Ferhat Gündoğdu's Testimony and the Legal Gap in Turkey's Refereeing System

In the tunnel of a stadium in Busan, I learned something no classroom taught me: a referee walks onto the pitch with a different mindset than a player. Players carry their feet and their form. Referees carry something more fragile — the belief that they are there for the job, not for anyone in particular.

Outsiders look at the scoreboard; I watch the pulse in the tunnel. And that pulse in Turkey is beating faster than usual.

When the daily Sabah published the content of Ferhat Gündoğdu's testimony, the President of the Central Referee Committee (MHK) under the Turkish Football Federation (TFF), I did not read it as a purely legal news item. I read it like an afternoon spent in a dressing room, listening to people in the trade speak to each other in a half-believing tone. This is the story of a referee-appointment system that runs on personal trust, and a system like that always leaves room for suspicion.

Context: an investigation that has moved past the rumour stage

The MHK is the body responsible for appointing and evaluating referees in Turkey. The TFF is the national federation that sits above the MHK in governance terms. When a judicial investigation file contains witness statements, the story has crossed the line of a press rumour. That file has names, testimony, and timelines.

According to the published content, Gündoğdu denies any personal motive and denies arbitrarily manipulating the referee list. He states that decisions were taken collectively within the MHK and passed through the approval of TFF management. He rejects the allegation that a referee was excluded from the list without cause. Three witnesses who once held roles in the apparatus — Süleyman Abay, Taner Gizlenci and Emre Altun — have given statements.

What caught my attention was not the denial. It was the admission.

Three admissions heavier than any denial

In his testimony, Gündoğdu admits that VETAS — the referee-appointment system — is not a mandatory system under legislation. This is the anchor of his entire defence: if VETAS is not mandatory, then manual intervention in the list is procedurally permissible.

But it is precisely that procedural permissibility that exposes the largest gap. When an appointment system has no automated safeguard, its integrity depends entirely on the goodwill of whoever holds power. He does not deny that manual changes occurred. He only says they were permitted to occur. To an observer, those are two very different stories.

The second admission concerns pre-match phone calls. Gündoğdu admits he called referees before they officiated, framing it as a morale boost. From a governance standpoint, direct contact between the head of the appointment apparatus and active match officials is exactly the kind of interaction every integrity framework advises against. Not because it is certainly wrong, but because it creates an unverifiable grey zone.

The third admission is the heaviest. Witnesses say Gündoğdu referenced knowing whom referees had met, and referenced access to HTS records — communication and phone-tracking data used in Turkish judicial investigations. His framing is that it was a warning to protect the referees' own careers.

I sat with this detail for a long time. In my trade there is an unwritten rule: when someone says "I am saying this for your benefit", you immediately ask "and how is that benefit guaranteed". If protecting a referee's career sits next to the ability to access personal communication data, the line between advice and pressure becomes too blurred to measure.

A pattern spanning years, not a one-off incident

This story does not begin today. The investigation content shows a group of referees who were reinstated in 2026 through a ruling by the arbitration body, then excluded from the list again in 2026. More than twelve individuals are named in that multi-year exclusion pattern. Some referees who officiated matches involving Trabzonspor in 2026 are also in the group later excluded.

Numbers tell what has passed. The dressing room tells what is coming. Here, both are telling the same story: the recurrence of the same group across the 2026 and 2026 cycles suggests a power struggle inside the refereeing apparatus, not simple professional decisions.

When an independent arbitration body issues a reinstatement and the appointing authority then reverses it, the question is no longer who was right in any single match. The question is that two institutions are speaking two different languages about the same truth. The arbitration body speaks in the language of procedure. The appointing authority speaks in the language of professional evaluation. And between those two languages, the referee is stuck.

The fact that some referees who officiated Trabzonspor-related matches in 2026 were excluded years later shows this story is bound tightly to Turkey's long-standing club-rivalry fault lines. In a country where every refereeing decision is read through a club lens, a list change will almost certainly be interpreted as favouring one club bloc, whatever professional rationale is offered.

The defensive structure: diffusing responsibility

The argument of "a collective decision, with TFF approval" is a familiar defensive structure. It shifts responsibility from an individual to a process. But that process has no automated safeguard to verify it.

This structure poses an interesting test. If the TFF endorses those decisions, the federation shares the risk. If the TFF disowns them, Gündoğdu is left alone. How the federation reacts will reveal more than any testimony about who really holds power in the referee-appointment system. In my years of observing, I have often seen organisations choose silence when silence is advantageous, and choose to speak when speaking is advantageous. This will be a similar test.

The notable point is that the defence never rebuts the substantive fairness concern. It only says everything happened within permitted boundaries. A valid procedural argument is not the same as a persuasive argument about justice.

The contrarian angle: the majority is misreading this story

Turkish public opinion is reading the case in two opposing directions, and both are hasty.

The first direction treats the testimony as proof of guilt. The second treats it as a plot by excluded referees. Both miss the most important point: an open investigation cannot yet conclude who is right. What has been established is not guilt, but a governance gap.

The blind spot lies here. People rush to judge a person, while the real problem lies in system design. A system that permits manual changes without an automated sanction will always generate suspicion, whoever heads it. Replace an individual while keeping the architecture, and the problem returns under a different name.

A substitute player knows more than five journalists combined. The same is true of a rarely appointed referee: they feel the power structure more clearly than anyone, because they live in its consequences. A referee dropped from the list does not need to read an investigation file to understand why. He only needs to look at the history of matches he has officiated.

There is a third reading, ignored by both camps. This case could be an opportunity for reform. The very admission that VETAS is non-mandatory creates legal pressure to institutionalise it. An integrity crisis, handled correctly, can become a catalyst for a more transparent appointment system. In sporting history, many of the biggest reforms were born not from vision, but from a scandal that could no longer be hidden.

Spillover effects: from the tunnel to the broadcast contract

Here I write from experience following matches and observing how clubs operate, not from a legal desk. That experience tells me one thing: trust in referees is the invisible infrastructure of an entire football ecosystem. When that infrastructure cracks, everything standing on it shakes.

If the crisis drags on, the first consequence is the referee supply. A profession whose practitioners feel their position depends on relationships rather than competence will struggle to attract young people. The second consequence is commercial confidence. Sponsors and broadcasters pay for a product assumed to be fair. When fairness is doubted, the value of that product declines, however slowly and immeasurably.

The third consequence, less discussed, is international credibility. A league suspected of lacking integrity in its adjudicating apparatus may draw attention from higher federations, though this article does not state it. In modern football, governance credibility is a form of capital, and that capital is lost faster than people think.

Busan taught me: silent observation says more than shouting. And what I observe here is a football nation asking itself whether it can trust its own adjudicating apparatus.

Three signals to watch next

The first signal is the judicial conclusion of the investigation file: a formal charge or a dismissal will close or expand the case.

The second signal is the TFF's stance on Gündoğdu and the MHK: backing or distancing will reveal how accountability is allocated.

The third signal is VETAS reform moves: a proposal to make it mandatory would be the most positive sign.

I will keep following further testimony, especially witnesses corroborating the HTS remarks. If multiple matching accounts emerge, the "warning" framing will struggle against the "undue influence" framing.

A mature football nation is not measured by the absence of scandal, but by how it repairs itself afterwards. Turkey stands before a choice not only about one person, but about the architecture of an entire system. The question is no longer who sits in the MHK president's chair, but whether that chair is still permitted to decide by hand.