Uber, coups and coffee shops - The fall from grace of Turkey’s World Cup hero

The record for fastest goal ever scored at a World Cup is held by an Uber driver in northern California. In between picking up fares around Palto Alto, he still togs out for five-a-side games with tech workers from Silicon Valley and dominates proceedings. As you might expect from a 51-year-old who once coolly slotted a left-foot shot past Lee Woon-Jae in the 11th second of the third-place play-off between his native Turkey and South Korea at the 2002 tournament. The 37th of 51 international goals that made him his country’s leading scorer of all time and its most beloved footballer. Then. Now?

Hakan Sukur is in his seventh year of enforced exile, a fugitive from Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s oppressive regime in Ankara. That would be the same Erdogan who, as Mayor of Istanbul, presided over Sukur’s first wedding, back when his celebrity was of such immense wattage that the ceremony was broadcast live on Turkish national television. Alternatively adored as “The Bull of the Bosphorus” or, simply, “King”, that spells at Inter Milan, Parma, Torino and Blackburn Rovers didn’t pan out as well as hoped never dimmed his popularity back home. He was too prolific with Turkey and Galatasaray for that to ever happen. Until politics intervened.

Earlier this month, Sukur appeared as a remote guest on the TV5 programme Düşünme Vakti in his homeland. Almost immediately, the show was taken off air and Mehmet Ali Kayaci, the journalist who conducted the interview, was fired. The country’s Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTUK) announced an investigation into how a supporter of a “terrorist organisation” was allowed to spread propaganda. Sukur had used the platform to defend himself against charges that, even though he was by then domiciled in America, he was part of the failed 2016 coup to overthrow Erdogan’s government.

“Nobody seems able to explain what my role in this coup was supposed to be,” said Sukur, whose houses, bank accounts and businesses were all confiscated by the government. “I never did anything illegal, I am not a traitor or a terrorist. I might be an enemy of this government, but not the state or the Turkish nation. I love my country.”

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It used to love him too, the relationship between player and fans robust enough to launch his post-football career in politics, winning him a seat in parliament for the AK (Justice and Development) Party in the 2011 elections. Erdogan was party leader and then Turkish prime minister, and the pair were good friends until a seismic falling-out in 2013. It centred on corruption revelations surrounding the leadership and Erdogan’s subsequent spiteful shutting down of schools related to Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric and close associate of Sukur.

Erdogan tried to persuade his most famous MP to remain in the party by offering him a ministerial post but Sukur resigned, his greater loyalty to Gulen (also currently exiled in America) prevailed. He stayed on in politics as a fervent critic of the regime and paid the inevitable price. Erdogan had him fired as a pundit at the government controlled Lig TV, his name was removed from a stadium in Istanbul’s Sancaktepe district, and, at the next election in 2014, he discovered politics is the dirtiest game of all. At a rally in Sakarya, Sukur’s home district, Erdogan spoke on stage in front of a giant poster of the region’s most famous son, depicting a suspicious-looking Sukur with his hand covering his face and the caption, “Brother, how will I look Sakaryans in the eye?” He lost his seat.

Within a year, he moved to California and bought a stake in a coffee shop, even as dubious warrants were being issued for his arrest. Among his offences were “insulting” now-President Erdogan on social media. More than 10,000 Turks were imprisoned for just that offence in a post-coup crackdown. Nearly 300,000 supporters of Gulen were also detained by the authorities on various trumped-up, politically motivated charges in that purge, and 96,000 of them sentenced to time in prison. Sukur was smart to get out when he did.

During a decorated playing career, he was a combative and niggly presence up front. Fans of Ireland, Liverpool, Leeds United and Arsenal may recall witnessing his practiced chicanery on torrid European nights. He won the 2000 Uefa Cup in a Galatasaray outfit featuring the inestimable Gheorghe Hagi that bested Bergkamp, Henry et al on penalties in the final. It was a measure of his impact in the campaign that Inter then brought him into a squad containing forwards of the calibre of Ronaldo, Christian Vieri, Alvaro Recoba and Robbie Keane, not to mention luminaries like Clarence Seedorf and Javier Zanetti farther back.

It’s a long way from there to being mentioned as a potential makeweight in fraught diplomatic negotiations. When then President Donald Trump sought to get the Turkish government to release Andrew Brunson, an American pastor imprisoned in Izmir for having ties to the Gulenist movement, Erdogan demanded Sukur be extradited in the other direction. Nothing came of it but he sold the coffee shop a while back because too many sketchy characters with ties to Ankara started to loiter there.

“Dictatorial regimes….sometimes use football and its top figures for their own benefit,” said Sukur. “When you put the state in the hands of a single man, he may want to use you for his populist policies.”

He learned that the hard way.