Arda Turan takes a puff on his second cigar. “I want to change the style of football in Turkey,” he says. “We will change football in this country.”
Fair enough. Of all the things you can say about Turan — and in an eventful playing career, people have said plenty down the years — you can’t say he lacks confidence.
You may remember Turan as a brilliant but frequently quite… angsty creative attacker. As arguably the best Turkish player of his generation. As the player who signed for Barcelona despite knowing he would have to sit on his hands for six months because they were under a transfer embargo.
As the player who once threw his boot at an assistant referee. As the player who was banned for 16 games after pushing another assistant. As the player who was given a two-year suspended prison sentence for firing a gun in a hospital, following a nightclub incident that ended with a pop singer receiving a broken nose.
And therefore, as a player who might be a fair way down most ‘likely to become a manager’ lists.
Raúl García 👀 Arda Turan ⚽ pic.twitter.com/A6RXuZRC6U
— Atlético de Madrid (@Atleti) February 25, 2023
And yet, a manager he is. And on the early evidence, a very good one. Turan completed his first full season as a head coach in May and it couldn’t really have gone any better. Eyupspor, the team from the Istanbul suburbs that he took over in the spring of 2023, cantered to the Turkish second-tier title, sealing the first promotion to the Super Lig in their history with a whopping six games to spare.
Perhaps it’s unfair to suggest he is an unlikely coach. Turan was always smarter than his sometimes antagonistic demeanour and reputation would suggest. Speak to people who have known him, from the start of his career back in 2005 with Galatasaray, and they will tell you about someone who, even then, thought keenly about the game, and spoke intelligently about it too.
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Turan emphasises that when The Athletic asks the question: how would Arda the coach have dealt with Arda the player?
“It would be very easy. I was an intelligent player, I was open to communication, always aware of the tactics of a game. A little bit of a downside was that I was very aggressive, but if a coach tried to manage that, it would be over.
“I could have been a bit more attentive, but a softer Arda isn’t Arda anymore. If you take this aggressiveness from me, I lose my style of play. If you fall in love with a player and you try to change them, you are not in love with that player anymore.”
Part of the problem, as Turan himself admits, is he rested too much on his natural gifts to make his more cerebral side obvious enough. “I didn’t have much pressure when I was a player,” he says when asked if he felt more expectation then, on the pitch or now, on the touchline. “Because I trusted my talents too much. Here, as a coach, you rely on how your players apply themselves.”
Turan has a slightly tricky relationship with the Turkish footballing public — as, to be fair, most high-profile Turkish footballers do. He made his name with his boyhood team, Galatasaray, winning a Super Lig title and being named captain when he was just 22. After seven years in Spain he returned to Istanbul to win another title, but this time with the unpopular Istanbul Basaksehir, before rounding off his career with a slightly tricky couple of seasons back at Galatasaray, when the club was going through a significant transition.
Most will probably know him as part of the Atletico Madrid team that beat the Spanish duopoly and won La Liga in 2013-14, a side very much built in Diego Simeone’s image, stuffed full of brilliant footballers but also hard, aggressive characters. Diego Costa. Diego Godin. Koke. Miranda. Turan. Or, as Turan puts it: “It was a team of players with balls.”
Turan and Godin celebrate winning La Liga 2013-14 (Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images)
Since then, Simeone’s Atletico reached two Champions League finals, won the Europa League and, of course, won La Liga again. They are very much a power, not just in Spanish football but in Europe too, all of which means it’s easy to forget what a story it was in 2014 when they vanquished the two giants in whose shadow they live.
“I respect teams like Leicester winning the Premier League, and Bursaspor winning in Turkey, but Atletico being champions was the hardest title in sports history. We were against the best Barcelona — maybe the best team — in history, and maybe the best-ever Real Madrid team. Cristiano (Ronaldo) on one side, (Lionel) Messi on the other. Against us. It should have been impossible.
“You would play a game, go to take a shower, come out and Real would be winning 2-0. They kill your dreams every morning. So you have to dream again and again.
“We played together, we laughed together, we fought together. Whenever I see Diego Costa, Miranda, Godin, Koke, I get emotional. We were a real family.”
Turan remembers a moment during pre-season, before that title win, that he thinks sums up the attitude of Simeone and those players, and at least in part explains why they were successful.
“We were doing strength and conditioning training in Segovia, outside Madrid. We were running, running, 6.30, 7am every morning. Then we would turn on the TV and see Real and Barcelona landing in Los Angeles or Miami to play friendlies — sunglasses on, stylish clothes.
“When we saw that, Simeone would say ‘Don’t watch that: they can do that, because they are more talented than you. If you want to beat them, you have to work harder’. Now, Atletico go to Los Angeles or Miami.”
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Turan stayed at Atletico for another year, but 2015 brought one of the more curious periods of Turan’s career. Barcelona, fresh from winning the treble with the forward line of Lionel Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez arguably at their peak, made him the most expensive Turkish player in history when they signed him for a potential €34million (£29m; $37m), also bringing in Aleix Vidal from Sevilla for another €18m.
The small problem was that Barcelona were under a transfer embargo — punishment for illegally signing underage players. Anyone who signed that summer could not be officially registered until the following January. So why did Turan, 28, and theoretically in the prime of his career, make a move he knew would preclude him from playing for six months?
Turan during his Barcelona unveiling (Lluis Gene/AFP via Getty Images)
He gives a small shrug and a simple explanation. “The best team in history wants you. So you start from there. If you love football, nobody would say no. If it happened again, I would do the same thing.”
The conversation turns to Turan’s influences. It’s not a given that a player who works under several great coaches will absorb the lessons and wisdom and become a great coach themselves, but Turan really does have an impressive list of potential mentors.
“I am trying to take good things from each coach. I learned courage from Simeone. Fatih Terim — depending on the squads he had, he had very good offensive solutions. I have also played with Guus Hiddink: he was very good, very cool with his players. (I loved) Luis Enrique’s training methodologies.”
Again, we come back to the idea that he was an unexpected coach. Not only did Turan know fairly early on that this was what he wanted to do, but he had bigger ideas than just winning a few games.
“The plan was not just to be a coach,” he says. “I wanted to change the style of football. It’s more than being a coach. I wanted to implement an idea, a new style of football.”
So why start here, with a relatively obscure team who had never previously played in the Turkish top flight, rather than something bigger that his name could quite probably have brought? Or perhaps even joined someone else’s staff and learned his trade that way?
“I couldn’t be an assistant coach, because I can’t even help myself,” he jokes. “I didn’t want to take a team halfway through a process. I wanted to take a team and form them. There was always going to be pressure on me and my team. Because of my career, I wanted to minimise the pressure that would be on me. I wanted to concentrate on the pitch, and lessen the pressure.”
Turan playing for Turkey against Macedonia in June 2017 (Metin Pala/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
It’s also probably worth pointing out that while Eyupspor don’t exactly have a storied history, they’re not quite a romantic underdog story either. They are backed by their president Murat Ozkaya, a Galatasaray member who made his money after founding a successful car rental business and took over the club in 2019. The Athletic meets Turan at their brand new training ground — the main building of which would put most Premier League facilities to shame.
Last summer, they signed 12 players, not all for especially lavish fees but a) they were mostly from Super Lig clubs and b) the Turkish second tier is a division where not many clubs can often afford to pay fees at all. Turan has a 10-strong coaching staff, who he says he pays from his own salary.
Nevertheless, even with that backing, Eyupspor’s season under Turan was impressive. They were promoted by 15 points, scored 17 more goals than the next most prolific team, and fulfilled Turan’s aim to play passing football: over the season, they averaged 63 per cent possession.
It’s the latter point that Turan seems most enthused by. “We have been promoted to the Super Lig, but the work starts now. I’m only happy because I showed people that you can change a club inside a game.
“I am planning to implement a strategy here that works for the long term — for five years in the future. I want to create a club that will get into Europe. I want a team that can play a possession game like Manchester City. I want to show coaches in Turkey that if they concentrate on the game, they can be big, they can play big football.”
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Big plans, big ideas. And inevitably his name combined with this promising start, big offers will come too.
“There’s no need to lie: if I continue like this, I will face that sort of situation for sure,” he says, after emphatically pooh-poohing the idea that he could coach Galatasaray’s great rivals Fenerbahce one day. “The important thing is when those opportunities come, to be ready. It might sound like a cliche, but I am happy here. Rather than being the second man in Rome, I am the leader of my village.”
The conversation over, he stubs out his cigar and wanders outside to discuss plans for the season ahead with some of his coaching staff, four of whom sat in on the interview.
Who knows whether Turan will carry on and become a truly brilliant coach? It’s far too early to say. But if he does, you will definitely hear about it.
(Photo: Seskim Photo/MB Media/Getty Images)
