Beşiktaş starts the season with a Europa League match hoping that it will be an illustrious year.
The Turkcell Super League club will welcome Vikingur of Faroe Islands to Istanbul’s İnönü Stadium in the second qualifying round of the Europa League on Thursday.
It looks like a fairly easy season-opener for Beşiktaş, since Vikingur has a history dating back no further than two years and has had no success other than winning the Faroe Islands League Title last season.
All of its players are playing at an amateur level, with all of them having daytime jobs.
That draws a stark contrast with the situation of Beşiktaş, which has spent millions of dollars to become arguably the most active Turkish football team during the last transfer window, in search of emulating its double-title success the year before last and to improve from last season’s disappointing fourth-place finish.
The biggest purchase of the season, and the biggest in Turkish football history according to Chairman Yıldırım Demirören, was Ricardo Quaresma. The Portuguese star was signed from Inter, where he had fallen out of favor, during the spell of fellow compatriot coach Jose Mourinho, for a fee of 7.3 million euros.
Always known to be a player having natural dribbling talent and an impressive technique with the ball, Quaresma has had some big ups and terrible downs in his career. While he was highly successful during his spells at Sporting Lisbon and Porto, the winger was never the first choice at FC Barcelona, Chelsea and Inter Milan. Now, Beşiktaş hopes that “Q7” will play at his peak.
Whether he lives up to expectations will also depend on his relations with Bernd Schuster. The new Beşiktaş coach will try to find the right position for Quaresma to play. Working at Real Madrid in 2007, he surely knows a thing or two on working with star players. But probably it will be down to Quaresma, whose work ethics and tactical discipline, rather than his skills, were harshly questioned during his unsuccessful periods.
Apart from Quaresma, Beşiktaş signed German winger Roberto Hilbert from Stuttgart. However, several media reports suggest that Beşiktaş is still in the market for two more stars, Real Madrid’s Guti and Manchester City’s Robinho. Turkish media focuses on Schuster’s Real Madrid link with two players, but it is clear that those transfers require more than that.
Even without those players, Beşiktaş is a star-studded team, at least compared to Vikingur.
In an online interview with Ekşi Beşiktaş, a collective blog of the Black Eagles supporters, Vikingur captain Niclas Kristiansson Niclasen declared that his team is excited by the opportunity to play against the Istanbul side.
“We know that the chance of playing against a club like Beşiktaş comes once in a lifetime, so we are highly motivated,” said Niclasen.
The skipper also acknowledged that all of his teammates, including himself, are playing football at an amateur level.
“It is true that our team is a group of workers, none of us are professionals,” said Niclasen. “I am working at the management department of a bank, for example. We have a carpenter, an electrician, a student and a fish factory worker as well.”
It will be an unforgettable night for Vikingur players, given that if the game is sold out, the crowd at the İnönü Stadium may be about two-thirds of Faroe Islands’ population, and it will be interesting for Beşiktaş fans to watch their team’s fresh faces for the first time in a competitive match.
The game kicks off at 9 p.m.
