Ali Sami Yen, between the aristocracy and the miracle

As everywhere, the first to play football in Turkey were the English, but the sport quickly took root among the population of Istanbul, and especially among the children of the social elites who attended the Galatasaray Lyceum. One of these young men was Ali Sami Yen (1886-1951), son of the intellectual and politician Sami Frashëri, one of the leading figures in Turkish history, whose Arabic name was Semseddin Sami (sun of religion).

Ali Sami Yen founded Galatasaray to form the first club made up solely of Turkish players. All of them, students of this school, founded in 1481 as an imperial school by Sultan Bayezid II. From the beginning, you can see the aristocratic air of the entity that adopts the Liceo’s motto: “I love quality, I love superiority, I love my Liceo” (in French, of course). Initially, the team was to be called Gloria or Audace, but they eventually adopted the name of the Genoese citadel of Galata on the Bosphorus. Galatasaray means Galata Palace.

They started playing in the Taksim stadium, which was nothing more than the courtyard of an artillery barracks where the walls were transformed into stands before building the legendary Ali Sami Yen, which took more than 25 years to complete. Work began before World War II and was not completed until well into 1964.

The day of the ‘premiere’ could end in tragedy, and his story too. During the opening match between Turkey and Bulgaria a crowd fell from the first floor, but miraculously no one was killed. When the stadium was demolished, serious defects in its construction were discovered. Only 57 kilos of steel were used per cubic meter of concrete. In the new NEF the amount is 250 kilos per cubic meter. The Ali Sami Yen bordered on misfortune for many years.

The new venue, opened in 2011, could not be called the Turk Telekom Arena because Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan banned any stadium from bearing the word arena. “You know what happened in the arenas, right? People were dismembered by animals, ”he assured. That does not mean that the Turkish telephone company pays the club 10.25 million euros over a decade to be able to sponsor the new Ali Sami Yen.