The on-pitch punch that proves the ‘beautiful game’ is anything but...

It is not often that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sounds like the voice of calm. But he was talking about football. And right now, football is mad enough to make the most unhinged dictator seem like a model of reason and rationality in comparison.

On Monday night, the Turkish Lig was suspended indefinitely after a referee was punched and kicked at the end of a game, his face swelling even as he was pictured leaving the field. However Halil Umut Meler, the official concerned, was not attacked by a player or a rogue supporter who had invaded the pitch. He was the victim of a right hook delivered by the president of one of the clubs involved.

MKE Ankaragucu were playing Caykur Rizespor at the Eryaman Stadium in the capital Ankara, in a match broadcast live on Turkish television. Ankaragucu had taken an early lead and looked as if they were heading for three points. Well into added time, however, the visitors scored. After the final whistle had blown, several players surrounded the referee to make their point about him adding too much injury time, thus allowing the late equaliser.

So far, so normal. Many a match these days end in a flurry of aggrieved complaint. Things, though, quickly escalated. From nowhere a man in a smart leather jacket approached the ref and, his face contorted in fury, punched him hard on the side of the face. As Meler fell to the ground, another man kicked him in the head. All this was broadcast across the nation, while professional sports photographers snapped away from myriad angles.

It was as ugly a moment as could be imagined. Meler is Turkey’s foremost referee. This season he has already officiated three Champions League games and last year took charge of West Ham’s Europa Conference League semi-final against AZ Alkmaar, a game after which the London club’s chairman David Sullivan did not feel the need to punch him.

Koca, who ironically was awarded one of the Turkish league’s fair play awards last season, however felt differently. And as was escorted off the pitch after throwing his punch, someone attacked him. Overnight it was revealed by the Turkish Interior Minister that he was in an Ankara hospital, under the watchful attentions of the security services, with detention procedures to follow.

It was an assault that sparked uproar. The Turkish Lig was suspended indefinitely, with all of this weekend’s games cancelled. The condemnation of Koca’s action was widespread, articulated by the country’s President who quickly put out a statement on X:

“Sports mean peace and brotherhood,” Erdogan wrote. “Sports are incompatible with violence. We will never allow violence to take place in Turkish sports.”

And he had a point. Politics might involve reacting to an attempted coup by rounding up thousands of members of the opposition and slinging them in prison indefinitely even though they had nothing to do with it. But football should be above such violence and repression. It should be an expression of joy.

Doubtless Koca will be lying on his hospital bed, or maybe by now sitting in his prison cell, full of remorse, aware of how badly he let down the club of which he was the figurehead and the game as a whole. Indeed it is hard to recall a leading sporting figure behaving like that. We have had an association chairman trying to sneak kisses off women players; we have had countless examples of directors with their hands in the till, plus several leaders of Fifa who have hardly been exemplars of probity. Now we have punching the ref to add to this truly insalubrious list of grievances.

Yet here’s the thing: Koca was behaving not as an authority figure. He was acting like a fan. And this is what being a fan does to you: it makes you behave in the most ludicrous fashion. Football has the ability to strip those watching from the sidelines of all common sense. The emotional investment in your team’s performance undermines rationality. And the referee, the figure attempting to arbitrate between two competing sides, is almost invariably the target for blame and abuse.

It was ever thus. The man in black has, almost since the game was first played, been a useful scapegoat for your own side’s inadequacies. Not just at professional games, for long soundtracked by the chant of “you’re not fit to referee”, either.

The late Sir Michael Parkinson used to tell an anecdote of the time he was watching one of his sons play in a junior game on a local park. So over-wrought was he by a referee he deemed to be incompetent, at one point he ran on to the pitch to confront him. So angry was he (“I was determined to punch him,” he would recall), that the ref immediately took flight and ran off the pitch, into the car park.

Parkinson chased after him, then continued his pursuit as the ref legged it down the nearby high street. It was only after he stopped, panting, some mile from the sports ground, that the great man realised the absurdity of his actions and took himself sheepishly back to the pitch, where the game had been abandoned.

These days, social media, the breeding ground of many a conspiracy theory, has only exacerbated the issues. On X a former sports correspondent for a national newspaper is forever tweeting rants about the manner in which the English referee community is somehow conspiring against his team Arsenal. And he is not alone: social media has become the place where fans can vent their assumptions about official policy to do their club down.

No doubt it is the same in Turkey. No doubt Koca, inflamed by what he had witnessed, was charged by righteous fury. Given access to the pitch, which is denied the ordinary fan, he was able to deliver his verdict. It was horrible to watch, stupid and unnecessary. But it was also football. Not so much the beautiful game as the one that sends its adherents increasingly doolally.