‘It was mayhem’: The day Graeme Souness planted a Galatasaray flag in Fenerbahce’s pitch

Brad Friedel is recalling one of Turkish club football’s most iconic and controversial moments.

Nearly 30 years ago, the then Galatasaray goalkeeper was celebrating a cherished Turkish Cup final triumph over arch rivals Fenerbahce when he saw manager Graeme Souness jogging towards the centre circle holding a giant flag in the club’s red and yellow colours.

“I just thought: ‘Graeme, what the ‘f’ are you doing?’,” Friedel, the former USMNT international, tells The Athletic. “I was laughing because the pole wouldn’t go into the ground initially. He had to have a few goes at it. The pole only stayed in the ground for a few seconds before someone took it out, but that was enough. It was symbolic. From that moment on, it was mayhem.”

Friedel’s Galatasaray team-mate Dean Saunders, who had scored the extra-time winner to secure a hard-fought 2-1 victory on aggregate, was equally incredulous given that they were inside the hostile confines of Fenerbahce’s Sukru Saracoglu Stadium on the Asian side of Istanbul.

“Souey ran past me with the flag and I just said to him: ‘All the best’,” he tells The Athletic. “I watched him do it thinking: ‘Oh my God, this isn’t going to go down well’. And you know what, it didn’t. Before you knew it, their fans were trying to get over the fences onto the pitch. As if losing a cup final to their biggest rivals in their own ground so late on wasn’t bad enough, Souey’s celebrations pushed them over the edge.”

It was April 24, 1996, and Galatasaray had salvaged something significant from a difficult season that ended with them finishing fourth in the Turkish League, 16 points behind champions Fenerbahce. They had also been knocked out of the UEFA Cup in the preliminary round by Sparta Prague.

Souness’ incendiary gesture had been triggered by the sight of the Fenerbahce vice-president, who had made derogatory remarks about him to the media earlier in the campaign. The Scotsman had accepted the opportunity to manage Galatasaray in June 1995 after 17 months out of work following the unravelling of his managerial reign at Liverpool.

“The guy had basically said: ‘What are Galatasaray doing giving the job to a cripple?’. He was referring to the open heart surgery I’d had a few years earlier, which I thought was unkind,” Souness explained at a Q&A event in Liverpool, attended by The Athletic, in December 2023.

“After we won the final, all our players ran down to the end where our supporters were. This big flag was handed over and the players took turns waving it. When it was my turn, I gave it a few waves, but when I turned to hand it to someone else, they had all run up to the halfway line.

“So I’m jogging up there with this flag when I see the face of that vice-president in the directors’ box. It was a moment of: ‘I’ll show you’. When I saw their fans’ reaction after I’d done it, I realised maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.

“When I managed to get under the shields of the police and into the tunnel, I was thinking: ‘I got away with that one’. But then I got clunked on the side of the head by a Fenerbahce fan who had got into the tunnel. I ended up having a bit of a tussle with him before eventually getting back to the safety of the dressing room.”

Turkish football has always been volatile, but even so, this was off the scale.

Saunders, who played for Souness at three clubs, including Liverpool, got an early sense of how emotions can run high when he arrived in Istanbul to sign from Aston Villa in the summer of 1995.

“There were thousands of Gala fans waiting in the airport,” he recalls. “I played in some derbies — Liverpool vs Everton, Swansea vs Cardiff, Aston Villa vs Birmingham City, Benfica vs Sporting. But Galatasaray vs Fenerbahce was on another level in terms of the passion and how fierce it was. You couldn’t hear yourself think.”

Saunders top-scored for Galatasaray that season with 21 goals, and none meant more than the ones he notched in that cup final. His first, scored from the penalty spot in Galatasaray’s home leg, had handed the club a slender 1-0 advantage, but it was a deficit Fenerbahce were still tipped to overturn.

“The context of that night is very important,” says the experienced Istanbul-based sports journalist Banu Yelkovan. “Fenerbahce were widely expected to win the cup. They had a very strong squad and were playing the second leg at home in Kadikoy in front of a full house.”

Aykut Kocaman soon wiped out the deficit in front of his home fans, but Galatasaray did not stick to the script. Instead, after Friedel had made a string of superb saves to preserve parity, Saunders struck again four minutes from the end of extra time to win it and set up Souness’ moment of history.

“For Fenerbahce, losing the trophy to their arch-rivals triggered serious concern,” Yelkovan recalls. “What followed was chaotic. But that chaos is precisely why the moment survived. Turkish football remembers scenes more than results. And that night in Kadikoy produced one of the most unforgettable images the rivalry has ever seen. I think even Souness did not know the importance of what he did back then. But he realised afterwards.”

For Ohio-born Friedel, it was the first major honour of his professional career and a trophy presentation like no other.

“When we came back out to get the cup, we were surrounded by riot police who were holding up their shields to protect us from all the missiles being thrown by their fans. There were fights breaking out in the tunnel.

“We must have then spent three hours in the dressing room waiting for it to be safe for us to leave. When we finally got on our team bus, their fans were trying to tip it over. Windows were shattered by rocks and beer bottles.

“I just remember Graeme pulling back the curtain and putting up two fingers to their fans as we drove off. It was only in the years after that I heard Graeme explain why he planted the flag after seeing that board member. It all made a lot more sense to me then.

“Nobody had ever planted a Gala flag in the middle of Fenerbahce’s pitch before that and nobody has done it since. It’s why they still sell T-shirts and have tifos in the stadium about it.”

Souness had expected to be “sacked on the spot and given a plane ticket home”, but was pleasantly surprised by the reaction of the Galatasaray hierarchy.

“I’ve never been hugged and kissed by so many men,” he recalled. “Some of them had tears in their eyes. They were delighted to have won the cup and even more delighted that I’d planted that flag. I can’t regret it.”

Yelkovan is well placed to explain why that confrontational gesture continues to resonate so greatly three decades on.

“The rivalry between these two clubs is unlike almost anything else in football and nobody forgets anything,” she says. “Here, the intensity is built on something unusual. It is not about religion, class, language or ethnicity. The fans live in the same city, often the same neighbourhoods, sometimes the same families.

“Symbolism matters. A gesture like planting a flag in the opponent’s stadium becomes bigger than the match itself. It instantly became part of Turkish football mythology. The photo of Souness planting the flag in the centre circle is still one of the most reproduced images in the rivalry.

“The symbolism was irresistible for Galatasaray fans. Very quickly, he was given the nickname ‘Ulubatli Souness’, referencing Ulubatli Hasan — the legendary soldier said to have planted the first Ottoman flag on the walls of Constantinople in 1453. For Fenerbahce fans, understandably, he represents the opposite side of that mythology. He is a man who celebrated a victory in the most provocative place possible. So admiration on one side of Istanbul, and a certain level of resentment on the other.”

One Fenerbahce fan known as ‘Rambo’ subsequently tried to exact revenge by hiding inside Galatasaray’s ground and getting on to the pitch before a derby fixture with a flag and a knife before being apprehended. “He was trying to create his own version of a derby legend, but it became like a caricatural version,” Yelkovan adds.

A change of club president in the summer of 1996 ensured that Souness’ Galatasaray reign wasn’t extended into a second season, as legendary Turkish coach Fatih Terim took over. It was the start of a glorious period for the Istanbul club, featuring four successive league titles and a UEFA Cup triumph of 2000.

Saunders and Friedel also moved on at the end of the 1995-96 season. “I went back to Istanbul not long ago to play in a golf tournament and the reception I got when I met Galatasaray fans blew me away,” Saunders says. “That cup final still means so much to them. They don’t forget.

“What a team we had. Tugay, who later went to Blackburn, was a great player. We also had Okan Buruk, who is the current Galatasaray manager, Hakan Sukur, Suat Kaya, and Arif Erdem. There was the three-foreigner rule — me, Brad and Ulrich van Gobbel at the back.

“My son Callum, who played for Wales Under-21s, was born in Istanbul during that season. I remember the locals seemed even more pleased that I allowed my lad to be born over there than the fact I played football for them.”

Friedel was already the subject of strong interest from Liverpool in 1996, but work permit issues meant he went back to the U.S. to play for Columbus Crew before finally moving to the Premier League giants the following year. He returned to Istanbul for a short spell as sporting director of Besiktas in 2024 and still has an apartment in the city, as he also divides his time between the Bahamas and the UK.

“I love Istanbul to this day,” he says. “I just find the city absolutely remarkable. Where it’s located, spanning Europe and Asia, contributes to that. I was a history major at college and I studied the Ottoman Empire, so it was perfect for me. Great weather, incredible food, lovely people.”

After suffering the ignominy of their worst-ever league finish in 2021-22 (13th), Galatasaray are back at the top of Turkish football, having won three successive Super Lig crowns, and well placed to claim a fourth this term, given they are four points clear of second-placed Fenerbahce.

Tonight, they face Liverpool in the Champions League last 16, having already defeated them once in the league phase. But whatever happens in Rams Park — the ground they moved to in 2011 — it is unlikely to match the drama of 1996.

“It only lasted one season, but Graeme certainly left his mark,” Friedel says. “He’s a hero to those fans. Iconic moments live forever in Turkey and planting that flag 30 years ago was one for Galatasaray.”

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