How did restaurant owner Salt Bae end up holding the World Cup in 2022?

Burak Yilmaz was the first. The first of many. Baetient Zero, if you will.

April 28, 2013. The then-Galatasaray forward started a trend which in the subsequent decade has swept through the football world, taking in Kylian Mbappe, Lionel Messi, David Beckham, Gianni Infantino, Karim Benzema, Ronaldo, Jose Mourinho, Diego Maradona and Paul Pogba, among many, many others.

Yilmaz was the first footballer to feature on the Instagram account of Istanbul-based butcher Nusret Gokce, or as you probably better know him — Salt Bae.

There’s an innocence to that photo. You might not even recognise it’s Gokce. The hair is still swept back although more loosely, not looking like it’s been slicked down with goose fat. The little beard is present, but slightly more unkempt.

But the weird circular sunglasses are absent. There’s a smile on his face, rather than an intense lack of expression/a curled upper lip, which is presumably supposed to be sexy. He’s wearing an apron, rather than a spray-on white t-shirt showing every undulation of the perfectly crafted muscles beneath. He’s just a bloke who runs a restaurant, delighted that a famous footballer has chosen to dine there. It’s quite endearing really.

How did we reach the point, nearly 10 years on from that photo and two years ago today, where the same guy somehow made it onto the pitch after arguably the greatest World Cup final of all time, mithering Messi in his moment of absolute triumph, pestering Angel Di Maria for a photo, wrestling the trophy from the hands of Cristian Romero and pretending to sprinkle salt on it?

If you look at the pictures of those Argentina players in the afterglow of the high point of their careers/lives, they’re all (sort of) smiling, but nervous smiles, glancing at this pitch invader with a look that seems to say, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

It’s a good question. How did it reach the point where a restauranteur from a small town in the east of Turkey gatecrashed the World Cup final? Why was — and is, to a point — football fascinated by Salt Bae?

The original Nusr-Et restaurant, which opened in 2010, is in a relatively well-to-do suburb north of Istanbul called Etiler. Over the road there’s a restaurant called Celebrity, which feels a little on the nose. To the right of the entrance is one of the dining spaces, decked out with lots of shiny black surfaces and chairs with red, green and gold tassels. It looks like Tony Montana’s parlour. There is a big bowl of salt on each table, like it’s an hors d’oeuvre.

The staff are all very pleasant, but in a hurry and quite keen to direct the diner’s eye towards the section of the menu with the spicier prices — not unusual in high-end restaurants, but it’s noticeable how their enthusiasm wanes once they realise you’re going to order something more modest. If you do go for an expensive enough steak, someone who isn’t Salt Bae will come out and do the Salt Bae ‘bit’, slicing your meat theatrically at the table and doing the sprinkling of salt off the elbow thing. It’s a bizarre sight, like watching a tribute act called something like Naylor Drift play ‘Shake It Off’.

On the night I visit, the gold-encrusted giant tomahawk steak would have set you back 9,750 Turkish lira, which at the time worked out at around £238, or $292. In relative terms that’s a bargain, given that the version in London went for £1,450 ($1,945), before it was taken off the menu, leaving the most extravagant item as the plain old boring non-gold encrusted giant tomahawk, for a mere £630 ($845).

But the limits of The Athletic’s expenses policy (plus basic human decency) prevent me from ordering anything quite that pricey, so I go for something slightly more reasonable. And it’s fine. Nice, even. An absolutely edible piece of meat. Not the best you’ll ever eat, but definitely not the worst. It’s a perfectly good steak, but you don’t build a restaurant empire with locations in 14 different cities on perfectly good steak.

And you don’t have gift shops in perfectly good steak restaurants either. To the left of the entrance there’s a section where you can buy a variety of Salt Bae branded merchandise, including various items of clothing (such as a slightly incongruous Christmas jumper, given this was in May), an apron, an array of knives, a knife sharpener and, somewhat inevitably, a set of Salt Bae salt shakers.

I ask the maitre’d why footballers seem to love Gokce and Nusr-Et so much. With a big smile he says, “Because we do the best meat!”, which seems like a slightly unconvincing answer.

The real answer to that question stems from one of his earliest backers, a man called Ferit Sahenk. Sahenk is one of Turkey’s richest men, with a list of interests as long as your arm, but for our purposes the two most relevant of those are being on the board at Fenerbahce for a couple of years in the early 2000s and being an investor in Nusr-Et.


Ferit Sahenk, (left), pictured in 2017 with former Fenerbahce head coach Zeljko Obradovic and chairman Aziz Yildirim (Onur Coban/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

To give his investment a little helping hand, Sahenk would invite an assortment of celebrities, other directors of football clubs and, of course, footballers to dine at the restaurant. Getting famous people to have their picture taken at your eatery is a tactic as old as the hills. They would go, be given VIP treatment, perhaps not exactly pay market rate for their dinner and would either post about it themselves on their social media or pose with Gokce for his. Gokce would then tend to accompany the pictures with captions explaining how much the celeb in question enjoyed their dinner.

Initially, the visiting diners were local Turkish players, but this is where the Turkish Super League’s love of a big name comes in. Over the following years most of the ageing stars who had joined one of Istanbul’s big three clubs would drop by: Felipe Melo, Raul Meireles, Lukas Podolski, Dirk Kuyt, Robin van Persie, Wesley Sneijder, Didier Drogba.

By 2014 he already had a restaurant in Dubai, but it wasn’t until early 2017 that his personal celebrity exploded. He posted a video called ‘Ottoman steak’, which showed him slicing a cut of meat in that silly, affected manner, sprinkling salt with his arm bent like he’s pretending to be a snake for a child, wearing the now standard issue white T-shirt and round glasses.

It went viral, getting north of 17 million views. He became a meme, and for a while everyone seemed to be doing the salt thing, not least footballers. Danny Welbeck, Dimitri Payet, the entire Bayer Leverkusen team and Marseille defender Doria all incorporated it into their goal celebrations. Beyond football, NFL star Travis Kelce, tennis player Frances Tiafoe and the Welsh rugby team were among those Salt Baeing.

The upshot of this was that people started seeking out his restaurant as a sort of internet-inspired ‘experience’, rather than just dinner. And this is really where his popularity among footballers is rooted. If you’re a professional athlete, going out for a meal often isn’t as much about the food as it is for the rest of us. You probably can’t have the burger, or the side of mac and cheese, or a bottle of wine. It’s more about the experience, and when these young men and women see something (they think is) cool online, they want to do that thing, to have that experience. They want to participate in the meme. It becomes self-perpetuating: it’s the ‘place to go’, so more people go there.

An inexhaustive list of footballers who have enjoyed the Salt Bae experience and posed with the man himself includes Messi, Ronaldo (Brazilian), Robert Lewandowski, Roberto Carlos, Roberto Mancini, Pogba, Thibaut Courtois, Mbappe, Benzema, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Cesc Fabregas, Riyad Mahrez, Mario Gotze, Radamel Falcao, Virgil van Dijk, Megan Rapinoe, Sergio Ramos, Zinedine Zidane, Franck Ribery, Gareth Bale, Marcelo, Luka Modric, Maradona, Beckham, Fabio Capello, Ashley Young, Jorge Mendes, Ronaldinho, Mikel Arteta, Javier Zanetti, Edgar Davids, Casemiro, Lisandro Martinez, Phil Foden, Kaka, Luciano Spalletti and Jose Mourinho.

Basically most of the footballers or managers you have heard of.

And his influence goes — or at least went — right to the top: Gokce’s relationship with Infantino is probably worth an article on its own.

The FIFA president was not only a regular diner at various Nusr-Et venues in the years leading up to the Qatar World Cup, but a prolific picture taker with and fawning disciple of the man himself. In January 2021 he called Gokce “the best of the best, legend number one”. A couple of days before the final in December 2022, the pair appeared in a lengthy video in which Infantino declared: “Football unites the world, Nusret unites the world… he’s the best. He’s my brother.”

They were seemingly so close that Infantino personally invited Gokce to the final in December 2022 but, as with many of the great love stories of our time, the beautiful relationship appears to be over.

After the stunt at the Lusail Stadium, Infantino promptly unfollowed Gokce on Instagram (although he does still follow Arnold Schwarzenegger, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Kim Kardashian), and FIFA issued a stern statement to the New York Times’s Tariq Panja, saying, “Following a review, FIFA has been establishing how individuals gained undue access to the pitch after the closing ceremony at Lusail Stadium on 18 December. The appropriate internal action will be taken.”

Panja then commented that ‘the internal review will likely find some junior figure to blame’, which turned out to be very prescient. According to a report on the football website Josimar, the blame was placed squarely on a man called Ersan Gokay, whose day job at FIFA was in the finance department but during the men’s World Cup was a “senior event controller”, which essentially means he guided the various “legends” that FIFA invites to these occasions.

Gokce was not part of the group that Gokay was responsible for, but according to Gokay he insisted he be escorted pitchside so he could “congratulate” the Argentina players.

Gokay told Josimar: “In the chaos after the final, everyone wanted something and Salt Bae said he wanted to congratulate the players because he had a big passion for Messi and Argentina. Some of the players dined in my restaurant, he said. They all know me.

“Do you realise how problematic that moment was? He was the president’s guest and he could complain to Infantino afterwards if I had denied his request. I had to be careful with him. I said: ‘You do not enter the pitch’. I never thought that he would do what he did on the pitch.”

Gokay then lost sight of Gokce for a second, at which point he found his way onto the pitch, and we all know what happened after that.

The blame was placed on Gokay, who claimed he later received a letter saying the incident had inflicted “significant damage to FIFA’s reputation and intangible assets”. He was punished with an official warning, his World Cup bonus was halved and he was banned from “all official events until 2026 except for his ‘financial related roles’”.

Gokay later went on sick leave because of the stress of dealing with that situation, and subsequently having been removed from his role as finance director of the 2023 Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand.

Gokay and FIFA then entered discussions about his departure, but in April 2024 he sent an email to all FIFA staffers making a variety of allegations against senior officials. He was fired with immediate effect two days later.

FIFA then issued a statement to Josimar which said, “The total lack of judgement and common sense in addition to a complete misunderstanding of duties and responsibilities displayed by the employee in question during that incident has been demonstrated again in an email shared with members of FIFA staff containing baseless factual inaccuracies and allegations which are unfounded. They are a frustrated response to the inevitable dismissal due to repeated misconduct of an employee.”

When contacted by The Athletic for their response to what Gokay said and the Josimar article, a FIFA spokesperson said: “FIFA does not comment on internal employment-related disputes or matters. Nevertheless, we wish the former employee well and the best in his future endeavours and thank him for his years of service.”

While Gokay might have been technically at fault for losing track of Gokce as a defender might lose a striker at a corner, ultimately this was Infantino’s responsibility. By giving Gokce VVIP status at the showpiece event in the men’s calendar, what did he expect to happen? Gokce’s brand has been essentially built on having his picture taken with famous footballers: this was the final boss of that genre. Infantino professing to be shocked that one of the world’s most incorrigible publicity seekers tried something like this feels… well, a little naive.

The Athletic asked FIFA about the current nature of Infantino’s personal relationship with Gokce, whether he takes any responsibility for what happened and the steps they have taken to ensure something similar does not happen in the future. They declined to comment.

For his part, Gokce has actually displayed a thin slice of contrition since. In an interview with The Times (of London) in June 2023, he said, “I love Argentina; I’ve lived there. I went to support them. Many of (the team) have come to the restaurant. I didn’t feel a stranger. It was a special moment.

“I can’t do anything about the reason I was there, but I would never, ever step on the World Cup pitch again. There were two billion people watching the World Cup… How many people are speaking about me? Five billion. The whole world.”

According to the interviewer, Julia Llewellyn Smith, that last part was said in the context of being embarrassed by the stink he had caused, rather than a boast.

Still, he hasn’t been ostracised by the entire football community. He managed to get himself into the VIP section at the 2024 Champions League final at Wembley, snagging pictures with Raul, Cafu, Kaka, Ronaldinho, Luis Figo, a bemused-looking Rafa Benitez, UEFA supremo Alexander Ceferin and FA president Debbie Hewitt, who he described as a “great, amazing president”. He also signed autographs for fans outside the stadium.

It was a busy week in UEFA land for him: a few days earlier he was a guest at the Conference League final as Olympiacos beat Fiorentina, celebrating with Evangelos Marinakis, the owner of the victorious team.

Gokce himself did not respond to requests for an interview for this story, and his representatives turned down a couple of approaches.

And it’s quite difficult to get people to talk about Gokce. A few people who knew him in the early days in Istanbul declined to speak with The Athletic about him because they had nothing good to say. One of those people still classed themselves as a ‘friend’ of his. “He has just changed so much,” said another, who wished to remain anonymous to protect their relationships.

Others did speak, but on the condition that their words were not quoted, not even anonymously. Information they gave has been used in this article.

Then again, others who recently worked and currently do work with him also declined to speak, this time because they wished to remain loyal to him. One person who recently stopped working with Gokce declined The Athletic’s invitation to talk about him in what we’ll call “robust terms”, citing their fondness for him.

“I never, ever wanted to overshadow anything,” Gokce told the Times. “I didn’t like the attention.”

Without meeting the man himself (again, he and his representatives turned down interview requests for this article), it’s difficult to say how true that final remark is, but based on his actions it is tricky to take his words at face value.

There are a few ways of looking at Nusret Gokce’s most infamous stunt, two years on. You could employ some cod psychology, and take yourself inside his mind on that day in 2022: here was a boy from a relatively remote corner of the world, who grew up poor but who had harnessed the undulations of modern culture and technology to make himself into one of the most famous restaurant owners on the planet and a celebrity even beyond that — a self-made man who had ascended to the point of the most powerful man in football inviting him to its biggest occasion.

You could also think Gokce is a chancer who found his way into the favour of those with influence, and who has gathered the reflected glow of celebrity and absorbed so much of it that he now possesses that glow. You could think of Gokce as a symbol of a particular kind of celebrity, the sort of loud self-publicist that has always existed, but the internet and meme culture has allowed to ascend to these levels.

And you could think all of those things at the same time. They’re not that different, really. It just depends on your perspective.

Whatever you think of him, it’s easy to see how a decade of this building could coalesce in his mind to form a rush of power and self-delusion. It’s easy to see how, having reached a level of notoriety where people of Messi’s stature actively seek him out, he would think, ‘Sure, this is the moment of triumph for perhaps the greatest player to ever play the game, but I deserve to share that moment with him.’ There are very specific rules about who is allowed to touch the World Cup trophy, limited to those who have won it and selected heads of state and dignitaries: in that moment, thanks to the power of his specific type of celebrity — plus how some of the people on that pitch had sought his restaurants out as a destination and an experience — Gokce probably sincerely thought, ‘Yes, I belong here’.

Gokce says he won’t pull that kind of stunt again. Maybe he is genuinely embarrassed about how he inserted himself into Argentina’s celebrations two years ago. But do you think he won’t try something like this again? Football hasn’t seen the last of Nusret Gokce.

(Top photo: Robert Michael/picture alliance via Getty Images)



Sumber

ARTIKEL TERKAITDARI PENULIS