The Reasonable Question

People who don't support a football club often ask the same question in slightly different forms: why do you care about something you can't influence, that you didn't rationally choose, that causes you genuine distress when it goes wrong, and whose players and executives you've never met and who don't know you exist?

It's a fair question. By almost any rational framework, football fandom is indefensible. You are emotionally invested in the performance of adults who are paid to play a game, employed by a corporation, and whose connection to the city or community they represent is increasingly nominal. The Stoic in me — the part that keeps asking "is this in your control?" — should want no part of it.

And yet. Galatasaray. Non-negotiable.

How It Starts (It's Never Rational)

Nobody chooses their football club the way they choose a phone or a car. You inherit it, absorb it, catch it from someone around you before you're old enough to make the decision deliberately. It happens at an age when identity is still forming and something large and emotional and communal just attaches itself to you.

By the time you're old enough to interrogate it, it's already structural. The colors, the sound of a specific crowd, the particular quality of feeling when the ball goes in — these aren't acquired tastes. They're imprints.

This is why the "just stop caring" advice from rational people misses the point. You might as well tell someone to just stop being from wherever they're from. The club is part of the geography of self even when the self has moved physically across several countries.

What Football Actually Is

Football — real football, the kind that matters — is one of the last contexts in modern life where pure loyalty without transaction is still normal. You don't support Galatasaray because they give you something. You support them because you support them. The commitment precedes and survives the results.

This is increasingly rare. Most of what we call loyalty today is conditional on value delivery. Customer loyalty. Brand loyalty. Even friendships are often implicitly transactional in ways we don't acknowledge. Football fandom is different. It's the commitment that doesn't require justification, that survives losing seasons and bad transfers and decisions that make no sense, because the commitment isn't to the outcomes — it's to the thing itself.

There's something philosophically interesting about a form of loyalty that is explicitly not outcome-dependent. The Stoics were right that attachment to outcomes causes suffering. But they weren't arguing for non-commitment. Marcus Aurelius was fully committed to Rome — he just tried not to be undone by things he couldn't control within that commitment.

The Suffering Is the Point

The games where Galatasaray win comfortably are pleasant. The games where they come back from two goals down in the last ten minutes produce something else entirely — a quality of feeling that I can't access anywhere else. The suffering isn't a bug. It's what makes the other thing real.

I've tried explaining this to people who find it baffling. The closest analogy is cooking something difficult. You could eat a ready meal. The outcome — calories consumed — would be similar. But it would mean nothing. The difficulty and the uncertainty and the possibility of failure are what give the result its character.

Football, done right, is something you do with your whole nervous system. That's not an argument for it being rational. It's an argument for it being alive.

The Stoic Asterisk

I'm aware of the contradiction. Everything in my reading of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius should point toward not caring about results I can't control. And I hold both things simultaneously: the Stoic framework is useful everywhere I've tried it, and it doesn't apply here, and I'm fine with that inconsistency.

Not every framework needs to cover every part of life. The dichotomy of control is an excellent tool for work, for relationships, for decisions under uncertainty. For a 90-minute match in Istanbul with the title on the line — I don't want the distance. I want to be entirely there, caring completely, with no philosophical buffer between me and what's happening on the pitch.

Cim Bom.