Türkiye vs Spain Wasn’t Just Football—It Was a Geopolitical Stress Test in Cleats
It began, as these things often do, with the polite fiction that nothing was at stake beyond the usual patriotic pantomime. Yet when Türkiye and Spain squared off in Berlin’s Olympiastadion for their Euro 2024 quarter-final, the planet’s more excitable commentators insisted the match was really a referendum on neo-Ottoman swagger versus post-imperial Iberian melancholy,…