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TDLR: Şanlıurfaspor made an official complaint to TFF against one of their rivals in relegation battle last year Gazişehir Gaziantep for match-fixing with concrete evidences like recordings and confessions. But TFF made the decision to not give any penalty to neither the players nor the teams involved.

In TFF 1. Lig (2nd Division of Turkish Leage) at the end of the last season Şanlıurfaspor, Manisaspor and Gazişehir were all battling against relegation. At the week before the last, Manisaspor played against Urfaspor and won. Gazişehir also won their match and guaranteed to stay in the league. After the season finished, a few recordings between some players and board members got leaked about the incentives that will be given to Manisaspor players in case they win against Urfaspor.

Naturally after these scandals Şanlıurfaspor made an official complaint to Turkish Football Federation. Finally yesterday TFF announced the Discipline Committee's decisions. Starting from the 32nd, the decisions for this incident can be seen. Basically what they're saying is, since the said evidences were illegally obtained and the other evidences were not enough to create a judgement, they decided not to give any punishment.

Some additional notes:

This video is one of the four recordings leaked from this incident (others also can be found online). People involved in this video are gathered in a Gazişehir board member's workplace in İzmir and they are as follows:

• Nizamettin Sertkal (Vice-President of Gazişehir)
• El Yasa Süme (A former player of the city's other team Gaziantepspor)
• Gökhan Sazdağı (Gazişehir player who was on loan at Manisaspor at the time)
• İsmail Haktan Odabaşı (Manisaspor player)

Before all of these leaks, Gaziantepspor made a statement against their player El Yasa Süme telling he was involved in match-fixing activities and sent from the team for that. They also shared the videos from their Twitter after the videos became public.

Correct me if I'm wrong here but AFAIK while the criminal law needs legally obtained evidences to sentence a punishment, sportive law doesn't look at how the evidences are obtained and implement the zero tolerance policy especially against match-fixing cases. So their reasoning for the rejection sounds like a bullshit excuse.

Gazişehir team is funded by Gaziantep municipality. Their board members includes political figures too so this also has a political side.

This isn't the first time in Turkey for match-fixing to go unpunished. In 2011, Fenerbahçe was banned from European competitions for match-fixing allegations and CAS opted to uphold the club's punishment, even their chairman was sentenced to prison yet no punishment were given to Fenerbahçe in Turkish League.

This incident got almost no media coverage in Turkey but it needs to be heard. I hope it gets the attention it deserves here.