The problem shouldn’t have been Alioski or his next club, it’s how Galatasaray dealt with that tragedy - The Athletic 25/7/21

By Phil Hay

In the early hours of the morning after the death of two Leeds United supporters in Istanbul, Peter Ridsdale met with a delegate from UEFA at one of the city’s police stations.

By that stage he was exhausted. He had been up all night receiving news of the stabbings, inflicted during violence which broke out on the eve of a UEFA Cup tie between Leeds and Galatasaray. He had travelled to the hospital where injured fans were being treated and arranged payment for a blood transfusion for Kevin Speight, one of the two who died. He was taken to identify the other, Chris Loftus, in the morgue after doctors mistook him for a family member.

Ridsdale can visualise it all 21 years on: the lay-out of the hospital, the chaos inside, the panicked confusion. And worse things too. As chairman of Leeds, he told the UEFA official that it would make sense to postpone the first leg of the semi-final which Leeds and Galatasaray were about to play. In the circumstances, it was a total irrelevance and too highly-charged. Your choice, the official replied. But if you back out, you’ll forfeit the game and incur a 3-0 defeat. The English FA followed the line of least resistance. In its opinion, contesting the game was “the least worst option”.

Last year, on the 20th anniversary of the killings in Istanbul, The Athletic spoke to some of the people closest to the tragedy and some of the people most affected by it. Through different eyes and different viewpoints, a picture built up of the disregard and indifference with which they had been treated by those they looked to for help.

The Loftus family gave up on campaigning for justice in Turkey because they did not think the system cared about them. Leeds’ head of security at the game recalled police officers lining the corridors in Galatasaray’s ground as the players emerged from the dressing room; an attempt, in his eyes, to intimidate them as they prepared to go onto the pitch. Amid the fall-out and a world of shock in Leeds, Ridsdale suggested that the second leg at Elland Road would be safer without away fans. Galatasaray accused him of trying to gain an unfair sporting advantage.

Given that context — and these examples only really scratch the surface of everything that happened in April 2000 — there was no way in which a player like Gjanni Alioski could consider leaving Leeds and joining Galatasaray, as he did for many months, without bracing himself for a tense political path and the objection he encountered online. It takes a certain amount of nerve to put a foot in both camps, which is doubtless why Harry Kewell was able to do so in 2008 when he left Liverpool for the Ali Sami Yen. That deal took Kewell back to a stadium where he and Leeds once needed protection with riot shields. The images of that never grow old.

At this juncture, it should be said that Kewell and Alioski were not identical. Kewell grew up in Leeds’ academy and was in the starting line-up for both legs against Galatasaray. He was on the scene as the club grieved and as much as any other of David O’Leary’s players, he was in a position to fully comprehend both the impact of the killings and Galatasaray’s response to them.

Alioski had less of a cross to bear. He was eight when the deaths occurred and he was 25 when he came to England as a professional. The connection was not comparable to Kewell’s. As a free agent, he had a decision to make about how best to look after himself with his 30th birthday coming next year (and in the end, looking after himself meant joining Al-Ahli in Saudi Arabia last night). It is his life and his career, much as the option of Galatasaray was incapable of arising without anyone passing comment.

Even so, the counterargument holds water. If the thought of a transfer like that sits uncomfortably then perhaps it should. It is wrong to presume to tell those who were affected by the events in Istanbul how to feel or how to react to a player taking Galatasaray’s money. Alioski was not part of that history but the history exists and the real story here — far more significant than Alioski or any other footballer per se — is the absence of any reconciliation over a night which feels as raw to those who witnessed it now as it did two decades ago; the lasting bitterness produced by a vacuum of empathy.

Kewell was quoted after joining Galatasaray as saying that “to blame Galatasaray for the tragedy in Istanbul is simply wrong and discriminatory”. That is true. But where Galatasaray failed, and where Ridsdale specifically felt resentment, was in grasping the scale of the tragedy and in refusing to accept that violence on the streets and a UEFA Cup tie could not be classed as unrelated events once the worst had happened. They ploughed on regardless, much like UEFA, and left Ridsdale thinking that their directors were more worried about distancing themselves from the stabbings than helping Leeds cope with them.

“I don’t think, even to this day, that Galatasaray would see the amount of press coverage or criticism as being fairly labelled against them,” Ridsdale said last year. “They felt we were overreacting.” In all the many layers of anger, that was one of them; the apparent inability to adopt some common decency.

A fortnight ago, Ridsdale was voted onto the EFL’s board. That decision drew much criticism, as well it might. His financial record at Leeds was dismal and Leeds never forget about it. But when it came to Istanbul, he and the club were remarkable in reacting quickly and with compassion. The families of the victims will tell you that. They have nothing but good words for Ridsdale’s conduct and nothing but gratitude for his support. In contrast, what Leeds saw in Galatasaray was a baffling lack of sympathy. And it is far too late to redress that now.

Whether this should dictate a transfer like the one Alioski was asked to ponder is a matter of opinion. It might be fair to say that the events of 2000 are a reason to dissuade a footballer with ties to Leeds from engaging with Galatasaray but not necessarily to prohibit him from signing, especially as time goes by. The complication here is that football has no right to dictate how people manage a grievance that goes so far beyond standard rivalry. Istanbul was life and death and more than focusing on Alioski himself, the attention on him generated by the very prospect of a move to Turkey itself should make us ask why it was ever allowed to come to this; a horrific episode which offered no chance of peace or proper closure.