen then he would be allowed to return home, but he refused to do so. His Turkish property and bank accounts were seized. The erasure of his name continued apace. Most seriously, his father was arrested. Actually, Sukur differs slightly on that last point: “My father wasn’t arrested; he was taken hostage,” he says. “They took my father hostage and said (to me), ‘Come back, and we’ll release your father and return everything to you’.”
His father was eventually released but, nearly a decade on, little has changed for Sukur.
“It’s not easy to sum up these 10 years in just a few lines,” Sukur says. “I went through very difficult times both financially and emotionally. But at some point, I had to stand up, because I had a family to take care of. Together with my three children and my wife, we joined hands.
“Without any court decision against me, all my assets earned from football were confiscated, just because I did not agree with the ideas of this regime and opposed it. And overnight, my whole life changed.
“They wanted me to return to Turkey and accept the rhetoric of the current regime. I had to either accept this unlawful and illegal offer or tell the world about this unlawful regime.
“Of course, I did not accept their offer. I am trying to stay strong in this difficult process for democracy and the rule of law.”
Sukur is understandably reticent about giving interviews.
It took a few months of gentle cajoling to arrange this one. In the end, it was facilitated by another man in a similar position to Sukur, former NBA star Enes Kanter Freedom.
(Mike Stobe/Getty Images)
Kanter was born in Switzerland to Turkish parents, but moved to their homeland as a boy and started his basketball career with Fenerbahce in Istanbul, before moving to the United States in his late teens to pursue his NBA dreams.
Like Sukur, he is not welcome back home. Like Sukur, he supported Gulen, to the point that he briefly changed his name to Enes Gulen. Like Sukur, he has been deeply critical of Erdogan, to the point where he likened him to Adolf Hitler. Like Sukur, his family were targeted and his father was also arrested.
Turkey attempted to extradite — or, in his words “kidnap” — Kanter in Indonesia in May 2017. He fled to Romania, but found his Turkish passport had been cancelled. He says he can only visit 29 countries around the world now, for fear of extradition to Turkey. He became an American citizen in 2021. He changed his name to Enes Kanter Freedom at the same time, partly in celebration, partly as a mark of protest.
“I was in third or fourth grade, and Hakan was playing for the Turkish national team in the 2002 World Cup,” Kanter Freedom tells The Athletic. “When he scored that goal (against South Korea), the whole school went crazy. That was the first time I decided to become an athlete. I wanted to become a soccer player, because of Hakan. But I was too tall and too slow, so it didn’t really work.
Sukur and Ronaldo at the end of Turkey’s match with Brazil at the 2002 World Cup (Richard Sellers/Getty Images)
“I’m an athlete. I’m a competitor. But I think he’s the best athlete — not just soccer player — that ever came out of Turkey.”
Sukur and Kanter Freedom bonded over their shared circumstances.
“He’s one of my best friends,” says Kanter Freedom. “It’s not easy what he’s done: he was the biggest name in soccer in Turkey. He made a lot of money and respect for himself. Afterwards, when he wanted to stand up for people and for the many undemocratic things that go on in Turkey, he pretty much left everything behind and came to America. He started from scratch.”
Not long after he moved to California, Sukur invested in a cafe, which was doing well. Called Tuts, it was not far from Stanford University in Palo Alto, south of San Francisco. He would work behind the counter, serving coffee and pastries. It was where he was interviewed by The New York Times in 2018.
But after a while, strange people started to show up there. The assumption from Sukur is that they were supporters of Erdogan, trying to intimidate him. They would leave threatening messages. They would harass staff and customers. One walked in and urinated on the floor.
“People were coming in screaming and shouting, making everyone uncomfortable,” says Kanter Freedom. “He didn’t want to make the visitors uncomfortable, so he sold the coffee shop.”
Since then, occasional stories about Sukur have popped up in the media, a frequent one being that he was driving an Uber and selling books on Amazon to make ends meet. Those stories are true, but Sukur says the Uber gig was more about learning English by speaking to the people he was driving around, as much as earning money.
“When I first came to America, I did struggle,” Sukur says. “If you don’t keep yourself busy with something, you remember all the bad things in Turkey. I always try to keep myself busy with something.”
Now, having turned 53 this week, he’s keeping himself busy with coaching youth football. When we talk, over Zoom, I notice a Champions League ball on a shelf behind him. I excitedly ask if it was from his playing career, a glory-days memento that he has managed to salvage (most of his memorabilia is locked up in Turkey), perhaps from when he scored both goals in a 2-0 win against Juventus in 2003, maybe the one he got to help Galatasaray beat AC Milan 3-1 in 1999.
(Courtesy of Hakan Sukur)
No. It turns out that he just bought the ball to use in his coaching sessions.
He also does frequent YouTube live streams, ostensibly to talk about Galatasaray, and Turkish football in general. I wonder whether he does that to maintain some sort of connection with home, that while his former club have tried to forget about him, he wants to remind people that he hasn’t forgotten about them.
“I use YouTube as a tool to reach out to people in Turkey,” he says. “Whenever I do a YouTube live, thousands of people join. I can talk to them not only to talk about football, but also the current problems in the country.
“If you’re in Turkey, many people are afraid to reach out. They reach out to me when they leave Turkey, and they buy a new (phone) number — when they return, they are afraid. They (the government and its supporters) are trying to brainwash and put fear in people’s heads, so they don’t support any of the voices that are calling for democracy in Turkey.”
There are plenty more examples of how thoroughly Sukur has been erased from Turkish society.
There’s basic stuff, such as the removal of his image from the headquarters of the Turkish Football Federation, which happened pretty quickly after he fell out of favour. The Sancaktepe FK stadium, in a suburb to the east of Istanbul, was called the Hakan Sukur Stadium before being renamed.
Then there’s stuff that you might not immediately notice, but it doesn’t take too long to spot. Like the Netflix documentary series about Fatih Terim that was released in 2022, in which there was no mention of Sukur, despite him playing hundreds of games under Terim for Galatasaray and the national team.
But there are others that are arguably much more dystopian.
Earlier this year, Turkish journalist Kemal Belgin was discussing the current Galatasaray team on the TV show ‘A Spor’, particularly centre-forward Mauro Icardi, before briefly drifting into a slightly wistful reverie. “They had a striker once, he lives in America now,” Belgin said. “None of (the current strikers) are fit to lace his boots.”
The presenter, Onur Yildiz, looked flustered, and quickly said: “Let’s get back to Turkey now.”
When Galatasaray won the Super Lig title last year, long-time captain and goalkeeper Fernando Muslera was asked about joining the pantheon of the club’s most decorated players. “There is Suat Kaya, Bulent Korkmaz… and I think there was another one,” he said.
It tells you plenty about the extent to which Sukur is persona non grata in Turkish society, that people are afraid to even speak his name.
Sukur at the Golden Foot Awards in Monaco in 2014 (Valerio Pennicino/Getty Images for Golden Foot)
It’s a topic that makes people completely lose their minds.
A few years ago, former Galatasaray player Mustafa Kocabey even suggested Sukur’s goals could have been a Gulenist plot. “I want research into the goalkeepers of rival teams in the years in which he won the Golden Boot,” he said. “Those goalkeepers could be (members of) FETO. They could have let those goals in knowingly.”
“It’s disgusting to see how he’s been treated,” says Kanter Freedom. “He doesn’t deserve that. I told him, ‘They might try to erase you from the club, the internet, from TV or whatever, but they’re not going to be able to erase you from peoples’ hearts’.”
It’s worth asking whether Sukur — and Kanter Freedom — would actually want to return to Turkey, if they could.
“Of course,” Sukur says. “I would love to reunite with my family, friends, and memories, but only when the rule of law returns. More importantly, the return of justice, human rights, and freedoms — which are as essential as bread, water, air — is crucial for my nation. I want everyone to understand this important fact: I have no problem with my country, my flag, or my people there. The reason I’m given this tough fight is because I care deeply about my beautiful country.”
I ask if a change in regime would be enough, or whether it’s deeper than that.
“The way for me to return home is not for Erdogan to be out of office or pass away, but for the law to be applied equally to all those who have suffered injustice,” Sukur says. “Additionally, the injustices faced by journalists and politicians who are imprisoned for expressing their ideas freely must come to an end.
“I have many dreams about how I want our people to be. What I want doesn’t seem very feasible in the short term, yet I will still share it: I would like our young people to be very open to the world, to the West, and to every new development globally. Yes, democracy and human rights, but I also wish for them to practise empathy, to accept everyone in their own situation, and to act without prejudice.”
Kanter Freedom adds: “We have no problem with our country. We love Turkey, we love our flag. One day, when this whole thing is over, we would like to go back to our country and visit our families. But I don’t think I could live in Turkey.”
Public opinion is probably too far gone for Sukur to return. While Erdogan is far from universally popular (some thought he would lose last year’s presidential election. Ultimately he won, with 52.18 per cent of the vote), the image of Sukur as a Gulenist, the perception that he was involved with the attempted coup in 2016, is too strong.
People simply don’t want to talk about him, at least in public. The Athletic asked several people in Turkey — journalists, former players, ordinary citizens — but nobody wanted to go on the record. And it is worth pointing out that he’s not perfect: Erdogan wasn’t a saint when Sukur was close to him, and he was elected to parliament for the AKP. Sukur has undoubtedly made mistakes, albeit not mistakes that should have resulted in exile.
Renouncing his support for Gulen might have done it once upon a time. That’s what happened with many of the other footballers, athletes, and public figures who were Gulenists: after the coup attempt, many of them recanted, and have gone on to have ‘normal’ lives and careers. Now, though? It’s difficult to work out what is less likely: Sukur recanting, or that being enough to allow him back into Turkish society.
Sukur wants his day in court, though. He has a sheaf of papers he says demonstrate his innocence.
“If I did something wrong, let’s go to court,” he says, clearly impassioned. “But the regime doesn’t want to take me to court, because if they take me to the ICJ (International Court of Justice) then they know they will lose and it will be one of the biggest topics out there. They just want to make sure that people are afraid of my situation.
“I have the evidence that I have not done anything wrong. They’re too scared because they know they would lose.”
Sukur actually seems relatively settled in California. His children are happy there. He refers constantly to the support given to him by his second wife, Beyda. He’s clearly incredibly grateful to her, even in awe of her and how she has stood by him. “At my highest and lowest, my wife has stayed,” he says.
“I feel good inside, because I have never committed any kind of crimes or acted unlawfully,” he continues. “From now on, I will try to pass on all my experiences to the next generation. I believe I have matured even more and can think more calmly. I am 53 years old and still working.
“I have my joys, my sorrows and my experiences — but I don’t have many regrets.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)