By Murat Yıldız
Türkiye won two volleyball titles within five weeks. The senior national team took the Volleyball Nations League on July 26, followed on August 30 by a younger squad winning the Mediterranean Games. The trophies do not carry equal sporting weight, and nobody serious pretends otherwise. Yet the second result is arguably more interesting because of the players who delivered it.
Türkiye's Typographers Play Volleyball
In 1911 Robert Michels published a study of political parties and reached a conclusion that has never stopped being uncomfortable. Organisations produce elites, often through ordinary administrative necessity rather than conspiracy or bad faith.
He tested the proposition on the German Social Democratic Party, then one of Europe's great mass political organisations and a movement built around democratic participation. If oligarchy could take hold there, few organisations could assume themselves immune.
It did.
Calling the tendency a law probably did Michels' argument no favours. Its strongest challenge arrived decades later, not as another theory but as an organisation that stubbornly behaved differently.
In 1956 Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin Trow and James Coleman published Union Democracy, their study of the International Typographical Union in the United States. They found organised factions, genuinely contested elections and leaders who could lose office and leave.
The typographers possessed something Michels' model had underestimated. Their occupational community was tight, local branches retained substantial autonomy and important secondary organisations could survive without the blessing of the central leadership. Members knew one another through professional and social networks that neither began nor ended at union headquarters.
Democracy endured partly because organised life did not flow through a single centre.
As I argued in The Iron Law of Oligarchy in Türkiye, the typographers did not make Michels irrelevant. They made his "law" look more like a powerful tendency, one that becomes harder to resist when little exists inside or around an organisation to check the advantages accumulated at the top.
Türkiye may have found its typographers. They play volleyball.
More Than One Door to the Top
The analogy has obvious limits. A sports federation is not a political party, a club academy is not an opposition faction and choosing a national team is not an election. The comparison becomes useful lower down, where power and opportunity are distributed across clubs, academies and youth programmes.
The Sultanlar Ligi is among the strongest women's volleyball leagues in the world. The 2026 European club season ended with VakıfBank defeating Eczacıbaşı in an all-Turkish Champions League final, two institutions competing for players, coaches, trophies and prestige while maintaining their own academies, finances, traditions and sporting interests.
They operate within a wider professional league alongside youth national teams and federation programmes whose work stretches across seasons and generations. The senior national team does not manufacture its talent pool from scratch. It draws from an ecosystem in which much of the testing has already taken place.
By the time a Turkish player reaches the senior squad, she may have spent years training alongside elite foreign players, facing them across the net and working under different coaches. Her ability has already been examined under conditions the national selector neither created nor fully controls.
Talent does not depend on a single gatekeeper. One club may identify a player another overlooked, a youth coach may see possibilities missed elsewhere, and improvement at club level can force somebody back into consideration. Closing a hierarchy becomes harder when credible alternatives continue appearing outside it.
The Mediterranean Games title is interesting for exactly this reason. The side that won in Taranto was not the senior team collecting another medal but a younger group drawn from deeper in the player pool, and Türkiye completed the tournament unbeaten. The trophy is modest beside a Nations League title, but what sits behind the first team is more important.
What the Net Cannot Flatter
Sport possesses something many political and bureaucratic institutions gradually learn to avoid: feedback that cannot easily be negotiated away.
In The Tyranny of Flattery, I wrote about what happens when leaders stop receiving information capable of contradicting them. Praise displaces reporting, bad decisions acquire flattering explanations and failure can survive because those charged with evaluating it depend on the people who produced it.
Sport is hardly immune. Federations can become political, coaches can play favourites, clubs make dreadful transfers and administrators protect friends. Money and reputation can distort judgment long before anyone walks onto the court.
Once the match starts, however, the opponent becomes the one judge nobody on your side can control.
Brazil has no reason to protect Türkiye's self-image. Italy does not care who has the better agent, the stronger club or the more impressive reputation. A weak receiver will be served at again and a late block will be attacked again. The opponent is an external auditor you cannot appoint.
A federation may be run on applause, but a set cannot be won with it. Sport remains one of the few institutions in which reality retains a veto.
On court, merit quickly stops being abstract because whoever occupies a position eventually has to perform the work it requires.
Plato's account of justice in Book IV of the Republic rests partly on each part performing the function proper to it. On a volleyball court the practical equivalent is unforgiving: a libero who cannot receive the serve will be exposed, and a setter's reputation cannot make an inaccurate ball accurate.
Comparable errors enjoy much longer lives elsewhere. A poor appointment in a ministry may be protected by hierarchy, a political party can redefine failure and a bureaucracy can design measurements that flatter its own performance. Volleyball offers less shelter because somebody on the other side of the net benefits directly from finding the weakness you would rather conceal.
The Right Player in the Right Position
Türkiye does not suffer from an absence of capable people. The recurring problem is that its institutions are often less successful at identifying them, placing them properly and allowing ability to matter once hierarchy takes over.
In Türkiye's Wasted Stock of Reason, I described a nation's stock of reason as its accumulated capacity to think, judge, remember, decide and act. Intelligent people have little institutional value if the system cannot recognise them, protect their independence or put them somewhere their abilities can be used.
The same problem ran through Why Political Systems Fail to Use Their Best Minds. A badly chosen officeholder produces dysfunction, while a capable person trapped in the wrong role represents human capital wasted before it can become productive.
Volleyball makes such mistakes difficult to disguise. The six most gifted individuals do not automatically form the best unit because receiving, setting, blocking and reading an attack require different capacities. The requirements of those positions do not disappear because an administrator, coach or audience happens to prefer somebody else.
Aristotle's idea of paideia is more useful here than any appeal to national character. Excellence has to be cultivated over time, so producing an exceptional setter at 24 depends partly on what happened to the promising setter at 14.
Türkiye's achievement is not simply that it has produced several extraordinary athletes. Countries occasionally produce exceptional individuals. Building institutions capable of finding their successors is much harder.
The Succession Test
Michels becomes most uncomfortable once an organisation has survived its founding moment. Founders often have good reasons to regard themselves as indispensable. In a young institution, experience may genuinely be scarce and much of the accumulated knowledge may sit with a handful of people.
Trouble begins when temporary necessity hardens into procedures that preserve the people who once embodied it.
Michels leaves us with a brutal institutional test: can an organisation create rules that may one day remove the person who created them?
I used Türkiye's opposition rupture this year to ask that question in The Iron Law of Oligarchy in Türkiye. Creating a new political organisation does not by itself solve personal rule. A founder proves little by defeating an old hierarchy if the rules of the replacement eventually make its own leadership impossible to replace.
Volleyball presents a less forgiving version of the same problem because succession cannot be postponed indefinitely. A national team may possess players such as Melissa Vargas, Zehra Güneş or Eda Erdem and still depend too heavily on exceptional individuals. Its institutional quality will be judged when those names are no longer available and the next players are asked to carry the standard.
A star is an achievement. A bench is a system.
Producing that bench requires people already near the top to tolerate, and preferably develop, those capable of taking their places. Political leaders can influence succession rules, senior bureaucrats can control promotion channels and party leaders can decide whose career advances. An ageing athlete has less room to bargain with the mechanism that measures her.
Indispensability may look like proof of strength, but inside an institution it can also reveal that nobody prepared the replacement. The bench exposes that weakness before the vacancy arrives.
The Test Is Not Over
None of this turns Turkish volleyball into an institutional utopia. Elite success is concentrated in a small group of exceptionally well financed clubs, so money, prestige and access remain unevenly distributed. Concentrated resources can produce excellence while developing their own closed habits over time.
Federation stability deserves the same caution. Long-term planning is valuable in a sport where a player identified in her early teens may need years to reach senior international level, but continuity should not be confused with merit. Michels' warning begins precisely with the advantages accumulated by people who remain in place. Institutional memory is worth preserving without allowing tenure to become entitlement.
The harder examination will come with generational succession rather than an ordinary defeat. Turkish teams have lost matches and tournaments before without the structure collapsing. We know much less about what happens when the present senior generation leaves, whether clubs will continue producing players at the same rate, whether younger athletes will receive meaningful responsibility, whether investment will survive leaner seasons and whether the federation can preserve useful continuity without protecting people simply because they have been there for a long time.
Macao and Taranto cannot settle any of that, and two successful tournaments should not be asked to carry such a burden.
Türkiye has nevertheless built at least one institutional ecosystem in which excellence is being reproduced through a network broader than one individual, one club or one generation. Cultural fatalism becomes a poor explanation for institutional failures elsewhere once the same society can produce closed hierarchies in one field and competitive renewal in another.
"This is our culture" tells us very little when the culture remains constant and the rules change.
What Mahfi Eğilmez Saw
Mahfi Eğilmez approached the problem from the opposite direction on August 31, beginning with volleyball rather than Michels. Türkiye's recent victories interested him because the younger team suggested something larger than another successful generation: the country appeared to be filling the space behind the stars already on the court.
His lesson was institutional. Lasting success requires a system capable of continuing after celebrated names disappear, which means preparing replacements, preserving structures that work through changes of management and allowing merit and performance to carry more weight than proximity.
Eğilmez gives that lesson a familiar name: structural reform. The phrase is used so frequently in economics and politics that it can lose almost all operational meaning, while volleyball gives it a concrete form. A functioning institution has to find ability early enough to develop it, expose that ability to competition, leave room for bad decisions to be corrected and keep more than one route open for new people to reach the top. Most difficult of all, it cannot make its future depend on the permanent presence of those who currently run it.
His final sentence, translated from Turkish, makes the connection explicit: "What we have been calling structural reform for years is, in fact, nothing other than this."
The harder institutional question may be simpler:
Who is on the bench, and can they really take your place?
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Original by Mahfi Eğilmez, "Voleyboldan Çıkarmamız Gereken Dersler," Kendime Yazılar, August 31, 2026.
Sources: Volleyball World, Türkiye Volleyball Federation, CEV, Mahfi Eğilmez / Kendime Yazılar, Robert Michels, Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin Trow and James Coleman, Bosphorus News review and reporting.