As is the case during every World Cup over the past two decades, the chances are you will have heard the name ‘Hakan Sukur’ uttered more than once in recent weeks.
The former Turkey international remains the scorer of the quickest ever goal in World Cup history, having netted after just 10.8 seconds against South Korea in the third-place play-off back in 2002. Then on the books of Serie A side Parma heading into the tournament, he could have actually joined Liverpool just a few months beforehand.
Sukur started the 2001/02 season at Inter Milan, but found himself behind Ronaldo, Christian Vieri, Mohamed Kallon, Alvaro Recoba, Adriano and Nicola Ventola in the pecking order. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t add to his 34 appearances, from which he scored six goals, from the 2000/01 season at the San Siro as a result and his agent was working overtime to earn him a move.
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When Michael Owen suffered a torn hamstring injury early in the season at Anfield, the Sukur camp spotted an opportunity and started talking up the possibility of a move to Liverpool.
"If Sukur is to leave Italy then it will be to one of two destinations - Spain or England,” his agent, Hakan Azman, told planetfootball at the time.
"I think if Liverpool were interested in Hakan then they would have called me. We would love Liverpool to get in touch with us. I have called the club but I am still waiting for anyone to get back to me."
Yet come September 2001 and both Sukur and Azman were claiming the Reds, who had also reportedly expressed an interest in Nuno Gomes, wanted to sign the striker on a two-month loan deal, with the Turk essentially issuing a come-and-get-me plea to Anfield bosses..
"Liverpool have told me I would fit into the English style of play,” Sukur claimed. “They are very keen to have me on loan. Quitting Inter would be the best thing for my career. If both teams come to an agreement Liverpool would be a good club for me."
Sukur's agent Hakan Azman added: "Liverpool want Hakar on loan. We are waiting to handle the financial details."
Meanwhile, Azman also told the BBC: "Inter want to release him and are open to offers, so a loan move remains a possibility. We have been in contact with Liverpool manager Gerard Houllier and it is possible that we will meet again by the end of the week.
"Hakan has a big reputation in Europe and deserves to play in a big team. It is not likely he would leave Inter to play for a smaller team, but Liverpool would be a realistic move if the clubs can agree. We want to move him to another club because, at the moment, he is not happy."
Houllier would laugh off suggestions that he was interested in signing Sukur, but such links still persisted. With Robbie Fowler edging closer to the exit door, eventually joining Leeds United in an £11m deal in November 2001, reports continued to claim the Reds were interested in the Turk.
However, player and agent would soon change tack, now claiming to be on the verge of a move to Blackburn Rovers come October 2001, having seemingly used ‘interest’ from Liverpool to engineer such a transfer as Sukur looked to reunite with his former Galatasaray manager, Graeme Souness.
“I will be saying goodbye to Inter. I will go to Blackburn Rovers,” Sukur claimed. “I have chosen Blackburn because I will join up with my ex-coach Souness and a former team- mate from Galatasaray in Tugay. I cannot wait to play in the Premiership."
"I think there's a deal but it is not guaranteed yet,” Azman added. “Graeme Souness is very interested."
Yet Souness himself would deny making a move for Sukur as he instead eyed up bringing Fowler to Blackburn.
“Who would not like Robbie Fowler?" Souness said a week before the striker’s move to Leeds. "He's your 25-goals-a-season man. He would be the difference between finishing mid-table and challenging for a place in Europe.
"Hakan Sukur may not have a large transfer fee but you can take it from me that he's got a huge salary. What would that do to my dressing room?''
In the end Fowler would join Leeds while Liverpool would replace him by signing Nicolas Anelka on loan. Considering the Reds would decide against signing the Frenchman permanently and ended up with El Hadji Diouf instead, perhaps the Turk wouldn’t have been so bad?
Meanwhile, Sukur would join Parma on a free transfer in January. Yet he found himself a free agent again the following August as he was released after the World Cup, and would end up reuniting with Souness at Blackburn afterall come December 2002.
However, his spell at Ewood Park began with him sustaining a broken leg in training that ruled him out for two months, and prevented him from making his debut in March 2003. He’d go one to score twice from nine appearances, before leaving at the end of his contract to return to Galatasaray after failing to agree new terms.
Having scored a whopping 223 from 359 appearances across seven and a half seasons, divided by a failed spell with Torino, it was in his first pre-season back in his third stint at Galatasaray that he’d cross paths with Liverpool once more.
The two sides would lock horns in an ill-tempered game in the Amsterdam Tournament as the Turks ran out 2-1 winners at the Amsterdam Arena. the Reds would finish the game with nine men, however, after both Neil Mellor and Steven Gerrard were sent off.
And the future Liverpool captain’s dismissal came as a result of locking horns with Sukur, having taken issue with the Turk and his team-mates’ behaviour on the pitch and been enraged further by Mellor’s red card.
“There was no chance of this being a gentle pre-season work-out," Gerrard recalled in his first autobiography, released in 2006. "Tensions between England and Turkey were running high at club and international level.
"A few months earlier, in a Euro 2004 qualifier, England had beaten Turkey at Sunderland's Stadium of Light, and it was a real battle. In two months' time, England were heading to Istanbul, so everything was being built up, every little fire stoked into an inferno.
"In Amsterdam, Galatasaray targeted Liverpool's English players. No question. F*****g blatant. I was on the bench, watching the Turks laying into Michael (Owen) and Emile (Heskey). I was steaming to get on, because there was so much going off out there.
"'Put me on, put me on!' I kept telling Gerard. With half an hour left, the boss relented. Harry Kewell got hooked, and I stormed on, looking for trouble. It was like a scene from a Wild West film. A fight raged between the two sides, and I needed to make up for lost time.
"Galatasaray's players were putting in nasty little tackles, pulling shirts and spitting at us. Hakan Sukur was right in the middle of it. All the Galatasaray players were. Hakan Unsal, Umit, the lot. What sly b******s.
"Suddenly an elbow jabbed into my face. My eyes watered up, my lip thickened, my anger intensified. I went looking for Sukur and Unsal. I hit Unsal with a tackle, and the Dutch ref, Rene Temmink, booked me. Now the Turks were really after me. Another elbow. Bang. I was taking so many blows to the head, I felt like a bloody boxer.
"Chaos reigned. Neil Mellor was goaded badly. He tackled Gabriel Tamas, a nothing challenge, but Temmink sent him off. Shocker. Now I was really on the warpath, chasing around, hunting Turks, kicking anything that moved.
“Temmink gave a silly free-kick against me, a foul on Unsal, and all the Turks immediately surrounded us. Their spit ran down my face. I wiped it off, and tried to walk away. Sukur pinched me. It was the old Turkish game of provocation, and I fell for a classic stitch-up.
“Wound up by the Turks, I was maddened by Temmink’s decision, convinced he had been conned by them. ‘You fat cheating c**t’, I told him. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Come here’.
“Bang, second yellow, red, off. B******s. The Turks were all smug, knowing their cheating had paid off and they were cruising to a 2-1 win.”
"From the moment I sent the first player off, Gerrard started talking to me,” Temmink recalled after the game. “I warned him twice and, after the third time, I had no choice. I can't repeat what he said. It is not something you would say to a ref or another person. If we had to tolerate this, then I would stop refereeing.”
Yet Gerrard would avoid a suspension after Houllier went to talk to Temmink, with the official not putting the incident in the report as he claimed the midfielder hadn’t used foul and abusive language.
“I couldn’t believe Temmink would understand,” Gerrard wrote. "He was foreign. I knew that because he was speaking foreign in the tunnel on the way out. But he knew English, or certainly the words I directed at him.
“‘You know that counts for the season?’ said Gerard. It suddenly dawned on me: this red card could affect me in the UEFA Cup. S**t. Joe Corrigan, Liverpool’s goalkeeping coach, also had a go at me. So did Thommo (Phil Thompson). I was fuming with myself and with Temmink.
“Gerard went to see the ref and had a quiet word - a plea, really. The gaffer then returned with a quiet smile on his face. ‘I talked to the ref, and Temmink said, 'I am not putting it in my report'. Gerrard was aggressive, but he didn’t use foul and abusive language'.’’ Result! Fair play to Temmink - I’d turned the air blue!”
Meanwhile, Houllier would actually defend Gerrard after the game as he hit out at Sukur for his involvement in getting the midfielder sent off.
"I talked to him and Gerrard told me that he didn't insult the referee or swear at all,” the Frenchman said. “I don't understand why the referee sent him off. "You would not believe the abuse some of the players got but you have to live with that.
"Before Stevie's dismissal, Hakan Sukur grabbed him and pushed him. Steven reacted to it but what Sukur did was very bad. Stevie is a leader of the team and perhaps he was frustrated at seeing young Mellor get sent off.
“Steven reacted, but in football it's never the provocation that gets punished but the retaliation. After that it was only about heat and frustration. He was sent-off for dissent but he never used foul and abusive language, the referee told me he didn't.
“I went to see the referee afterwards because I wanted to know what he said to him. He didn't swear or insult him, the referee told me he called him 'a bad ref’. There will be no suspension. Red cards happen because the players wanted to win, but they overreacted a little bit.
"They lost a bit of their cool. It damaged the atmosphere and we couldn't play well after that. The whole thing was started by a bad tackle by Igor Biscan but the guy was not even injured.I think he (Gerrard) was frustrated because of the reaction of Hakan Sukur.
“The boy is very disappointed but I think Hakan Sukur was out of order too. In that original tussle Hakan Sukur went to grab him and pinch him. He pinched him from behind and then of course Stevie reacted and there were immediately six or seven players all around him.
"He was wrong to react and he knows that but I know Stevie well enough to know it is not a problem for the future. Definitely not. It was just that incident and the circumstances on the night combined, the frustration at the game and the tiredness from the tours.”
Houllier continued: "I stand by Stevie and I understand him. There was a lot of provocation happening on Sunday but I don't want him to change. I want him to keep his cool, because there will always be provocation because of his reputation. But I don't want to take the competitive element out of him.
"I don't think he'll become a marked man because of what has happened. When he goes to Turkey he will be targeted, he will be provoked, so he's got to keep his cool there and his discipline. But he knows that and I know he will do that.
"I will speak to him about what has happened. He knows it was not right but at the same time it's a mans' game and I stand by him absolutely."
Gerrard would go on to be named Liverpool captain the following October, and led his side to Champions League, FA Cup and League Cup glory. He'd leave Anfield in 2015, having scored 185 goals from 710 games across 17 seasons.
As for Sukur, he would score a further 72 goals for Galatasaray from 186 games, before retiring a few months short of his 37th birthday in 2008. But what is the Turk up to these days, 20 years on from trying to become Gerrard’s team-mate at Liverpool?
Well believe it or not, he's actually working as an Uber driver and selling books in the United States, having been forced to leave Turkey and live in exile, after being branded a terrorist by the Government in his homeland.
Sukur had been elected as a Member of Parliament to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in the 2011 general elections. He became an MP for the ruling Justice and Development Party – the party of current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was even a witness at his wedding. However, he resigned from his position in December 2013 in protest after the interdiction of the group's "dershane" system, and decided to continue working as an independent MP.
But he remained close to powerful cleric Fethullah Gulen and later openly criticised Erdogan on social media. He would be charged as a result in February 2016. In July 2016 there was a failed coup against Erdogan’s leadership which was blamed on followers of Gulen, known as Gulenists. In the aftermath, Sukur refused to denounce Gulen and saw his life fall apart.
In August 2016, a warrant was issued for his arrest as he was charged with being a member of the Gulen movement, designated as a terrorist organization in Turkey, over the alleged coup which he was accused of being part of.
Fleeing Turkey, he took up self-exile in San Francisco and planned to become a restaurateur in Palo Alto. However, he left his job because "strange people kept coming into the bar" before starting work as an Uber driver. He has since claimed that his houses, businesses and bank accounts in Turkey had been seized by the government.
"I have nothing left, Erdogan took everything: my right to liberty, freedom of expression and right to work," he explained in an interview with German outlet Welt am Sonntag in January 2020.
"Nobody seems able to explain what my role in this coup was supposed to be. I never did anything illegal, I am not a traitor or a terrorist. I might be an enemy [of] this government, but not the state or the Turkish nation. I love my country.
"After the split with Erdogan, I started to receive threats. My wife's shop was attacked, my children were harassed, my father put in prison and all my assets confiscated. So I moved to the United States, initially running a cafe in California, but strange people kept coming into the bar. Now I drive for Uber and I sell books."
It would appear Sukur is still a very touchy subject back in Turkey with his name again making headlines in recent weeks as a commentator was sacked just for mentioning the striker during a game at the World Cup.
Alper Bakircigil was commentating on Canada’s game against Morocco on Turkish state broadcaster TRT, when he mentioned Sukur's goal after Hakim Ziyech scored early into the contest. His employers were not too pleased and the commentator was replaced at half-time, with it later emerging he had been sacked.
Bakircigil wrote in a now-deleted tweet: “I was cut off from the TRT institution, where I worked proudly for many years, after the event that took place today. Separation is included in love. Hope to see you again. Goodbye.”
Meanwhile, while still a legend of Turkish football, Sukur can never return to his homeland. If he were were to return to Turkey, he would face charges of insulting the president and rebelling against the government. Such charges are punishable with life imprisonment or even the death penalty.
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