BarcelonaBarça returns to Istanbul. The city where football is perhaps experienced with more passion than in our own home. A city with one foot in Europe and the other in Asia, where three giant clubs coexist that seem willing to do anything to rule: Fenerbahçe, Besiktas, and this Tuesday’s rival, Galatasaray. The clichés say that Galatasaray is the one with the most fans, with a more popular touch and a social base in many cases made up of immigrants from the rest of Turkey. Fenerbahçe prides itself on being a team for the lifelong people of Istanbul, secular people who look towards Europe and venerate the father of modern Turkey, Atatürk. And Besiktas is the club with the most progressive fan base. Clichés that are not always true, since within every fan base there is a bit of everything.
What all three teams also have in common is a good handful of scandals. To follow sports news, fans often talk more about judges than goals. Just in the last fifteen years, the justice system has arrested more than 20 executives from the city’s three big clubs in different cases. If the focus is widened to all of Turkish football in general, the figures are frightening. Dozens of cases with hundreds of detainees. No one is spared. Presidents, executives, players, referees, agents, and journalists. The various scandals have modified the competition’s honors list, leaving Fenerbahçe without a league title that this club still claims as its own. There have been reports of attempts to buy rival teams with briefcases and bribes to referees. The Negreira case seems minor compared to what is experienced in Turkey, where in 2025 the police arrested more than 50 people in an investigation into illegal betting. Executives, businessmen, a popular former referee who appears on television every weekend, and players like Fenerbahçe captain Mert Hakan Yandaş and Galatasaray defender Metehan Baltacı were arrested. The latter admitted to having bet, but said he had done so on matches in lower categories where his friends play. The case became so big that 149 referees and assistant referees were suspended, especially in the Second and Third Divisions, but also in the First Division.
And this 2026, a new scandal. The authorities arrested 17 people in a new case in which the spotlight was once again placed on illegal betting, which became a real headache for the authorities. One of those arrested was the vice president of Galatasaray, Maruf Gunes, who was involved in this case in which bets made between the years 2020 and 2026 are being investigated. Gunes is being investigated for making 48 bets on Galatasaray matches, a figure that may seem high, but which seems small if compared to the 1,488 bets made by the Besiktas executive, Tolga Kirgiz, in the same period of time. These were small bets, such as the number of yellow cards, corner kicks, or whether there would be a goal before the 30th minute. Whoever was doing it was trying to bypass the authorities.
A goalscoring goalkeeper
The individuals involved were trying to place bets that would not attract attention. But Maruf Gunes made a mistake. On May 18, 2025, Galatasaray was playing against Kayserispor. A match in which Barça’s rival was already the League champion. And Gunes bet a very large sum of money on an unlikely play: that the Galatasaray goalkeeper, Fernando Muslera, would score a goal. And that is what happened. Galatasaray explained that they allowed Muslera to take a penalty, as he was leaving the club that summer, after 14 seasons. It was a kind of reward after so many years of service. Gunes took advantage of the fact that he knew the coaching staff was considering letting Muslera take a penalty, if one occurred, to place this bet. Once it became known that the police were questioning Gunes, the press reported that he had made this bet to win a very large sum of money that would have helped Galatasaray pay for part of the transfer fee and salary of their star striker, Victor Osimhen.
After five weeks of saying nothing about this matter, Galatasaray issued a statement claiming that this accusation was false, but the case is still being investigated. In the statement, it was said that this whole thing was a smear campaign carried out by rival clubs, but it was admitted that Gunes was being investigated. The club emphasized that the accusations that signings were paid for with money from betting were false and that if Gunes was betting, it was for his own benefit and nothing more. Just in case, however, they have removed him from the board.
The case exposes a serious problem in Turkish football. In 2025, after years of investigations, the Turkish Football Federation held a press conference explaining that 371 of the 571 professional referees in the first three divisions were placing bets with fake profiles. Of these, 152 did so every week, betting on matches in which they were referees and, therefore, could decide the number of cards or whether a player would be sent off. A single referee had reached the point of making 18,227 bets. A year later, a new case has tarnished Barça’s rival. The passion of the fans, however, remains intact. Sometimes it seems like a miracle.
