Fenerbahçe and the Absentees at Can Bartu: Reading a Training Session Through Its Gaps

No shouts echoed from the Can Bartu pitch during that training session. İsmail Kartal stood at the centre, arms folded, watching two groups of players rotate through 5v2 possession drills. Full-pitch matches followed, orderly, nothing out of the ordinary. A session like any other — until you notice that the densest thing in the report is not what was written, but the names that were missing. The national-team players had left. They were somewhere else, wearing their country's colours, in the middle of an international break that the report itself never bothered to name. Fenerbahçe said only that preparations continue. And inside those words, a much larger story was unfolding. That is the story I want to tell today. Not the story of the 5v2 drills, the warm-ups, the internal matches. Those happen at every training ground from Istanbul to Manchester, from Beijing to Buenos Aires, and they tell you nothing about a specific club. The story I want to tell is about absence — about what a major Turkish club does across two weeks when most of its favourite sons are not home. There is one thing I have learned from watching football from the outside for many years: the training report is the strangest literary genre in sport. It exists to say that nothing is happening. It tells you about drills you already knew before you started reading. It confirms that the club is preparing, as though some club somewhere on earth might not be preparing. And somewhere between those even lines, a small detail can tear the whole curtain apart. This time, that detail was the absence of the internationals. Fenerbahçe is no ordinary club. It is one of the three great powers of Turkish football, alongside Galatasaray and Beşiktaş. Their Şükrü Saracoğlu Stadium was once among the loudest places in Europe, a fortress no visiting side wanted to enter on a cold European night. Can Bartu, the first-team training base, sits on the Asian side of Istanbul, one famous ferry ride across the Bosphorus from the city centre. I have a specific memory of Istanbul. In 2026, on my way to Moscow to work at the World Cup, I stopped in the city for a few days. It is a city of historical fractures, where every building carries at least three empires that have passed through it. But what I remember most is not Hagia Sophia or Topkapi Palace. It is the feeling that football here is a civil religion, something deeper than a game. In Istanbul, people do not watch football. They live it. And because of that, whatever happens at Fenerbahçe's training ground is never simply a sporting matter. It is politics, identity, the honour of an entire region. İsmail Kartal, who led that session, is a familiar face in Turkish football. He has sat in Fenerbahçe's hot seat several times, and left it several times in different ways. This is the common fate of managers at big clubs: sitting on a chair that can turn into a trap every season. In this report, Kartal is called Technical Director, a title that in Turkish football usage usually equates to head coach. But that opens a question the report never answers: where exactly is the line of real power between him, the board, the sporting director, the people who decide transfers? At Fenerbahçe, that question has never had a clear answer, and that may be one reason the club has passed through so many years of drift. But let me return to the session. Let me talk about what the report actually says. The players gathered, did indoor core work, then went onto the pitch for warm-ups and agility. They split into two groups. Part of the session was 5v2 — five players keeping the ball against two defenders. The rest was full-pitch matches. To an ordinary reader, this is a description of an ordinary session. To someone who has watched football long enough, it is a description that could not be more bland. And it is precisely that blandness that carries the information. Take the 5v2 drill. It is one of the most classic drills in modern football. Five players, usually in a tight space, must move the ball quickly under pressure from two defenders. The goal is to develop ball retention, passing under pressure, and decision-making in small spaces. It is used everywhere, from youth academies to top European professional clubs. But here is the crucial point: 5v2 is universal. It does not tell you whether the team will press high or low. It does not tell you whether they will build from the back or go long. It does not tell you whether they will play with three at the back or four, with one striker or two. It only tells you that the team is training. And the full-pitch matches? The same. An internal match can be anything — a tactical experiment, a fitness session, a rhythm session, or simply a way for players to feel the ball again after a few days off. There is no information about line-ups, formations, duration, or results. We only know that the ball rolled. This is where I want to pause and talk about something I have observed over decades: the art of reading what is not written. In my trade there is an unwritten rule: the most important thing in a report is sometimes what it does not say. A training report mentions core work, warm-ups, agility, 5v2, full-pitch play — but never mentions any specific tactical drill, never mentions preparing for a specific opponent, never mentions set pieces, never mentions any change of system. To me, that means: Fenerbahçe are not preparing for a specific match this week. They are in the middle of an international break, and this session serves only to maintain fitness and ball rhythm. That is the most reasonable conclusion. But it is also one many will skip over, because we tend to overread information-poor reports. We see a 5v2 drill and immediately think of a pressing system. We see a full-pitch match and imagine a tactical shift. We forget that football, at its deepest layer, is a trade — and sessions like this are the daily work of the people in that trade. But the story does not stop there. Because if the session reveals nothing about tactics, the absence of the internationals reveals a great deal about the state of the squad. Consider the FIFA virus. That is the term football uses for players returning from national duty tired, injured, or simply out of form. During an international break, a club like Fenerbahçe can lose dozens of players, scattered across continents, playing matches of different intensities and time zones, then returning only days before the club's next match. This is a structural problem of modern football. Clubs pay the wages, national teams use the players. Clubs carry the injury risk, federations reap the results. There is no perfect solution to this contradiction, and every international break is a gamble for clubs with many internationals. For Fenerbahçe, the number of internationals is a sign of the club's stature. You cannot have many national-team players unless you are a big club. But at the same time, it is a risk signal. Across the two weeks Kartal leads a depleted group, somewhere else in the world his most important players are playing matches he cannot control. And during that window, something interesting can happen at Can Bartu: players who were not called up may receive more attention than usual. They may train at higher intensity, get more time on the ball, and receive more individual guidance from the coaching staff. For young players, substitutes, men who usually get a few minutes per match, this can be a golden opportunity. I have seen this many times in my career of watching football. An international break can be where a young player quietly changes his standing. Not through one moment of brilliance on the pitch, but through hundreds of hours of silent work while the famous names are away. And this is what the training report does not tell you. It tells you about 5v2 and full-pitch matches. It does not tell you about private conversations between Kartal and a young defender. It does not tell you about video-analysis sessions running late into the night. It does not tell you about a substitute midfielder practising long shots after the main session ends. Those things happen at every training ground. We just never see them in the report. And this is where I want to offer a view that may upset some people. I do not believe reports like this have real analytical value. I believe they exist for another reason — they exist to make fans feel they are being informed, that their club is active, that everything is proceeding according to plan. It is a form of communication, not a form of journalism. This does not mean the people writing them are doing anything wrong. They are doing their job, and I respect that. But we — readers, analysts, lovers of football — need to understand that a training report is just a training report. It is not a sign of tactics. It is not a prophecy of results. It is not a window into the soul of the club. I learned this lesson in a rather painful way. In 2026, when I wrote a piece about Zhang Yuning and Cleo at Beijing Guoan, I leaned on concrete numbers to make a contrarian claim. I did not lean on vague observations about team spirit or coaching style. I leaned on the fact that a young striker scored eight goals in fifteen matches while a foreign striker scored four in eighteen. That is a claim that can be verified. And that is precisely what a training report cannot provide. It cannot provide a verifiable claim. It only provides a sequence of events that can be read in countless ways. This leads me to an observation about Turkish football specifically, and modern football in general. At big clubs, expectation pressure is a physical force. It is as heavy as a block of stone, and it is always there, hanging above everyone. At Fenerbahçe, that pressure is particularly heavy, because the club has spent many years without a league title. In a city where football is a civil religion, failing to win the title is close to insulting some deity. Under that weight, a training report has a very specific social function: it tells fans that things are heading in the right direction. It soothes anxiety. It substitutes feeling for information. And I think that is part of the reason reports like this are written, read, and shared. Not because they contain much information, but because they contain something even more important to fans: the sense that their club is still alive, still breathing, still preparing. But if we really want to understand what is happening at Fenerbahçe right now, we must look elsewhere. We must look at how many internationals the club has supplied. We must look at the upcoming fixture list. We must look at the injury status of each player. We must look at the unrecorded conversations, the unannounced decisions, the undisclosed calculations. That is where the truth lies. Not on the Can Bartu pitch. I have lived in Beijing for many years, working as a journalist covering football for the Chinese market. From that position, I learned that every football culture tells its own story in its own way. In England, people tell it with numbers. In Italy, with tactics. In Spain, with stories about stars. In Turkey, with emotion. And Fenerbahçe's training reports are a perfect example of telling stories through emotion. They contain no numbers to analyse, no diagrams to dissect, no data to compare. They contain something else: a feeling of continuity. The club is still there. The session is still happening. Everything is still moving. For Fenerbahçe fans, after so many turbulent years, that may be the most important thing. There is one point I want to make clear, and I make it as a man who has lived long enough to know that every certainty can be reversed: what I am writing is not a criticism. It is an observation. Fenerbahçe's training report does its job correctly. The problem lies with us, the readers, when we forget what that job is. If you want to understand Kartal's tactics, watch Fenerbahçe's matches. If you want to understand the players' form, look at the numbers. If you want to understand the club's condition, look at the fixture list and the injury list. The training report will not answer those questions. It will only say one thing: the club is still preparing. And sometimes, that is exactly what you need to hear. But let me close with a forward-looking thought, rather than a summary of the recent past. What I know for certain is that the internationals will return. They will come back from all over the world, with different levels of fatigue, with different moods. Some will return with the joy of a win. Some will return with the frustration of a defeat. Some, possibly, will return with an injury nobody wanted. And when they return, Kartal will have to do what every manager at every big club must do after every international break: mend a team out of fragments that have lived different stories across two weeks. It is a strange job. You must bring players who played different matches, under different systems, in different roles, back into a single system. You must bring egos nourished by wins or wounded by defeats back into a common goal. You must do it within days, before an important match. No 5v2 drill can prepare you for that. No full-pitch match can simulate it. It is human work, not tactical work. And I think that is what Fenerbahçe fans should be watching in the coming weeks. Not what is written in the training report. But what happens when the absentees return. Because football, however much we analyse it with data and tactics, is always a story about people. And the best stories always begin when the absentees come home. As for Can Bartu, and those sessions without the internationals? They will continue. They will continue until the season ends, and after that too. And every week, a new report will be written, telling us about drills we already know too well. Sometimes, between those even lines, there is a gap. And if you know how to read it, that gap will tell you a story nobody else can see. There are no great prophecies. There is only an old man weathered enough to see the fractures the crowd chooses to ignore. This time, the fracture lies in the names left unwritten in a training report in Istanbul.