The stadium is a place of concentration. What finds no space in everyday life gathers there. Emotions are not explained. They are released. Football is therefore never just a game. It is a social resonance space. Those who enter the stands bring more than club colors. They bring memories, frustrations, fears, and unresolved conflicts. In the chants and shouts of the terraces, what lies beneath society becomes visible.
The insults directed at Leyla Zana in a stadium in Bursa can only be understood in this context. They were not political analysis. They were not arguments. They were not a conscious position. They were affect. Loud, raw, collective. That is precisely why they matter. In stadiums, individuals are rarely the real target. Groups are.
In reality, the hatred was not directed at Leyla Zana herself. It was directed at Kurds as a whole. At their visibility, their history, their presence in public space. Leyla Zana served as a projection surface. Her name allowed a long-accumulated conflict to discharge itself without being spoken.
Stadiums function through simplification. Complexity disrupts them. Ambivalence is seen as weakness. The crowd demands clarity. Friend or enemy. Victory or defeat. Us or them. In this logic, there is no room for figures who mediate, remember, or ask questions. They disturb the affect. What disturbs is booed.
Fan aggression is rarely spontaneous. It is prepared. Not necessarily organized, but learned. Media play a key role in this process. Not through direct incitement, but through constant repetition of simplified narratives. Through headlines that moralize conflict. Through images that reproduce fear. Through debates in which volume replaces reflection.
The stadium becomes the final stop in a long chain of unreflected discourse. What is suggested during the day in commentaries, social media, and political speeches erupts in the evening from the stands. Not always consciously directed, but effective. Hatred rarely grows from information. It grows from repetition.
What matters most is what is not said in the stadium. There is no history. No responsibility. No solutions. Affect serves avoidance. It prevents a truth that is difficult to accept from being spoken: that the Kurdish question is not a security problem, but a social one. That it is politically solvable. That its persistence has more to do with denial than with terrorism.
Affect is convenient. It relieves pressure. It allows people not to remember, not to listen, not to negotiate. In affect, there is no responsibility. The individual disappears into the collective. Shouting replaces thinking. That is why stadiums are so vulnerable to projection.
Football fans are not perpetrators in a classical sense. They carry moods produced elsewhere. They act emotionally, not strategically. But emotions have political consequences. They shape reality. When entire stands shout in unison, a climate emerges in which dialogue becomes impossible.
This dynamic becomes especially visible when Kurdish teams play in western Turkey. Matches involving Amed Sport are one example. What meets there is not only two teams, but two expectations. For some, it is football. For others, a stage. At this point, it becomes clear whether sport connects or divides.
A stadium must not become a tribunal. It must not be a place where identity is negotiated. It must not serve as a substitute arena for political conflicts that have failed elsewhere. When Amed Spor plays, it should be about passes, movement, tactics, performance, and joy. About nothing else.
Football lives from recognition. From respect for the opponent. From appreciation of performance. When these principles collapse, the game loses its integrative power. It becomes a stage of exclusion. And thus, an extension of social division.
I have written for many years about violence, trauma, and peace processes. Again, and again, one insight returns. Peace is not only a political condition. It is a social learning process. It does not begin with agreements, but with the capacity to trust again. Societies shaped by decades of violence carry that violence into language, gestures, and collective emotions. It does not disappear when weapons fall silent. It relocates.
In this sense, the insults against Leyla Zana were less a political statement than an expression of unresolved history. The Kurdish question is not only political. It is psychological. It touches identity, guilt, fear, and loss of control. Noise in the stadium protects against this confrontation. It replaces it.
A look beyond the border shows that things can be different. Only a few kilometers away, in Zakho in northern Iraq, there is a football club whose fans were honored by FIFA for their extraordinary fan culture. They are passionate, loud, and creative, but not hateful. There, people celebrate rather than humiliate. The opponent remains an opponent, not an enemy. Football becomes a space of belonging, not exclusion.
This contrast is instructive. It shows that aggression in stadiums is not a natural law. It is learned. It is guided. It is politically functionalized. Where societies fail to make peace with themselves, football also becomes hostile. Where conflicts are suppressed rather than processed, they seek other stages.
Turkey stands at a historical moment. The peace process is fragile, contradictory, and at risk. It requires more than political agreements. It requires cultural disarmament. A new language. A new understanding of belonging. Hate chants in stadiums are not marginal phenomena. They are warning signals. They reveal how deep resistance to change runs.
At this point, another question may be asked. Not a legal one. Not a tactical one. Not a political one. A question of courage.
What if the leadership of Bursaspor apologized to Leyla Zana? Not defensively. Not with explanations. Simply. For what happened in their stadium. For the space that was surrendered to uncontrolled affect.
And what if they invited her to attend a match? Not as a symbol. Not as a provocation. Not as a political gesture. But as a spectator. Someone sitting in the stands, watching a game. Ninety minutes of football. Passes, runs, duels, goals. Nothing more.
Perhaps that would be courage. Not loud declarations, but quiet restraint. Not amplifying the crowd, but stepping away from it. In a time when loudness is mistaken for strength, such a gesture could irritate. And precisely for that reason, it could matter.
It would not defeat anyone. It would not humiliate anyone. But it might open something. A moment in which football could again be what it is meant to be. A game. A place of encounter. A space where difference is visible without turning into hatred.
Perhaps peace does not begin with grand speeches, but with small interruptions. With the decision not to carry affect further. With the courage to let the ball roll again.
Dr. Jan Ilhan Kizilhan is a psychologist, author and publisher, an expert in psychotraumatology, trauma, terror and war, transcultural psychiatry, psychotherapy and migration.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.