Türkiye’s Sports Economy: Football, Basketball and the Road to Export

Türkiye’s sports economy combines a domestic audience the size of Germany’s with the commercial structure of a mid-ranking league, an airline that sponsors half of European sport and a government that builds stadiums faster than clubs can fill them. This article is part of the Sports Economy hub and completes our country series alongside the Premier League as a British export and the Gulf playbook. It asks what the country earns from sport today, why the numbers lag the passion, and what a route to export would require.

How large is Türkiye’s sports economy today?

Modest relative to its audience. Turkish professional football generates revenue in the low billions of dollars a year across 18 Süper Lig clubs, the second tier and the federation, with the three Istanbul giants earning the great majority; basketball, volleyball and the events business add a few hundred million more. Sport’s share of GDP is well under the 2.6% Britain records.

The simplest benchmark is television. The Süper Lig’s rights have been sold to beIN Sports (through its Turkish subsidiary, formerly Digiturk) since 2016, when a five-year deal set a record $500m a season. The lira’s depreciation and the pandemic brought successive renegotiations: about $340m in 2020/21, $215m in 2021/22, ₺2.2bn a year for 2022-24 and, from March 2024, roughly $182m a season for the Süper Lig and the TFF First League through 2027. In dollar terms the league’s main revenue line has fallen by almost two-thirds in a decade, even as the audience grew. No other top-ten European league has that chart.

The clubs’ own accounts show the consequence. Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe, Beşiktaş and Trabzonspor each run listed football companies on Borsa Istanbul (Fenerbahçe’s association holds 62.27% of Fenerbahçe Futbol A.Ş., with 37.73% in public hands), and each carried debts in 2019 large enough that the Turkish Banks Association coordinated a restructuring of the big clubs’ loans over five years. Galatasaray’s revenue, lifted by three consecutive league titles, Champions League participation and the Osimhen effect, is the highest in the country but still well short of Deloitte’s Money League top 20, whose threshold was €276m in 2024/25; the others earn less. Combined, the big three earn roughly what a single mid-table Premier League club does.

What the country does have is scale on the demand side. Galatasaray had 16.2 million followers on X in May 2025 and Fenerbahçe 13.7 million, more than most Premier League clubs; Fenerbahçe counts tens of thousands of congress members and once reported more than 300,000 paid members; and the Süper Lig’s 2025/26 attendance of 2.66 million across 306 matches produced an average of 14,593 despite many small clubs and empty provincial stadiums. Our article on the sports economy by region places Türkiye in the European mid-tier on supply and the top tier on demand; closing that gap is the whole playbook.

Why does the Süper Lig earn so little compared with its audience?

Because the money is domestic, in lira and dependent on one broadcaster, while the product is undermined by debt-driven spending, governance disputes and a competitive structure in which three clubs win almost everything. International rights are small because foreign broadcasters buy balance and stability, and the league offers neither.

The currency problem is first-order. A broadcaster earning subscriptions in lira cannot pay dollar fees indefinitely, so each renewal since 2019 has either cut the fee or shifted it into lira; the 2020/21 agreement was paid only in lira. Clubs, meanwhile, pay foreign players and transfer fees in euros. Galatasaray’s €75m for Osimhen in July 2025, the largest fee in Turkish history, is more than a third of the entire league’s annual domestic broadcast income. The economics only work with Champions League money (which is paid in euros), strong sponsorship and owner or member support, which is why the title race has become a two-club affair and why the financial gap between the Istanbul clubs and the rest keeps growing.

The single-buyer market compounds it. beIN, which also holds Premier League, LaLiga and Champions League rights in Türkiye, has no domestic rival capable of outbidding it for the Süper Lig; Türk Telekom’s Tivibu and Turkcell’s TV+ have mostly stayed out of top-flight football. The Premier League’s lesson, as our UK playbook shows, is that rights values rise when at least two buyers compete for packages; Germany’s 2024 tender nearly collapsed with two. Türkiye has one.

Governance is the third drag. The 2024/25 and 2025/26 seasons were marked by public disputes over refereeing, a three-match ban for José Mourinho after a post-match altercation with Galatasaray’s coach in early 2025, Mourinho’s dismissal by Fenerbahçe in August 2025, and two changes of Fenerbahçe president in little more than a year, with Sadettin Saran replacing Ali Koç in late 2025 and Aziz Yıldırım returning in 2026. Each episode is a headline abroad that a rights buyer reads as risk. Foreign broadcasters will pay for drama on the pitch; they discount drama off it.

How do the big Istanbul clubs work as businesses?

As member-run associations that own listed football companies and large multi-sport operations, financed by sponsorship, broadcast income, European prize money, player trading and, chronically, debt. Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe and Beşiktaş are each more than a century old, each fields professional basketball and volleyball teams, and each is governed by a president elected by members.

Galatasaray is currently the strongest. Three straight Süper Lig titles (2023/24 to 2025/26), a Champions League round-of-16 run in 2025/26, the 53,978-seat RAMS Park (named under a sponsorship with Rams Global) and Osimhen’s 37 goals on loan in 2024/25 followed by his permanent signing have lifted revenue and ticket demand; the club’s average crowd of around 43,000 is three times the league average. Its model is the Istanbul version of a Champions League club: European income, a flagship stadium, a shirt deal and the sale of players developed or acquired cheaply. Fenerbahçe, runner-up in each of the last three seasons, operates the 47,911-seat Şükrü Saracoğlu Stadium, the Ülker Sports Arena and the most successful club basketball programme in the country, with EuroLeague titles in 2017 and 2025. Beşiktaş plays at a 42,684-seat waterfront stadium opened in 2016, under a naming agreement with the refiner Tüpraş.

The financing structure is the weakness. Because the associations cannot sell control and the listed companies are minority-floated vehicles rather than true equity stories, the clubs fund deficits with bank debt, deferred payments and presidents’ personal guarantees. The 2019 restructuring, coordinated by the Turkish Banks Association, converted the big clubs’ short-term loans into longer-term facilities and was followed by Turkish Football Federation financial rules modelled on UEFA’s. Compliance has been partial. The clubs have none of the German system’s pre-season licensing discipline, none of the English system’s billionaire owners to absorb losses, and only intermittent Champions League money.

Player trading is where Turkish clubs do earn hard currency. Arda Güler’s move from Fenerbahçe to Real Madrid in 2023, Kenan Yıldız’s development at Juventus and Ferdi Kadıoğlu’s sale to Brighton in 2024 show the academy pipeline works; the problem is that most of the proceeds are spent on ageing imports rather than reinvested. Our pillar on how the transfer market works as an economy explains why selling clubs in weaker currencies tend to run that cycle.

Where is Türkiye already a sports exporter?

In basketball, volleyball and airline sponsorship. Turkish clubs have won four of the last nine EuroLeague titles, VakıfBank and Fenerbahçe have dominated women’s club volleyball, the national teams reached the finals of EuroBasket 2025 and the 2025 Volleyball World Championship, and Turkish Airlines has sponsored more European competitions and clubs than any carrier except Emirates.

Basketball is the clearest success. Fenerbahçe won the EuroLeague in 2017 and again in 2025, beating Monaco 81-70 in the first Final Four held outside Europe, in Abu Dhabi; Anadolu Efes won back-to-back titles in 2021 and 2022. Both clubs play in arenas of 12,000 to 16,000 and draw EuroLeague crowds (12,165 for Efes in 2023/24, 10,785 for Fenerbahçe in 2024/25) that rank in the competition’s upper half. The men’s national team, led by Houston Rockets centre Alperen Şengün, who averaged 20.8 points, 11 rebounds and 7 assists, went 8-1 at EuroBasket 2025 and lost the final 88-83 to Germany. The Turkish Basketball Super League is one of the deepest in Europe below the EuroLeague tier, and the country has become an exporter of coaches (Ergin Ataman at Panathinaikos) and a regular stop for NBA scouts.

Women’s volleyball is the second. The “Sultans of the Net” won the 2023 European Championship, the 2023 Nations League and the 2023 World Cup in a 22-match perfect season, finished fourth at the Paris Olympics and took silver at the 2025 World Championship in Thailand. At club level VakıfBank has won the CEV Champions League five times (2011, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2022) and the Club World Championship three times, and Fenerbahçe was the first Turkish club to win a world title in 2010. The Turkish women’s league pays the highest salaries in the sport and imports its stars, which is the reverse of the football pattern: here Türkiye is the destination league, the equivalent of the Premier League in volleyball.

Turkish Airlines is the sponsorship export. The carrier, which reported revenue of $24bn and net profit of $2.9bn for 2025 across 356 destinations, title-sponsored the EuroLeague from 2010 until July 2025 on a deal that began at €15m over five years, has been a global sponsor of the Champions League since 2022/23, and holds or has held carrier agreements with Barcelona, Manchester United, Borussia Dortmund, Aston Villa and Marseille alongside Galatasaray, Trabzonspor and Başakşehir. The strategy is the same as Emirates’ and Etihad’s: sport as route marketing for the Istanbul hub. Our analysis of shirt sponsorship and naming rights covers how airline deals are priced.

What role does the state play?

A large one, mostly in bricks. Since 2011 the government, through the housing agency TOKİ and the Ministry of Youth and Sports, has built or rebuilt dozens of stadiums, including the 42,000-seat Konya and 43,361-seat Bursa venues and the 40,782-seat Trabzon stadium, and it underwrites the national teams, the Istanbul events calendar and the Euro 2032 co-hosting bid with Italy.

The stadium programme is the Turkish equivalent of Germany’s 2006 build, without the clubs’ ownership. Most provincial stadiums are publicly owned and leased to clubs, which keeps the matchday revenue line weak and explains how a Süper Lig fixture can draw 568 spectators in a 2025/26 season whose record crowd was 51,641. Istanbul’s Atatürk Olympic Stadium (74,753) hosted the 2023 Champions League final and the 2005 final before it and is the centrepiece of the Euro 2032 proposal, which lists ten Turkish candidate venues from which five will be selected in October 2026. Istanbul Park, which returned to the Formula 1 calendar briefly in 2020 and 2021, and the Istanbul Marathon, the only one run across two continents, complete an events portfolio that the government treats as tourism promotion.

The state is also the lender of last resort. Public banks were central to the 2019 club debt restructuring, and the federation’s financial fair play regime has been applied with a lightness that reflects the political cost of sanctioning Galatasaray or Fenerbahçe. The result is the inverse of the German model described in our 50+1 playbook: member-run clubs without the licensing discipline, and public infrastructure without club ownership of it.

On the participation side the picture is improving. Wrestling, Türkiye’s historic Olympic strength, remains a state-funded federation sport; football, basketball and volleyball academies have multiplied; and the women’s volleyball success has driven a measurable rise in girls’ participation. The Ministry’s licensed-athlete count runs into the millions, though a large share of licences are nominal. The domestic fitness and sporting-goods market is modest, which leaves the sports economy more concentrated in professional clubs and events than in Western Europe.

What would a Turkish road to export look like?

It would start with the product rather than the sale: a competitive league with credible officiating and enforced club licensing, a second domestic broadcast bidder to reset the rights price, central international sales modelled on the Premier League’s territory-by-territory tender, and a sponsorship strategy that uses Turkish Airlines, Beko, Trendyol and the Istanbul hub to carry the league to the diaspora in Germany, the Netherlands, the Gulf and the Balkans.

The diaspora is the under-used asset. More than three million people of Turkish origin live in Germany, with large communities in Austria, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and the United Kingdom, and Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe already draw tens of thousands to friendlies in Cologne and Rotterdam. Those are the territories where international rights have real value, and where a Turkish-language streaming product could price above what beIN pays at home. The Bundesliga’s 2026 free streaming channel in the UK and the Premier League’s deals with NBC and beIN show the mechanics; what is missing is a Süper Lig international rights operation with the mandate to do it.

The second step is ownership reform. Türkiye could adopt a version of Germany’s licensing system without touching the member-association structure the big clubs’ fans would never give up: audited budgets before the season, positive-equity requirements phased in over five years, points deductions for breaches. The Istanbul clubs’ listed companies could then become real equity vehicles, as Borussia Dortmund’s is, and attract the minority institutional capital that English and American funds have put into Spanish, Italian and Portuguese clubs. The alternative, a Gulf-style state buyer, is unlikely for a country with its own fiscal constraints and clubs whose members are their political base.

The third step is to build on what already exports. Basketball and volleyball give Türkiye a template: euro-denominated competitions, clubs backed by exporters, arenas the clubs control and a track record of winning. A sports strategy that treated the EuroLeague clubs, the Sultans of the Net and the national basketball team as the lead products, with football as the volume business, would match the country’s real competitive position rather than its self-image. The 2032 European Championship, co-hosted with Italy, is the natural deadline: a league that arrives in 2032 with enforced licensing, two domestic broadcasters and an international rights arm will have done what the Premier League did between 1992 and 2007. Our forecast of where the sports economy is heading by 2030 suggests the window for mid-sized leagues to establish international streaming audiences is open now and will narrow as the largest leagues lock in global distribution.

How does Türkiye compare with the other country playbooks?

It has Germany’s member-run clubs without the licensing, England’s passion without the export engine, and the Gulf’s state-built stadiums without the sovereign budget. Its distinctive strengths, a global airline sponsor, a diaspora of millions and a second and third sport that already win in Europe, are ones none of the other four countries combine.

Against the United States the comparison is almost entirely structural: Türkiye has an open league, no salary cap, no collective bargaining and no college system, and its clubs are civic institutions rather than franchises. Against the United Kingdom it is a question of sequencing: England spent the 1990s fixing stadiums and governance before the export took off in the 2000s, and Türkiye has done the stadiums but not the governance. Against Germany it is a question of discipline: both countries have member associations, but only one enforces pre-season licensing, and the difference shows in debt levels and in the number of clubs that have needed bank rescues. Against the Gulf it is a question of money: Istanbul clubs cannot outspend Riyadh for players, but they can offer what Saudi clubs lack, which is a century of history, 40,000 fans a week and continental competition.

The most useful comparison may be with Qatar’s beIN, which pays for Turkish football. A single foreign broadcaster holding the domestic rights of a league with 85 million people and a global diaspora is an anomaly that a more competitive market would correct. Türkiye’s road to export runs through creating that market at home first. The country already produces Champions League players, EuroLeague champions and world-class volleyball; the business of sport has simply not caught up with the sport.

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