Turkish police arrested Ferhat Gündoğdu, the head of the country's Central Referee Committee, on Tuesday, along with six other men connected to how referees in Turkey get picked, graded and sent out to matches. The charges named so far are harassment and forgery of official documents. Istanbul's public prosecutor is running the case, and officers moved on four cities at once: Istanbul, Ankara, Elazığ and Manisa.
Gündoğdu runs the body known by its Turkish initials, MHK. It decides which official takes charge of a Galatasaray game and which one gets left on the list for a Tuesday fixture nobody watches. That is the machinery under investigation.
Who else was taken in
Alongside Gündoğdu, prosecutors detained Ferdi Karadoruk, who heads the Istanbul delegation of the Referees and Observers Association, and Ahmet Şahin, a former deputy head of the MHK. Yunus Yıldırım, a former committee member, and Sabahattin Şahin, a current one, were also arrested. So were two officials from the Istanbul Referees Association, Alican Sağlar and Emre Küçük.
Investigators are looking at whether certain referees were quietly shut out without any reasoning that stands up, whether others were simply never given games, and whether a favoured group was pushed through the grading process. Reports in Turkey say the lists of referees and observers drawn up in 2022 and 2024 were altered without authorisation. The Spanish paper Marca carried the same detail.
The WhatsApp messages
The part that will be hardest for Turkish football to explain away came off Karadoruk's phone. Investigators recovered WhatsApp conversations about the referee lists themselves. In one, four names come up and somebody writes: "Let's delete these four." The replies are "Let's be careful" and "Don't delete them immediately."
In another exchange Karadoruk discusses a particular referee, and the messages include the line "Since he won't bow down.. let's cut off his head and be done with it." Read as a figure of speech it is ugly enough. Read as a description of how a man's career gets ended, it is the whole allegation in one sentence.
A second scandal, not the same one
None of this is the betting case. Turkish authorities suspended 149 referees last year over an illegal gambling investigation that ran through hundreds of players, club owners and officials, and they have been clear that the two files are separate. That is technically true and practically beside the point. For a league where refereeing decisions are argued over on live television every week, and where a club president once walked onto the pitch and punched an official, a second corruption case inside twelve months lands on ground that was already soft.
The men arrested have not been convicted of anything, and the investigation is at an early stage. What Turkish football has to sit with in the meantime is the suggestion that the answer to who referees the big games was not decided on merit.
Case facts: Ferhat Gündoğdu, president of Turkey's Central Referee Committee (MHK), plus six others, arrested Tuesday 29 September 2026. Accusations: harassment and forgery of official documents. Led by Istanbul's public prosecutor, with simultaneous operations in Istanbul, Ankara, Elazığ and Manisa. Focus is on referee selection, classification and appointment, including alleged unauthorised changes to 2022 and 2024 lists. Separate from the 2025 betting investigation that saw 149 referees suspended.
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