5+1, 5+1+2 or 6+2+2. A geographical perspective on the never-ending debate of home-grown versus foreign footballers in Turkey

The study aimed at analysing the shift of local and international players during the 1990–1991 and 2019–2020 football seasons in Turkey. The sample of study consists of 7.724 male professional football players. The foreign players employed in 1990 and 2020 were subjected to analysis based on country of birth. Also, the analysis was conducted on the home-grown players to reveal their distribution across regions and provinces at NUTS-1 and NUTS-3 scale by incorporating values of absolute production and per capita index of player production. The side-effects of adapting to the trend were also seen in the increasing number of foreign footballers playing in Turkey as well as the decreasing number of home-grown professional players. The main insight of the study is unless rules are implemented on the number of foreign footballers allowed, foreign footballers will continue to dominate Turkish football and impair the production of home-grown footballers in local clubs.