On the right track, after the UEFA stick

If it weren’t for the stick of the UEFA and FIFA (the threat to be banned from national games and other international tournaments)… 

If Galatasaray (GS) foremost and other second and third league teams had not protested…
The problem of how to penalize match fixing would not have been finalized this way. Our clubs would have, somehow, found a way to accept a formula to break article 58, not once but a couple of times. 
They shied away. The second and third league teams were afraid of losing money and GS was afraid to put millions of euros at stake in case it did not participate in European champion clubs [tournament]. Finally, they have found the correct path, though not very enthusiastically. 
They have saved the honor of Turkish football. 

Let’s not fool each other. Some 240 delegates attended the meeting. I looked around randomly, listened to speeches and observed the reactions and I was utterly sad. The level of our administrators was so low; they had so much of a small-town politician attitude that be sure it will be extremely difficult for Turkish football to advance in such an environment. 

Aydınlar should not resign 

Head of the Turkish Football Federation (TFF) Mehmet Ali Aydınlar should not resign.
His final speech at the end of the meeting was very touching. His eyes watered. He kind of had an attitude as if he were asking himself, “What am I doing among these people?”

Is that not true? 

He is an extremely successful, rich businessman. He fell in the middle of sports mafia who were ready to stab each other in the back. Moreover, he is being dragged through the mud. 

Aydınlar should definitely not resign. If he does, it would mean that he has lost the war he was fighting, that he has accepted defeat. Whereas what he wanted to do was to find a way out with goodwill and have a collective decision made. Not that he wanted to be blamed as the only guilty party or to be accused by Fenerbahçe administrators. 

Whatever the consequences, now is not the time to quit. He will make this historic decision, finish his job and then he may quit if he wants to. 

Not today – this day is not the day to part.

Aysal showed character 

Among all this mayhem, it was the head of Galatasaray Ünal Aysal who acted the most consistently. 
He never accused Fenerbahçe. He did not spell disaster. He was a president who was able to show the courage to say it would not feel the same for Galatasaray to become the champion in a league where Fenerbahçe was not present. 

Indeed, Turkish football was saved from a disaster. If there had been a different decision made, we would have been relegated to the second league as a country in the international sport community. 

Bid for third bridge raises questions 

It is still being questioned why there were no bidders in the third bridge tender. Even though Transport Minister Binali Yıldırım joked with journalists with lighthearted comments, nobody was satisfied. 

Is there a problem in our bidding techniques, or is it because foreign loans have dried out? Another thorny issue emerged when it was announced that the bridge would be built using national resources. 
This has raised many questions:

- If giant foreign firms are afraid of not being able to find loans, shouldn’t we also be afraid?
- How correct is it to channel our domestic resources to the bridge? 
- If the new bid will go to the lowest offer, then how will the contractor make money? 
- Isn’t the government concerned about the earthquake?