Research Information System
15th European Sociological Association(ESA) Conference, Barcelona, Spain(Online), Barcelona, Spain, 31 August - 03 September 2021
Abstract
In general, amateurism in sport evokes sports activities based on purely sportive spirit with no pay. However, the situation in Turkey amateur football league, represents an exception of the general definition since 1950s. This “paid amateurism” practice became known to the public for the first time in 2020 following postponement of amateur football leagues due to Covid-19 pandemic by the Ministery of Youth and Sports of Turkey. Eight months after the decree, amateur football players held a protestation at the gate of Turkish Football Federation for the leagues to begin. The banner they carried at the protest, which was an unprecedented event, first in the Turkish sport history were telling that 70 thousand amateur football players had been in starvation for 8 months.
The paper aims to discuss the "precarity" phenomenon among Turkish Amateur Football Leagues in terms of both amateur players’ public manifestation and historical development of football in Turkey. The ampirical data of the study were compiled from local and national newspapers, comments of football players published in internet forums and social media sharings. As a result, study reveals that playing amateur football in Turkey is considered as waged work either in the form of fulltime or supplementary, rather than a purely leisure time activity. The most crucial problem for football players is the lack of secure job, public social security due to the lack of "written employment contracts", as is apparent during the Covid-19 epidemic process. Like the fractions of the working class working informal, a-typical and/or with temporary status amateur football players in Turkey too are highly vulnerable, invisible and deprived from an organized power.