Gamze Bal 
Trabzonspor host Drogheda United on 1 October. Behind what looks like a simple friendly lies a 20-year story. Go a little further back, and it is almost 200 years…
The loveliest part of this story is this: none of it was planned… There is no marketing idea, no project cooked up at a club table, no brotherhood with meaning bolted on afterwards.
In the summer of 2006, when forums still carried the whole weight of the internet and were at their liveliest, Bordomavi.net board member Tunga Liman noticed a club in Ireland with claret-and-blue colours and a crescent and star on its crest.
He is curious.
A tiny curiosity…
Then he follows it, he digs. The internet of that day is not like today’s. If you chased something, you really had to chase it… He finds Drogheda’s fan forum, signs up, writes to people, reaches the club, asks questions. And he carries what he learns, piece by piece, in real time, onto Bordomavi.net — and so to Trabzonspor fans.
A claret-and-blue club with a crescent and star.
In Ireland, no less…
Would a Trabzonspor fan sit still?
Of course not…
Trabzonspor fans go to the Drogheda forum; Drogheda fans come to BMN. Weekly match follow-ups, good wishes, swapping notes on club histories and trophies… Photographs are shared. Scarves start travelling. Shirts are sent. Shopping is done at TS Club and given as gifts to Irish people 4,500 km away whom they have never met. Fans who visit Ireland and unfurl a Trabzonspor scarf at a Drogheda match also break the physical barriers of contact.
Before long they start calling one another brothers. People take to their heart a team and a support they have never seen, in a city they have never visited. On one side Trabzonspor, on the other Drogheda United.
So was the first stitch of this story really only twenty years ago?
Perhaps much earlier…
Back in the 19th century, during the Great Famine that lasted years and killed more than a million Irish people.
In 1847, the famine’s cruellest year, the Ottoman Empire can no longer merely watch this human tragedy and offers Ireland £10,000 in aid. Because that would have outstripped Queen Victoria’s £2,000 gift, the offer is refused and only £1,000 can be sent. Sultan Abdülmecid still will not leave this starving people alone; three ships loaded with food and medicine set out for Ireland. For the secret historic aid to go through, the Ottoman ships sail further north — to the port of Drogheda… The crescent and star added to the town’s emblem later pass onto Drogheda United’s crest as well.
Is history doomed to repeat itself? I do not know. But it loves to rewrite itself, and it loves to show itself in the smallest moments…
In 2008 Drogheda fall into serious financial trouble.
News hitting the forums turns Drogheda’s crisis into a Trabzonspor fan’s own worry. Messages of support and help go from Turkey. Years later the Drogheda side tell it like this: money came out of the envelopes sent by Trabzonspor supporters…
You bind yourself to a city, a colour, a story, and then that bond stretches toward people you never expected. A team supported by people you have never seen, in another country, is in a bad way — and you do not stop at saying “what a shame”.
By 2010 the relationship fans had begun and kept up for four years is in front of both clubs. The embassy steps in, directors talk, and at last Trabzonspor and Drogheda United officially become sister clubs… Trabzonspor’s statement that day says: “The dialogue that first began among supporters has now reached an official level.”
In fact the whole story is in that sentence.
One person’s curiosity, over the years, turns into a relationship between two football clubs, a friendship between two cities, even a small piece of a diplomatic story between two countries. That is not to be shrugged off.
Those who followed it closely will remember: in 2013 the two teams had actually met again in Ireland for a friendly. Trabzonspor went to Dublin as a squad, delegations met, officials and businesspeople gathered — but Irish weather, as unpredictable as the Black Sea, seemed to feel these two northern clubs coming together, and a tremendous rain and storm caused the match to be called off.
Now this unfinished story, as Trabzonspor call it, is coming to Trabzon to open a new page, fully twenty years after first contact.
On 1 October Drogheda United come to Trabzon.
For the first time.
Perhaps Tunga Liman will be in the stand. Perhaps someone who, in those years, posted Drogheda’s score on the forum and did the translations. Perhaps someone who sent a scarf to Ireland, who sang together in Drogheda pubs. And perhaps thousands hearing this story today for the first time…
Old forum pages, usernames, broken English, envelopes, scarves, Trabzonspor fans who went to Ireland, Drogheda fans who celebrated Trabzonspor’s championship, a cancelled match and a friendship that will not be forgotten for years…
It does me good to know football still has sides like this.
All that transfer fuss, the rows, the millions, the necktie wars — set them aside: this is the real business of football.
The most important actor in football is the supporter, the passion of the people who give the game its soul.
Everyone and everything changes, transforms, traces are wiped. But the supporter’s memory remains, and that memory carries this sincere story of friendship into the present. And from here into the future…
How strange. This story, stitched stitch by stitch over twenty years, had actually begun with something tiny.
A man who loved Trabzonspor very much had looked a little more carefully at a crest…
Those memories on our forum are at this link: https://forum.bordomavi.net/forum/bmn-trabzonspor/mattia-ahmet-minguzzi-genel/2770-kardes-takimimiz-drogheda-united
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