Sociological Approach to the novel “ King of Goals”: Football and society in Turkey in the Fifties

Literary Works such as novels and stories depict a fictional world designed by creative writers. Reality, aestheticized by literary arts, appears in the text as “literary reality”. However, even Works woven with imagination and fantastic elements offer clues about the facts of the society in which they exist. “Humor” is a branch of literature that, with its irony-laden language, can undertake criticism of the social structure and system when appropriate, as an expression of the society it is in. As an opposition intellectual and humorist, Aziz Nesin criticized “modern sports”, an element of social structure, in his texts with his perspective of humor for the benefit of the public. In this study, it was aimed to analyze the author’s novel “King of Goals” from a sociological perspective. Rather than an understanding of analysis that takes into account text-related elements such as style, narrative elements, form and aesthetics; the “Sociology of Literature” method which focuses on penetrating the realities of society through fictional text has been adopted. In this context, the approach that took into account the “Literary Map”-“Objective Map” comparison suggested by Ömer Naci Soykan and the message of the novel was applied. In the novel the distorted understanding of sports is depicted and a sports system that is not beneficial to society is criticized. The corrupt relations network around the main characters, the heiress Sait Sarıoğlu and the tabloid figure Kerkenez Sevim and the intrigues in the football world are revealed in an ironic manner. The phenomena such as playful club managers, sloppy reporting and manipulatiin in the sports press, football-politics relationship, and match-fixing are a product of macro social system. Millions of people who make up the society watch and talk about sports rather than doing it for fitness, health and strengthening. Rather than focusing on the real country’s problems, the negative situations and people in a society where everyone from age to age are fascinated by sports pages and are addicted to football are portrayed. In the final analysis, it can be said that the work criticizes society through football.