Aziz Yıldırım, a businessman and Fenerbahçe’s longest-serving former president, has been elected president again, returning to the helm of one of Turkey’s biggest sports clubs after an eight-year absence, the Anka news agency reported on Sunday.
Yıldırım, 73, defeated businessman Hakan Safi by a wide margin in an extraordinary general assembly held on Sunday, the club’s third leadership vote in three years. A total of 27,387 ballots were cast, with 27,172 deemed valid. Yıldırım received 17,245 votes, while Safi received 9,927.
The winner will serve for one year because under the club’s bylaws Fenerbahçe must hold its next regular election in May or June 2027.
“We will not be angry with each other. We will embrace each other because Fenerbahçe needs unity and solidarity,” Yıldırım said after the results were announced on Sunday. “Division is wrong.”
The result marked Yıldırım’s return to the club presidency after eight years. He previously led Fenerbahçe for two decades, from 1998 to 2018, making him the longest-serving president in the club’s history.
During his presidency Fenerbahçe won six Süper Lig titles, reached the Champions League quarterfinals and the Europa League semifinals and expanded its stadium and training facilities.
Yıldırım’s six league titles came in the 2000-2001, 2003-2004, 2004-2005, 2006-2007, 2010-2011 and 2013-2014 seasons. The club has not won Turkey’s top-flight title since the 2013-2014 season, a drought that has fueled growing pressure from supporters.
During the campaign Yıldırım promised to put former Fenerbahçe player Oğuz Çetin in charge of football operations, recruit two leading strikers and increase the stadium’s capacity to 64,000.
He also said he had prepared a $300 million financial plan and would seek to end the club’s debt restructuring agreement with a group of Turkish banks.
Sadettin Saran, the outgoing president, did not run in Sunday’s election.
Fenerbahçe last held an extraordinary election in September 2025, when Saran defeated Koç. He later called another election and announced that he would not seek another term.
Saran had announced late last year that the club would go to a congress at the end of the season after he became the subject of a drug investigation, saying he did not want a legal case concerning him personally to draw Fenerbahçe into another legal process.
He was sentenced last week to two-and-a-half years in prison in a separate case on charges of encouraging illegal betting. The ruling can be appealed.
Yıldırım’s name is closely associated with the 2011 match-fixing case, one of the most controversial legal and sporting episodes in Turkish football.
The investigation was launched in July 2011 over allegations that match-fixing and incentive payments had taken place in several games during the 2010-2011 season in the Süper Lig and the second-tier Bank Asya First League. Yıldırım and a number of prominent figures in Turkish football were detained. He spent nearly one year in pretrial detention.
In July 2012 a specially authorized court convicted Yıldırım on charges related to match-fixing and forming and leading a criminal organization, sentencing him to six years, three months in prison. Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the conviction in 2014.
Yıldırım and Fenerbahçe denied wrongdoing and said the case was a conspiracy. After Turkey abolished specially authorized courts, Yıldırım sought a retrial.
An İstanbul court acquitted him and 35 other defendants in 2015, but the Supreme Court of Appeals overturned the acquittals in January 2020 due to procedural deficiencies.
The case was retried again, and in November 2020 Yıldırım and other defendants were acquitted of the match-fixing charges.
The Turkish Football Federation did not punish Fenerbahçe as a club over the domestic match-fixing allegations, although the case continued to fuel a bitter dispute with Trabzonspor, which has long argued that it should be declared the champion of the 2010-2011 season.