The Homeless World Cup and the Turkish-Kurdish conflict

Until I watched the film "The Beautiful Game" on Netflix, I didn't know there was a 'Homeless World Cup Tournament' in the world.

It turns out there is.

It doesn't get much coverage in Turkey, but there is a 'homeless' population in developed Western countries, and their numbers are in the hundreds of thousands. In almost every developed Western city, it is possible to encounter these homeless people living in cardboard or nylon shelters while walking down the streets. New York, London, Paris, Tokyo are all full of such needy people.

When the problem is this large, various non-governmental organizations emerge to help the homeless, publishing newspapers and organizing to assist them. One example of these newspapers is published in England as "The Big Issue," and the proceeds go to people in need. There are also some newspapers published for similar charitable purposes in Istanbul.

Mel Young, the founder of "The Big Issue" in England, met with his friend Harald Schmied, who prepared a similar newspaper, at an international meeting in Austria about 20 years ago. While drinking beer in the evening, an interesting idea came to their minds. Mel Young describes it as follows:

“My friend Harald and I were attending the annual conference of the International Network of Street Papers in Graz, Austria. We drank beer and talked about how we could change the world. The meeting we attended was important, but there wasn't a single homeless person at the meeting."

This situation—the idea of bringing homeless people together in an international setting—stuck in their minds, and they asked themselves the following question:

How can we include the homeless in this inspiring international environment that we live in?

After long discussions, the idea of football, the universal language, came to their minds. At the end of the night, they invented the Homeless World Cup, where teams from all over the world could represent their countries in a week-long street football tournament.

The first Homeless World Cup was held 18 months later, in July 2003, in the city of Graz, Austria. Since that day, the Homeless World Cup has been held all over the world until the pandemic, and homeless people from different countries come together every year to play football.

And that is what the Netflix film “The Beautiful Game” is about.

The film is very beautiful and has an emotional content; I think you shouldn't miss it, you won't regret it.

Turkey is not represented in the tournament in the film, and later I researched and found that Turkey is not part of the Homeless World Cup Organization. Perhaps because there isn't a homeless population in Turkey of the same scale as in Western countries, no one has participated in this tournament representing Turkey to date. It goes without saying that to participate in the tournament, the players must truly be homeless people living on the streets.

There is no Turkish team in the film, but there is the issue of Turks and Kurds.

I don't want to give too much away, but in the film, the captain of the Italian team is a Middle Eastern immigrant of Turkmen descent, and his nickname is 'Turk'.

One of the players on the England team is a Syrian Kurd.

The screenwriters of the film portray the two players in a fight and even a war, as if Turks and Kurds are in a state of conflict at every moment.

It is very clear how unpleasant it is for Turks and Kurds to be perceived this way abroad, but unfortunately, events fuel such a perception; even the images of what Diyarbakır teams have experienced in certain cities are proof of this situation. This film alone is an indication that as long as this problem in Turkey is not solved, the issue will continue to confront us in different environments in the future.

Let's return to the subject of homelessness.

The Turkish-Kurdish issue aside, it is a fact that some people in Turkey also live on the streets; a large number of people spend the night on the streets in certain districts of Istanbul. If there are such needy people, shouldn't we also send a representative to the 'International Homeless World Cup'?

Since journalists started this initiative in the international arena, it seems the duty in this regard falls to Turkish journalists.