Fenerbahçe vs Alanyaspor: The Turkish Fixture That Explains Why the World Can’t Stop Losing on Penalties

Fenerbahçe vs Alanyaspor: How a Turkish Football Fixture Became a Metaphor for the World’s Chronic Inability to Finish Anything

ISTANBUL — Somewhere between the Bosporus and the Antalya coastline, two football clubs will meet on Sunday for what UEFA’s fixture computer insists is merely Matchday 33. Yet in the grander scheme of late-capitalist collapse, the Fenerbahçe–Alanyaspor tilt feels less like sport and more like a case study in how we keep scheduling endings we never quite reach. Kick-off is 19:00 local time, which translates to high noon for Western European doom-scrollers and 2 p.m. for New Yorkers already two Bloody Marys into brunch denial. Everyone else can watch on beIN Sports, assuming their government hasn’t blocked it for “moral corruption” or unpaid electricity bills.

Fenerbahçe, the eternal bridesmaid of Turkish football, arrives nursing the kind of existential grievance usually reserved for Russian novelists. They are top of the table on goal difference but haunted by the knowledge that Galatasaray still have a game in hand—proof, if any were needed, that life is unfair and algorithms are smug. Their last European outing ended in a Europa Conference League quarter-final loss to Olympiacos, a result that sent club president Ali Koç into a televised monologue that combined the rhetorical flair of Cicero with the emotional stability of a toddler who dropped his ice cream. The takeaway: nothing short of domestic perfection will suffice, which is adorable given humanity’s historic record on perfection.

Alanyaspor, meanwhile, are the seaside upstarts who keep outperforming their wage bill like a grad student who aces finals on instant noodles and spite. They sit mid-table, mathematically safe from relegation yet light-years from the Champions League money trough. In any normal country, this would be cause for mild satisfaction. In Turkey, it is cause for fans to wonder why they can’t simply conjure petrodollars like the top three. Their coach, Fatih Tekke, recently told reporters his team “plays with joy,” a statement so radical in modern football that several analytics firms reported minor system crashes.

The geopolitical subplot sneaks in via the broadcast footprint: beIN’s signal blankets from Doha to Djibouti, a reminder that soft power now travels on fiber-optic cables and subscription fees. Qatar owns the rights, Turkey hosts the match, and European hedge funds probably own the players via third-party economic rights, because nothing says globalization like a Cypriot shell company owning a Brazilian’s left foot. Meanwhile, Alanya’s stadium still carries naming rights from a tourism conglomerate that went bust during the lira’s last swan dive. The signage remains, a fossil of optimism.

Off the pitch, the Turkish Football Federation has introduced “simplified” VAR protocols for the run-in, a phrase that translates roughly to “we’ve hidden the replay angles that make us look incompetent.” This follows the March incident when a Fenerbahçe goal was disallowed because the VAR official was allegedly busy checking TikTok. (He claims he was “double-checking line calibration.” Same thing, really.) FIFA observers called the episode “regrettable,” which is sporting-governance speak for “see you in the next corruption seminar, old chap.”

But the real spectacle is the fans. Fenerbahçe’s traveling support will board 127 buses, three ferries, and one questionable fishing trawler to reach Alanya. They will chant for 90 minutes about glory, justice, and the historical perfidy of referees named after biblical figures. Alanyaspor’s ultras will respond with choreographed tifo depicting a giant watermelon—long story involving a 2018 fruit vendor who became a meme—because nothing deflates elite entitlement like produce-based mockery. Somewhere in the executive boxes, men in open-collar shirts will pretend to watch the match while actually monitoring currency futures on burner phones.

Come Monday, the table may shuffle, pundits will declare new narratives, and UEFA coefficient spreadsheets will update like graveyard shift accountants. Yet the broader significance remains depressingly stable: we keep staging climaxes that refuse to resolve. Fenerbahçe fans will demand a coronation; Alanyaspor fans will settle for schadenfreude; the rest of us will scroll past highlights on mute, already late for the next supposedly decisive event. In that sense, the final whistle is just a polite lie we tell ourselves between commercial breaks.