| Summary/Abstract |
The upgrading of Başakşehir from a quarter to a district is related to the transformation of İstanbul Başakşehir Football Club from a football club into a politico-cultural project carried out capitalist cronies attached to the governing (Justice and Development Party). ‘Rent-seeking’ activities in cultural areas are usually neglected or, if anything, considered the indirect results of developments in the financial or economic field. Sports in general and football in particular are the best examples of this omission. This article is directed towards filling this gap by taking Başakşehirspor as a venue to explore how ‘rent-seeking relations’ expand and gain a foothold in culturally-oriented economic fields in order to bolster their already established control over networks of cronies in the political and economic system. In the literature, a common characteristic of crony capitalism, network formation, has not received sufficient attention. The available research, focusing on whether crony capitalism merely replaces corruption, clientelism, or both, overlooks certain kinds of methodological approaches that could be fruitful, such as network analysis. An analysis of how this network revolves around Başakşehir and of its transformation under AKP governance will provide a basis to show how Başakşehirspor replicates the same practices of network formation.
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