The İstanbul Public Prosecutor’s Office said Friday it had ordered the detention of 46 people, among them 29 footballers, as part of a sprawling investigation into illegal betting on Turkish matches. Thirty-five people have been detained so far.
Among the players, 27 are suspected of having bet on matches involving their own teams, the public prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
One was Metehan Baltacı, who plays for reigning Turkish champions Galatasaray, it said. Earlier this month, he had been suspended for nine months over the betting scandal.
The investigation has rocked Turkish football, with six referees placed in pretrial detention on November 10, along with the president of Eyüpspor, a club in Turkey’s top Super Lig division.
— İstanbul Cumhuriyet Başsavcılığı (@istanbulCBS) December 5, 2025
Prosecutors did not identify the 26 other players suspected of bets involving their own teams, but said Mert Hakan Yandaş, who plays for Fenerbahçe, another major İstanbul club, had placed bets through someone else’s account.
The prosecutor’s office said police had so far detained 35 of 46 people named in the arrest order. Five were known to be currently abroad, it said.
Zero goal attempts
Two club presidents were among those targeted by the order for “attempting to influence the outcome” of a match between their two third-division teams in the 2023-2024 season, the statement said.
The match had caught the attention of investigators because neither side had even made one attempt to score a goal, Turkish media reported, with several newspapers saying that was where the entire investigation began.
Six other suspects, one of them a player, are accused of conspiring to influence the result of a second-division clash between Ümraniyespor and Giresunspor in December 2023.
A first-division referee, the former president of second-division side Adana Demirspor and a well-known football commentator and his wife were also targeted for “suspect financial transactions” in their bank accounts.
Media reports identified some of the other detainees as football commentator Ahmet Çakar; former Adana Demirspor chairman Murat Sancak; referee Zorbay Küçük; and Konyaspor’s Senegalese winger Alassane Ndao, who was reportedly taken into custody on suspicion of betting on his own match.
Mehmet Emin Katipoğlu, the president of Ankaraspor and a figure known for his ties to former Ankara mayor Melih Gökçek, was also detained.
Footage on social media showed Çakar being escorted by police officers for a routine medical examination at an İstanbul hospital.
Çakar said he did not know why he had been taken into custody when asked by a reporter.
Football commentator Ahmet Çakar is among 35 people detained so far in an expanding illegal betting investigation. Çakar said he did not know why he had been taken into custody when asked by a reporter as police escorted him to a routine medical examination in #Istanbul . pic.twitter.com/M1e457zk0k
— Turkish Minute (@TurkishMinuteTM) December 5, 2025
So far, the Turkish Football Federation (TFF), which has said it wants to “clean up the beautiful game” in Turkey, has suspended more than 1,000 players, 25 of them from the Super Lig, with the sanctions ranging from 45 days to 12 months.
Only one was a foreign national — Konyaspor’s Ndao, who was suspended for 12 months.
In October, the TFF suspended nearly 150 referees for betting on matches, all of whom have since been dismissed.
Turkish Minute, with reporting from Agence France-Presse