Ismail Kartal took Fenerbahce back to the Champions League after 18 years, and quit after one match of it
Kartal resigned in his post-match press conference after Thursday’s 1-1 draw with Roma, saying he would never return. President Aziz Yildirim refused to accept it, and the coach then missed training.
Sep 11, 2026
It took Fenerbahce 18 years to get back into the Champions League league phase. It took Ismail Kartal about an hour after their first match in it to resign, live, in front of the cameras.
Fenerbahce had just drawn 1-1 with Roma in Istanbul on Thursday night. Bryan Cristante put the visitors ahead on 39 minutes, Archie Brown headed the equaliser three minutes into the second half, and a point against a Serie A side is a perfectly respectable start to a campaign nobody at the club had been part of since 2008-09. Then Kartal sat down in the press conference and ended his own job.
A bottle from the stands
During the match a spectator threw a water bottle that hit the 65-year-old on the head. Fenerbahce identified the person and banned them. That incident, and the pressure that had been building around him, is what Kartal pointed to when he announced he was going.
He said he had resigned to clear the way for the club, and that he had done it with no intention of ever returning. Coaches say versions of this and come back within a fortnight. Kartal’s phrasing left less room than most.
The president said no
Aziz Yildirim did not accept it. The Fenerbahce president was in front of reporters not long afterwards, explaining the resignation away as a reaction to being hit by a bottle and instructing his coach to carry on.
“Some fans threw a bottle at the coach’s head this evening during the game. He is upset about it,” Yildirim said. “I am his senior, I told him to continue and that’s it. We are a family.” He was blunter elsewhere: as long as he remains president, Kartal is the Fenerbahce coach.
Kartal’s answer to that came on Friday, when he did not turn up to training at Samandira and could not be reached. Turkish and international outlets have since split on whether the club has finally accepted the resignation or is still refusing to, which tells you how settled this is.
He is the reason they are in this competition
The strange part is who is walking out. Kartal is Fenerbahce four times over. He played for the club for a decade, managed it in 2014-15, took it on as interim in 2021-22, had a full spell in 2023-24, and came back in June for a fourth go.
He is also the reason they are in the league phase at all. Fenerbahce entered this season’s Champions League at the second qualifying round in July and had to win three ties to get through, past Gornik Zabrze, then Sturm Graz, then Lyon over two legs. Seven European matches, four wins, three draws, no defeats. The Roma game was the reward.
Behind that is a club that has finished second in the Super Lig five seasons in a row and keeps spending to fix it. Close to 99 million euros went out this summer, on Mason Greenwood, Romelu Lukaku, Nathan Ake, Vedat Muriqi and Kojo Peprah Oppong among others, into a squad that already had N’Golo Kante, Marco Asensio, Milan Skriniar, Nelson Semedo and Matteo Guendouzi in it.
The league is where it went wrong
Europe has been the easy part. Fenerbahce sit ninth in the Super Lig with six points from four games, having lost at Genclerbirligi in their opening league match on 15 August and then at home to Besiktas on 5 September. Two wins, two defeats, and a title race that looked over before September was a week old.
That is the pressure Kartal was talking about, and a bottle to the head is what it looks like when it stops being abstract. Fenerbahce play Gaziantep away on Monday, and at the time of writing nobody outside the club can say with any confidence who will be in the dugout.
One more detail, because it is the detail everyone will remember. Archie Brown, who had just scored the goal that saved the point, found out his manager had resigned while he was still doing his post-match interview.