Football and its ideological functions during the first years of the modern Turkish Republic: Nationalist discourses in the football news on the national press

Football, shortly after it emerged as a modern sport in England in the middle of the 19th century, has begun to spread around the world and turned out to be the most popular of all types of sports. At the end of the same century, football was played for the first time by the Englishmen on the Ottoman soils, which are now bordered by the Republic of Turkey, and again in a short while it started to attract the interest of the Turkish people, hence many important Turkish football clubs were established in the beginning of the 20th century, one after another. Meanwhile, nationalism is an ideology that is on the rise worldwide for the most of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. During the period when the Ottoman Empire collapes and the modern Turkish Republic was finally established in 1923, nationalism was perhaps the ideology that was the most influential on politicians of that period. The current study focuses on how the efforts of the creation of a new national identity in the newly established Turkish Republic in the first half of the 20th century are reflected upon the symbols from the matches of the Turkish national football team and examines how these are discussed on the columns of three important newspapers of that period, namely Akşam, Cumhuriyet and Vakit.