The scandals of Barça's rival in the Champions League

BarcelonaBarça returns to Istanbul, where football is perhaps experienced with more passion than at home. A city with one foot in Europe and the other in Asia, where three giant clubs coexist that seem willing to do anything to rule: Fenerbahçe, Besiktas, and this Tuesday's opponent, Galatasaray. Clichés say that Galatasaray has the most fans, with a more popular touch and a social base often made up of immigrants coming from the rest of Turkey. Fenerbahçe prides itself on being a team for lifelong Istanbulites, secular people who look towards Europe and revere the father of modern Turkey, Atatürk. And Besiktas is the club with a more progressive fanbase. Clichés that are not always true, since within every fanbase there is a bit of everything.

What all three teams also have in common is a good handful of scandals. To follow sports news, fans often talk more about judges than goals. In the last fifteen years alone, the justice system has arrested more than 20 executives from the city's three big clubs in different cases. If the focus is widened to all Turkish football in general, the figures are frightening. Dozens of cases with hundreds of detainees. No one is safe. Presidents, executives, players, referees, agents, and journalists. The various scandals have modified the competition's honors list and have left Fenerbahçe without a league title that the club still claims as its own. Attempts to buy rival teams with suitcases of cash and bribes to referees have been reported. The Negreira case seems like nothing compared to what is experienced in Turkey, where in 2025 the police arrested more than 50 people in an investigation into illegal betting. Executives, businessmen, a popular former referee who appears on television every weekend, and players like Fenerbahçe captain Mert Hakan Yandas and Galatasaray defender Metehan Baltacı were arrested. The latter admitted to having bet, but said he had done so on matches in lower categories where his friends play. The case became so big that 149 referees and assistant referees were suspended, especially in the Second and Third Divisions, but also in the First Division.

And this 2026, a new scandal. The authorities arrested 17 people in a new case in which the spotlight was once again placed on illegal betting, which became a real headache for the authorities. One of those arrested was the vice president of Galatasaray, Maruf Gunes, involved in this case in which bets made between the years 2020 and 2026 are being investigated. Gunes is being investigated for having made 48 bets on Galatasaray matches, a figure that may seem high but which seems small if compared with the 1,488 bets made by the Besiktas executive Tolga Kirgiz in the same period of time. These were small bets, such as, for example, the number of yellow cards, corner kicks, or whether there would be a goal before the 30th minute. Whoever was doing it was thus trying to evade the authorities.

A goalscoring goalkeeper

Those involved tried to place bets that would not attract attention. But Maruf Gunes made a mistake. On May 18, 2025, Galatasaray was playing against Kayserispor. A match in which Barça's rival was already the League champion. Gunes bet a very high amount of money on an unlikely play: that Galatasaray's goalkeeper, Fernando Muslera, would score a goal. And that is what happened. Galatasaray explained that they allowed Muslera to take a penalty because he was leaving the club that summer, after 14 seasons. It was a kind of reward after so many years of service. Gunes took advantage of the fact that he knew the coaching staff was considering letting Muslera take a penalty, if one occurred, to place this bet. Once it became known that the police were questioning Gunes, the press reported that he had made the bet to win a very high amount of money, which would have helped Galatasaray pay for part of the transfer fee and the salary of its star striker, Victor Osimhen.

After five weeks without saying anything about this matter, Galatasaray issued a statement claiming that the accusation was false, but the case is still being investigated. The statement said that it was all a smear campaign carried out by rival clubs, but it was admitted that Gunes was being investigated. The club emphasized that the accusations that signings were paid for with money from bets were false and that if Gunes was betting, it was for his own benefit and nothing more. Just in case, however, they have removed him from the board of directors.

The case exposes a serious problem in Turkish football. In 2025, after years of investigations, the Turkish Football Federation held a press conference explaining that 371 of the 571 professional referees in the top three divisions were placing bets with fake profiles. Of these, 152 did so every week, and they bet on matches they were officiating and in which, therefore, they could decide the number of cards or whether a player would be sent off. A single referee had reached 18,227 bets. A year later, a new case has tarnished Barça's rival. The passion of the fans, however, remains intact. Sometimes it seems like a miracle.

Illegal ticket sales, in the spotlight

As if that were not enough, in the hours leading up to the match, the authorities reportedly arrested nine people suspected of selling illegal tickets for the Galatasaray-Barça game, according to the Turkish media outletFanatik. The club expects to generate a large amount of money from the box office for this Champions League duel, and tickets have already sold out, some with a price exceeding 1,000 euros.