Mohamed Salah plays in Turkey now. So do Romelu Lukaku and Leandro Trossard and Leroy Sané and Nathan Aké. Mason Greenwood and N’Golo Kanté and Dusan Vlahovic, too.
Bruno Fernandes and Gabriel Martinelli may yet follow them there, depending on negotiations and moods and whatever else compels a footballer to leave one club for another.
Victor Osimhen, one of the world’s highest-rated strikers, was already at Galatasaray, where he has hammered in 43 league goals in two seasons, plus this campaign’s opener.
Salah, the Super Lig’s signature signing, will reportedly earn about as much at Trabzonspor as he did with Liverpool last season, where he was one of the Premier League’s highest earners – on account of the net salary structure in Turkey.
As the Saudi Pro League, which flooded the game with billions in cash when it lured Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar in 2023, scales back its ambitions, the Turkish league has stepped into the void. A flurry of investment by its four biggest clubs – Galatasaray, Fenerbahce, Besiktas and Trabzonspor – is remaking it into the new moneyed destination league for the game’s ageing and the underplayed and the overpaid and the overvalued. Or perhaps they’ve made a series of savvy signings; we’ll soon find out.
Unlike in previous spending sprees by leagues seeking to claim a more prominent spot in the transfer market ecosystem, the Super Lig doesn’t seem to have benefited from massive investment from a soft-power nation-building project or the sudden interest of oligarchs. Rather – and it’s all slightly confounding – it appears to have more to do with the collapse of the Turkish lira relative to the euro, which went from trading at €0.10 half a decade ago to about €0.018 today. While their clubs pay their players in lira, revenue from European competition and foreign broadcasts is paid out in euros. The long and short of it is that the big four Turkish clubs can now afford players they previously couldn’t because they can write down more of their earnings on their balance sheets.
As such, Turkey joins an increasingly long line of unconventional homes for some of the game’s biggest names. Every few years, some new league invests heavily in hopes of finding a shortcut into the firmament of the world’s best-regarded competitions. Before Saudi Arabia, it was China, where it was the stated objective of President Xi Jinping and his government to leverage the sport as “a must to build China into a sports powerhouse as part of the Chinese dream”. Eventually, Chinese soccer awoke from that dream with a start.
Before that, it was the Russian Premier League, when sanctioned oil billionaire Suleyman Kerimov bought Anzhi Makhachkala and plowed in hundreds of millions to lure some of the world’s top players. That set off an arms race with Zenit St Petersburg, Rubin Kazan and Dynamo Moscow, before the spending fever broke just a few years later when Kerimov backed off.
The Brazilian league has had flurries of pricey signings over the years – although mostly focused on bringing home the country’s wayward sons – in apparent accordance with the state of the nation’s economy and bank balances. In January, Flamengo brought Lucas Paquetá back from West Ham for an astounding $50m, setting a new Brazilian record for an incoming transfer, dwarfing the $32m Cruzeiro had paid Zenit for Gerson just 20 days earlier.
During its Beckham Era, Major League Soccer was routinely paying above-market rates to lure Thierry Henry, Robbie Keane and the like. And before that, the Qatar Stars League tried to deliver on its name by drawing Gabriel Batistuta, Pep Guardiola, Frank de Boer, Marcel Desailly and others for a final payday.
Every one of these leagues moved on from this gambit before long, switching to some other strategy, or however they spun the decision to cap the money gusher.
It should probably be pointed out here that unlike most of the aforementioned circuits, Turkey actually has a thriving and long-established football and fan culture. That makes it feel slightly different this time around, as Turkish clubs have earned credibility as the homes of star players, unexpected though their arrivals may be, and because those players will probably still appear in the Champions League (Galatasaray qualified automatically; Fenerbahce are in the qualifiers) and Europa League (Trabzonspor and Besiktas are both in the qualifying rounds).
All the same, the Turkish clubs now take the mantle of acting as a kind of bailout fund for Europe’s storied leagues, where clubs from the latter can offload their distressed assets. At a minimum, these nouveaux riche leagues provide a hefty cash injection to the old-money center of the European game.
In the end, nothing much ever comes of this play for the newly ambitious. They move on, eventually. The whole thing turns out to be counterproductive. Because rather than match the status of the legacy competitions they hope to challenge, they wind up bankrolling them, cementing the chasm between them.
They learn that lesson before long and the money dries up. But no matter, there is always some fresh source of dumb money out there.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.