Sitting on his return flight to Ljubljana, his mission accomplished, Slavko Vincic might have wondered if this is as close as a 45-year-old Slovenian football referee can come to feeling like Jason Bourne, or Eliot Ness, or maybe even — pushing the parallel to its absolute extreme — Batman.

Forty-eight hours earlier, he had touched down in Istanbul. The outline of his assignment was clear. He was to get in, dispense justice, and get out. There were to be no loose ends, no mistakes. He was not to attract attention. He was not to make any enemies, but he was not there to make any friends. The job had to be clean and it had to be quick.

And that, more or less, was how it had gone. Vincic had been hired to referee the Intercontinental derby, the venomous, pyretic meeting of Galatasaray and Fenerbahce in the Turkish Super Lig; in doing so, he had become the first foreign official to take charge of a Turkish league game in more than half a century.

It had gone, all things considered, pretty well. The bar for success was fairly low: the game had been played to completion, which in the circumstances represented a considerable triumph. It was probably for the best that it had finished as a goalless stalemate, featuring just the seven yellow cards and no especially enduring controversies.

But that is not to say it was easy. Vincic was, at one point, forced to delay the game as fans hurled flares at each other in the stands and police struggled to restore order. There was one unseemly squabble between the two teams’ coaching staffs; in the aftermath, Galatasaray said they would lodge a formal complaint accusing the Fenerbahce manager, Jose Mourinho, of making “racist statements”. Fenerbahce say Mourinho’s comments were taken “completely out of context and deliberately distorted” and they are weighing up legal action of their own.

The Turkish Football Federation had, by all accounts, paid Vincic somewhere in the region of €10,000 (£8,300, $10,500) — as well as granting him a per diem allowance of €800 — for his work. Given the stress involved, he might be inclined to raise his fee just a little next time. And there will, unfortunately, be a next time.

Vincic’s cameo as a whistle-for-hire should serve as an alarm bell, one that should ring loud not just in Turkey but across global football. That it was deemed necessary to recruit an outsider to take charge of the Super Lig’s grandest fixture should not be seen as a bold innovation, a blueprint, a precedent for others to follow. It is none of those things. Instead, it is a nadir, a harbinger, a warning of what is to come.

The road that brought Vincic to Istanbul is a long, winding and troubling one. Turkish football disappeared, long ago, down the rabbit hole. The Super Lig has, for years, been awash with paranoia and suspicion and what might kindly be described as a tendency towards conspiracism.

All three of Istanbul’s great powers — Galatasaray, Fenerbahce and Besiktas — have long believed they are being actively undermined by shadowy forces intent on helping their rivals. Trabzonspor, the largest team from outside Istanbul, are convinced they are oppressed by the power of those three clubs. Everyone else feels things are rigged in favour of an elite that often includes Trabzonspor.

In recent years, though, something has changed. The conspiracy theories that always bubbled beneath the surface have reached a boiling point, their toxic fumes engulfing and slowly asphyxiating the league.

In 2023, the president of Ankaragucu stormed onto the field and punched a referee in the head. The same month, the president of Istanbulspor ordered his players to abandon a game after they were not awarded what he believed was an obvious penalty. The following year, Fenerbahce became so convinced of their victimhood that they threatened to leave the league entirely.

And then, earlier this month, Adana Demirspor were ordered to abandon a game against Galatasaray in protest against a decision to award a penalty to their opponents. The club released a statement decrying the “systematic, deliberate referee errors and injustice” they had suffered; the penalty was, they made clear, the final straw. Remarkably, Fenerbahce — a team who were not, you will notice, involved in the game — quickly produced their own statement, accusing Galatasaray of “deceiving” referees and fans in a variety of ways. “Thanks to you there is neither trust nor justice left in Turkish football,” it concluded.

That was the backdrop which ended with both clubs and the Turkish federation concluding the only way the Intercontinental derby could be played was under the auspices of a foreign referee — someone untarnished, unimpeachable. Vincic, referee at last year’s Champions League final, was selected, anointed as the last honest man in the game.

There is a tendency, certainly within the rest of Europe, to treat Turkish football as a special case, to see in it an inherent and unavoidable otherness. It is wild and exotic and essentially alien, not so much an extreme as an outlier. That Orientalising approach is comforting, but it is also misleading. Turkey is not on a different path. It is just further down the road.

Earlier this month, Real Madrid sent a four-page letter to Spain’s football authorities outlining the club’s avowed belief that the country’s refereeing system is “completely flawed” and alleging that “decisions against Real Madrid have reached a level of manipulation and adulteration of the competition that can no longer be ignored”.

El escándalo mundial sigue creciendo.

— Real Madrid C.F. (@realmadrid) February 3, 2025

For clarity: this was not a group of fans, stung by disappointment and defeat, venting their darkest suspicions; it was not a manager or a player, still slick with sweat, claiming without a conclusive body of proof that standards have slipped; it was a club, at an institutional level, writing in exhaustive detail what it seems to believe sincerely is evidence that it is the victim of a wide-ranging conspiracy.

A few days later — and with rather less fanfare — Milan announced their intention to do something similar, writing to the organisation that oversees referees in Serie A to complain that the league’s officials were not showing sufficient “respect” to their players (quite what this meant is not, admittedly, immediately apparent). “For us, it’s an unacceptable situation,” as Zlatan Ibrahimovic, now an all-purpose executive at Milan, put it.

To his credit, Ibrahimovic at least chose his words more carefully than Pablo Longoria, Marseille’s president, this weekend. Longoria was caught on film — initially, at least; after a while, he was fully aware he was being recorded — ranting about “corruption” among France’s referees after his team had a player dismissed in a 3-0 defeat at Auxerre.

“If Marseille has a proposal to join a Super League, we will go right away,” Longoria said. The league, he suggested, was “rigged”. His coach, Roberto De Zerbi, was only a little more measured, suggesting the standard of refereeing in France is so poor that he would not take another job in the country. “If French people are happy with this level of decision-making, then good for them,” he said.

Longoria has subsequently tried, with what might charitably be described as limited success, to tone down his comments — corruption has a different meaning in Spanish to French, apparently, though he did not specify what it was; he does not actually think French football is rigged — but the damage, in more ways than one, is done.

Just as in Turkey, it is now clear that a strain of conspiracism runs through much of European football. It is not just fans who believe they are the victims of institutional bias, but executives and presidents and those who should know better, too. Worse still, they are now willing to say the quiet part out loud, to stoke the flames, to weaponise their suspicions.

The counter-argument is that Italy and France still bear the scars of actual corruption scandals, while Spain has its own ongoing case to deal with. Marseille’s sole European Cup win is tainted by the allegations of match-fixing against the club’s former president, Bernard Tapie, and Serie A is still recovering from the effects of Calciopoli. In Spain, investigations are ongoing into Barcelona’s payments to a prominent refereeing chief, though those involved all deny any wrongdoing.

Sometimes, conspiracies are real; just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you, as Joseph Heller and/or Kurt Cobain put it. But that does not justify the liberal scattering of allegations of malfeasance; if anything, it makes it all the more important that they are only made when there is actual evidence.

And, despite what they may say, none of the clubs crying foul have anything approaching that. Instead, they have only proof in the Do Your Own Research mould, a set of cherry-picked facts that have either been stripped of context or deliberately misinterpreted.

This appears to be an affliction of the modern age, a trope that can be traced back in large part to social media and has attained the power to overturn governments and rewrite even recent history. Football has been subjected to what might, in other contexts, be described as a process of radicalisation.

And while the consequences for the game are not perhaps quite as dire as they are for, picking an example at random, the nation state of Ukraine, they are still severe.

Most immediately is the precedent Vincic has set. He was still talking to Mourinho in his dressing room after the Intercontinental derby when Trabzonspor requested that he officiate their games against Fenerbahce and Galatasaray, too. It is hard not to see their point; why should only two teams be guaranteed what Mourinho has called his “credibility”? He is, it seems likely, going to be a busy man.

But that is just the start. Jeremy Stinat, the referee who provoked Marseille’s ire, had the tyres on both his and his wife’s cars slashed even before Longoria’s rant; there have been reports in France that there was some sort of intrusion at his home after the game, too. It is uncomfortable to imagine quite where that might eventually lead.

The most pernicious danger, though, is also the one that is least tangible. The ultimate consequence of the suspicion that suffuses Turkish football is a suspension of belief. So many fans, coaches and executives have come — or been led — to believe the league lacks integrity and that its meaning has started to diminish, too.

Sport ceases to function if there is a sense that what you have seen is not in some way real, if the outcome of a game or a tournament or a season can be dismissed as somehow illegitimate. That has a potential economic impact, but it also has a spiritual one. If everything is rigged, why would you watch? If the whole thing is fixed, why would you care?

It is that, more than anything, that should give Longoria and Ibrahimovic and whoever is in charge of the letter-writing department at Real Madrid pause for thought. Their leagues all know the damage that can be done by corruption. They should be very wary of invoking its shadow for their own ends.

(Top photo: Hakan Akgun/Anadolu via Getty Images)