Football Gets the Money. Volleyball Gets the Medals.
- Seda
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
Filenin Sultanları: How Türkiye's Women's Volleyball Team Became the Country's Most Successful National Side
In a living room in Ankara, in a student flat in Berlin where someone keeps one browser tab open for the match, the same scene repeats every summer now. A Turkish woman tosses the ball high, jumps, and the room goes quiet for half a second. This is voleybol, volleyball, a word the language borrowed from French and never gave back. Over the last few years it has become the steadiest source of national pride that Türkiye has.
That sentence sounds wrong to anyone who knows the country, because pride here is supposed to come from football. For most of a century it did. So consider one week in late June 2026, when two Turkish national teams were on the world stage at once.
The men's football team played its final group match at the World Cup in the United States, having already lost its first two games without scoring a single goal. In Ankara, the women's volleyball team finished its home week of the Nations League with a comeback win over China. The football side carried the largest budgets and the loudest expectations in Turkish sport. The volleyball side carried a record that has quietly become the best of any national team the country has ever sent abroad.
A name before a record
The women's team had a name long before it had trophies. People call them Filenin Sultanları, the Sultans of the Net. Three words that hold the whole story.
File is the net, the taut line that splits the court. The nickname goes back to the 2003 Women's European Volleyball Championship, held in Ankara and Antalya, where Türkiye took silver on home soil and the crowds reached for a word grand enough to match them. For twenty years the name sounded aspirational. Now it reads as plain description.
The record, laid out
Under the Italian coach Daniele Santarelli, who took charge in 2022, Türkiye won both the Nations League and the European Championship in 2023. They beat China for the first title and Serbia for the second in a five-set final in Brussels that ended 15-13 in the deciding set. Melissa Vargas, the Cuban-born opposite who plays for Türkiye, scored 41 points in that final and was named the most valuable player of the tournament. The captain, Eda Erdem, lifted the trophy in the centennial year of the Republic, and the players dedicated the win to that anniversary.
That season came close to flawless. The team won twenty-two matches in a row across three competitions and reached the top of the world rankings for the first time in its history. The word the crowds chanted was şampiyon, champion, and for once it described the present tense.
At the 2024 Paris Olympics the team reached the semi-finals for the first time, losing the bronze match to Brazil. In September 2025 they reached a World Championship final for the first time and took silver in Bangkok, losing 3-2 to Italy after Vargas top-scored with 33 points. Both Vargas and Erdem were named to the tournament's Dream Team. Around them: Zehra Güneş at the net, İlkin Aydın and Hande Baladın on the wings, the setter Cansu Özbay, the outside hitter Ebrar Karakurt.
As this is written, the team sits third in the world and is competing again in the 2026 Nations League. The Türkiye women's volleyball side is now often called the most successful national sports team the country has produced. The claim is strange in a country that has always counted national feeling in football. Few national teams have a stronger case.
Where the money goes, and where the medals come from
Turkish football runs on money it does not have. The country's largest clubs carry debts measured in billions of euros, much of it owed in foreign currency while income arrives in a weakening lira. Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe and Beşiktaş are large multi-sport institutions, and football revenue has long carried their other branches, volleyball and basketball among them. Football sits at the center of the budget and at the center of attention. Everything else is asked to fund itself or wait.
The results have not matched the spending. The men's national team last reached a World Cup in 2002, where it finished a famous third, then missed five tournaments in a row. It returned in 2026 after twenty-four years away and left the group stage with two defeats and no goals scored. The squad includes players at Real Madrid, Juventus and Inter Milan. The gap was never about talent. It sat between that individual quality and a team ready to win together, and the football establishment preferred not to name it.
Women's volleyball built the opposite arrangement, with less noise and far less cash.
The domestic league, the Sultanlar Ligi, produces clubs, led by VakıfBank, that win European titles with a regularity the men's football sides have not matched in a generation. The national team grew out of that league, match by match, season by season. Türkiye still spends most of its sporting money on the men's game. Its medals come from somewhere else, and they come from women.
The word Sultan
Filenin Sultanları breaks into clean pieces. File is the net. The ending -nin is the genitive suffix, "of," so filenin means "of the net." Sultan keeps its old sense of sovereign. The plural arrives in a single suffix: Sultan becomes Sultanlar through the plural ending -lar. The final -ı ties the sultans back to the net. One short chain of suffixes turns a single title of power into a whole team of them. This is how Turkish builds meaning, stacking outward from the root, and the name of a volleyball team carries a quiet lesson in it.
The word Sultan carries more than grammar. In English it sounds male, an emperor on a throne. In Ottoman usage the title belonged to women as well. Hürrem, the wife of Süleyman the Lawgiver, held the rank of haseki sultan and ran part of the affairs of an empire from inside the palace. I followed that story in an earlier essay on how a captive woman became political structure. The era after her is remembered as the Sultanate of Women, a stretch of roughly a century when the mothers and wives of sultans held real authority at the heart of the state.
So when a country gives a team of women a sovereign's title and means it as the highest praise it has, the language is reaching back five hundred years. It places these athletes in a long line of Turkish women who held power in public and were named for it. The name was chosen the way nicknames always are, without ceremony. It turned out to be exact.
A country's reforms, and its women
Turkish women gained the vote in national elections in 1934, ahead of France, Italy and Belgium. That number is often cited as evidence that the Republic arrived with women's rights already in hand. The fuller picture is longer and messier. The groundwork was laid across the previous century, in the reform movements of the 1800s, the constitution of 1876, the revolution of 1908, and in the women's press and associations that operated in Istanbul in the late Ottoman period. I traced that longer arc in a separate essay on the Ottoman roots of Turkish reform. The public standing of women has been contested ground here for a very long time, won in pieces and defended in pieces.
A national team of women at the top of a global sport is the newest chapter of that argument, and one of the most watched. Millions who would never open a history of Ottoman reform sit down to watch these women win, and they take in the same idea. Turkish women belong at the front of public life. They have for generations.
What a country does with a winning women's team
A successful women's team becomes a mirror, and the country does not always like what it sees.
The response has been wide. Matches sell out, television audiences run into the millions, and volleyball is now among the most followed sports in Türkiye, most of that growth built by this single side. Players who were once known only to specialists turn up on billboards and in children's drawings. For a sport that women play, in a country where women's public life is argued over constantly, that ordinary visibility is its own kind of statement, made without anyone having to give a speech.
The response has not been universal. A few conservative voices went after Ebrar Karakurt over her private life while the team was winning Europe, and Balkan Insight reported the title as a victory won in spite of pressure at home. Karakurt answered: "Uniting we will win, not dividing." The line has outlasted the attacks.
This is the part that reaches past sport. Bianet has noted that the Sultans hold particular meaning for many women in the country right now. A girl in a small Anatolian town can watch, on an ordinary weeknight, women who look like her country reach the very top of a global field and hold their dignity while a few try to take it from them. She learns something from a volleyball court before she reads it anywhere.
A line from the founder
When the team dedicated its 2023 wins to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the Republic's centennial year, it was reaching for a particular kind of authority. Atatürk built much of his idea of the new state on the public standing of women and on physical education, a story that begins with his landing at Samsun on May 19, 1919.
A line widely attributed to him fits the team almost too closely: Ben sporcunun zeki, çevik ve ahlaklısını severim, "I admire the athlete who is intelligent, quick, and principled." Like many sayings passed down in his name, the exact source is uncertain, and it is best held as something attributed to him rather than documented.
Even so, it describes a kind of citizen as clearly as a kind of player.
The women's volleyball team is, in that older vocabulary, the citizen he described. It wins through preparation and intelligence rather than money, and it holds itself with calm under provocation, while a richer and louder branch of Turkish sport keeps returning home without the trophy.
Watching from outside
For learners abroad, trying to read the country through more than its suffixes, the Sultans of the Net are one of the clearest windows there is. Watch them play, and listen for the name the crowd gives them. The name is five centuries old, and it tells you who Türkiye admires when the country is paying attention. The language and the stories are all still there, waiting to be read. That is what this site is for.
Add Learn Turkish with Seda as a Preferred Source on Google for deeper insight into Turkish language, history, and culture.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q: Why is the Turkish women's volleyball team called "Filenin Sultanları"?
A: It means "the Sultans of the Net." File is the volleyball net, and Sultanlar is the plural of Sultan, sovereign. The nickname dates to the 2003 European Championship hosted by Türkiye, and it frames the players as rulers of the court.
Q: What has the Turkish women's volleyball team actually won?
A: They won the European Championship and the Nations League in 2023, reached the semi-finals at the 2024 Paris Olympics, and took silver at the 2025 World Championship in Bangkok, their first World Championship final. They reached number one in the world in 2023 and have stayed near the top since.
Q: Why compare the volleyball team to Turkish football?
A: Football receives most of the money and attention in Turkish sport, and its biggest clubs carry billions of euros in debt, while the men's national team left the 2026 World Cup without scoring a goal. The women's volleyball team, built on a strong domestic league, became a world power with far fewer resources. The contrast shows where money goes and where results actually come from.
Q: What does the word "Sultan" have to do with women?
A: In Ottoman history the title Sultan belonged to imperial women as well as men. Hürrem Sultan held the rank of haseki sultan and wielded real political power at the heart of the empire, in a period remembered as the Sultanate of Women. Giving a team of women that title places them in a very old tradition.
Q: Who is the team's biggest star?
A: Melissa Vargas, a Cuban-born opposite who represents Türkiye, has led the scoring in the team's biggest matches, including the 2023 European final (41 points) and the 2025 World Championship final (33 points). Captain Eda Erdem is the long-serving anchor of the side.
Comments