A game of two halves :|the making of professional football in Turkey, 1946-1963

Abstract

This dissertation examines the professionalization and popularization of football in Turkey in the period 1946-1963 from a social history perspective. Utilizing an extensive research based on the empirical-analytical model, it explores the transition of Turkish football from an amateur, participant-based sport into a professional mass spectator game. Focusing on a period when Turkish society was itself undergoing a significant transformation, this dissertation asks how changing social, political, demographic, and economic dynamics played role in the transformation of football and its cultural production. The belated move towards professionalism in the post-World War II era, albeit without conceding the game to free-market forces, resulted in an incomplete, hybrid mode of professionalism, that would develop around public service values instead of a business logic. In this regard, this study lifts the lid off the peculiarities that give Turkish professional football its current shape. One of the inspirations for this dissertation is the conception of football as a “total social phenomenon” to use Marcel Mauss’s term, that illuminates the historical development of the wider society. Guided by this perspective, this study contributes to the recognition of football as a subject of serious academic research in Turkey and expands the horizon of the international sports history literature by offering a non-Western case study.