When Turkey arrives in Santa Clara to face Paraguay in the World Cup Friday night, its most accomplished player in history will not be sitting in the stands, but he will be nearby.
Hakan Şükür will be watching up the road, in his living room in Mountain View, with his two cats Bella and Luna. He doesn’t feel safe attending the match, he said, because people connected to his home country’s security and intelligence agency may be present.
It is a surreal change for a man who once embodied Turkish soccer.
When Turkey last competed in the World Cup 24 years ago, Şükür was the team captain and led his country to an improbable third-place finish, while memorably scoring the fastest goal in tournament history (opens in new tab), a record that still stands.
But since 2016, Turkish authorities have sought to arrest Şükür over alleged links to the Gülen movement, a religious network the government designates as a terrorist organization and blames for that year’s failed coup (opens in new tab). Turkey’s all-time leading scorer has denied any involvement — yet has spent the years since in exile in the United States.
Once celebrated as a national hero — his first wedding was televised live — Şükür’s story offers a rare window into how political crackdowns can reach beyond borders, reshaping not only a country’s democracy but also the lives and memories of its most celebrated citizens.
“I can’t go home, so God brought [the team] here to San Francisco,” Şükür said with a laugh. “I’m excited. Anytime the national team is talked about at this level, my name comes up again.”
In 2011, three years after he retired from soccer, Şükür was elected to the Turkish parliament as a member of the ruling Justice and Development Party. But when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ascended to power and started remaking the republic into a more authoritarian state, Şükür spoke out repeatedly and began to face consequences.
First, his employment prospects dried up. Then his ailing father was jailed. His assets, along with those of his family and close friends, were frozen. In 2015, a year after Erdoğan was elected president, Şükür came to Northern California to explore new business opportunities and brought his wife and three children. The plan wasn’t to stay in America. But when Şükür was charged with “insulting” Erdoğan (opens in new tab) on Twitter in 2016, his family was left with no other option.
The Şükürs would never be able to return to their home country.
Around the 15th minute of Turkey’s opening World Cup game against Australia last week, Fox play-by-play announcer Jacqui Oatley started talking about Şükür’s goal-scoring record.
What seemed like a benign moment of banter between commentators did not go unnoticed in the Şükür house. During the previous World Cup in Qatar, a Turkish commentator was fired at halftime (opens in new tab) of a game between Morocco and Canada for mentioning Şükür’s name in passing.
The campaign to erase Şükür had grown both systematic and petty. Even Galatasaray — the renowned Turkish club where he made more than 400 appearances and won multiple trophies — scrubbed his name and image from its facilities and website. (This would be like the 49ers erasing any mention of Jerry Rice). And a 2022 Netflix documentary on the club’s legendary coach Fatih Terim omitted Şükür entirely — cutting his goals from archival footage and erasing him from team photographs, as if he had never existed.
“It was great timing for my kids to hear something positive about me around Father’s Day,” Şükür said, cracking a smile as his eldest daughter, now 26, walked into the garage where he had set up his YouTube studio, which he uses to post videos and interact with more than 162,000 subscribers, including some who pay to chat with him.
Şükür’s YouTube channel allows him to stay connected to Turkish life in an environment where there is a firewall around anything related to his name. His channel attracts supporters and agitators, whom he’ll engage with to remind people that disagreements are not bad.
“People are scared to say what they think in Turkey,” Şükür said. “It wasn’t always that way.”
In one corner of the garage, he painted the wall black and used credit to purchase lighting and equipment to give his videos a more professional look. Behind him, he displays his favorite memorabilia, including a State Medal he received in 2002 that was later revoked by Erdoğan.
“It is one-man power,” Şükür said of Erdoğan. “He’s turned our democratic system into a judicial system that he controls.”
But their relationship once looked vastly different.
Şükür was such a big star in Turkey back then that his first wedding in 1995 aired on national television. Erdoğan, then mayor of Istanbul, officiated over the ceremony while his future enemy, Fethullah Gülen, served as witness.
With distance, Şükür said he came to see Erdoğan’s mingling with athletes and celebrities as a cynical instrument of power.
“He’s manipulative,” Şükür said. “I foolishly allowed him to use me.”
For more than a decade since his exile, Şükür and his family have called a quiet Mountain View cul-de-sac home. The house is just minutes from Google’s headquarters. Out back, lemon, apple, and plum trees fill the yard, their fruit pressed by his wife Beyda into bottled drinks that line the studio fridge and greet every visitor.
During this period, Şükür has cobbled together different jobs and investments — including coaching soccer, owning a cafe (opens in new tab), and driving for Uber — to raise their children from immigrant teenagers into adults with American accents. Few people in the U.S. know who they are or how they got here, which has been a nice change of pace, Şükür said.
In Turkey, they had a much bigger house, a staff, and were always in the spotlight. But here in Silicon Valley, the Şükür children drive themselves around and attended community college before transferring to public universities.
“I think you’re a lot more independent here in America,” his daughter said, when asked what had changed most about her father. “And you’re a much safer driver!”
“I got a lot of tickets in those first years,” Şükür quipped back. “You Americans have a lot of rules on the road.”
Turkey lost to Australia 2-0 last week in its much-anticipated return to the World Cup after 24 years.
Turkish pundits, including Şükür, slammed the team’s approach, accusing them of being overconfident. On the day before kickoff, captain Hakan Çalhanoglu told the media (opens in new tab) that he thought Turkey would “dominate” because “we have more qualities and a more talented team.”
While the Turks did have plenty of possession, what they lacked — despite having their most talented generation of midfielders ever — was a true target man up front. On message boards, Turkish fans joked that Şükür should pop into the squad for a cameo appearance on Friday since he’ll be close by.
Had things not fallen out with Erdoğan, Şükür believes that he would have either been the country’s minister of sport or coach of the national team. Despite being blackballed by the Turkish federation, he remains a fan of the team and still talks to people involved with the program — who risk their reputations by contacting him.
“This is the generation that grew up idolizing me,” Şükür said, settling into a chair at a Peet’s Coffee on Castro Street in Mountain View hours before heading off to coach a youth soccer camp.
“[Çalhanoglu] was named after me,” he said. “I am incredibly proud of what these guys have accomplished at the club level.”
These days, the Turkish national team is filled with players from Real Madrid, Inter Milan, Juventus, AS Roma, and FC Porto. Some who’ve lived most of their lives outside of the country don’t even speak Turkish.
Back when Şükür was the star of the national team in the 1990s and 2000s however, he was the country’s most notable export to Europe.
Although he struggled to find the same success he had in Turkey, he always managed to return home a national hero. A third stint at Galatasaray from 2003 to 2008 saw him score 55 more goals before his retirement into media and politics.
Şükür said that before he left for America he was offered a clemency deal by Erdoğan in exchange for a public apology and a pledge of loyalty.
“Some of my teammates took it,” he said. “But I couldn’t. At what cost was it worth it to lie?”
There are many Turks across the diaspora’s ethnic and religious lines who privately agree with Şükür’s opposition to Erdoğan. But few, given the president’s brutal crackdown on dissidents, dare say so publicly, mostly out of fear for their loved ones or businesses back home.
Even some of Şükür’s friends, who helped him rebuild his life in the Bay Area, declined to be named in this story or photographed with him.
“It’s bullshit that politics from 10,000 miles away still affect us here in America,” said one Turkish friend, who owns several Bay Area restaurants.
The Standard contacted more than a dozen Turkish people of different backgrounds including academics, doctors, tech workers, and even lifelong Galatasaray fans, who all declined to appear in a story with Şükür. Even if their views were different from his, the optics could have devastating consequences in Turkey, those people said.
One friend, Sean Tekdemir, is proud of his association with Şükür. He invited Sukur to work as a guest coach at his youth soccer academy, Pro Elite Soccer Training.
At the turf fields just outside of Google’s Mountain View campus on Shoreline, the pair spends most weekday afternoons training local kids on dribbling and shooting drills. Over a decade, their tutelage has helped students earn athletic scholarships. Tekdemir’s ambition is to connect more serious local players to Europe using his and Şükür’s connections.
It is at these fields where, after hours of candid, sometimes dark conversation, that Şükür is most joyful. He’s 55, gray at the temples, and no longer runs — but it’s clear that the World Cup legend still enjoys the competitive nature of the game.
In a recent five-on-five scrimmage between his students, Şükür played on the girls’ team against the boys. He placed himself as a defender so that he could see the entire field and bark out instructions to his teammates.
In the final moments, with the game tied 5-5, he looked up and dribbled through four defenders before slapping a long-range shot into the goal. The boys cried foul and said it was unfair. Şükür responded by saying they should never be intimidated by an opponent.
He took pictures with kids and answered questions about the World Cup and European soccer with a smile, always ending the conversation with a reminder to “dream big and work hard.”
Afterward, he went home to cool off in the garage with one of Beyda’s ice-cold juices.
On Friday, she will take their daughters to the World Cup game in Santa Clara while he stays home. He asked his eldest how she thought she’d feel watching her country play in-person for the first time in over a decade.
“Conflicted,” she said. “Probably a little heartbreaking because everything, you know, that happened to you.”
“But I hope they win.”
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