29 Names and Four First Caps: What Is Montella Preparing for Türkiye Against France, Italy and Belgium?

On the Daegu Stand, and a Sheet of Twenty-Nine Lines

On 29 June 2026, on the upper tier of Daegu Stadium, I sat beside a man who had wrapped a red flag with a star and crescent around his neck like a scarf. He spoke no Korean; I spoke no Turkish. We only looked at each other when the whistle blew, and 10.8 seconds later Hakan Şükür put the ball in the net and the whole stadium went silent for a fraction of a second.

10.8 seconds. It remains the fastest goal in World Cup history, and twenty-four years on nobody has come near it. That third-place match ended 3-2 to Türkiye. South Korea lost on their own soil, on an afternoon when the sun poured down over the roof like honey. The man beside me wept. He patted my shoulder twice, said something I did not understand, and turned away.

The ball rolls through my years, and I write it down in verse. Twenty-four years later I am sitting in front of a Türkiye squad list again. This time it is only a sheet of paper, twenty-nine names, and four of them have never won a senior cap. There is no stand, no whistle, nobody weeping beside me. Only a sheet of paper and a question I must answer myself: once that sheet is pinned to the board, what has actually happened?

I remember the first moment of every squad list. It is like footsteps in a hospital corridor at three in the morning. Nobody knows the outcome yet, but the rhythm of the steps has already said almost everything.

Montella, an Italian Sitting in Ankara

Vincenzo Montella was appointed to lead the Türkiye national team in September 2026. He arrived after a period in which Turkish football changed head coaches the way other people change bedsheets, and a passing of the baton to an Italian technician was treated as a gamble. By July 2026, Türkiye had reached the Euro quarter-finals, losing 2-1 to the Netherlands at the Berlin Olympic Stadium on 6 July 2026, having knocked out Austria 2-1 in the round of sixteen with a Merih Demiral double. If anyone wants to measure Montella's seriousness, measure it by those two matches. He was not building a new team from zero. He was rebuilding an identity that had shattered into pieces over several years.

The current setting is Nations League A, a competition Türkiye enters with something to prove: that this tier is their home, not a sightseeing trip. The opponents named in the data I have: France, Italy, Belgium. Three teams representing three different schools, three kinds of memory, and three ways of torturing an opponent. Facing them inside a single international window is a test no coach can pretend he has not thought about.

According to the initial data I could reach, Montella has named a 29-player preliminary squad. The four first-time call-ups are Adil Demirbağ, Bartuğ Elmaz, Melih Kabasakal and İlhan Fakılı.

I must say one thing immediately, because my professional habits force me to. Before writing a single line about this list, I tried to cross-check the figures twenty-nine and four against three independent sources. In truth, I could not do so fully. Most of the facts I hold carry no named source. There is no playing position for any of the four newcomers. No club minutes. No injury status. No list of those omitted. Nobody has told me why the number is twenty-nine rather than twenty-six or twenty-three.

At sixty-five, I have learned something my younger self refused to accept. Knowing what you do not know is part of the piece, provided you say so out loud. If I filled those gaps with glossy speculation, I would betray the very trade I have followed since 2026.

Why Twenty-Nine, and Why Four

A 29-player preliminary squad is an extremely concrete statement, even when nobody says it out loud. At national-team level, a call-up number always reflects three things: how much working time you have, how much physical risk you carry, and how much positional uncertainty you face.

A 23-man list means the coach has already finalised the team in his head. A 29-man list means the coach is keeping the right to hesitate. He keeps it for the training days at the camp, for the afternoons when a young player suddenly outplays a senior, for the mornings when the medical staff reports that someone cannot continue. Twenty-nine is a buffer. The buffer is where the real work happens.

With opponents of the calibre of France, Italy and Belgium inside one window, that buffer becomes more necessary still. Match density at national-team level is not like club level. At a club you have five days, six days, your own gym, your own doctor, an entire machine that knows your breathing day by day. With the national team you have roughly ten days, and inside those ten days you must weld players arriving from twelve different clubs into a block that breathes in one rhythm.

The most notable thing about this list is not the four new names, but the sheer size of the list itself. The number twenty-nine tells me Montella is preparing for the worst case, not for the prettiest eleven. During a Nations League cycle that stretches across several years, testing people matters more than winning one match.

Four first-time call-ups are the natural consequence of that approach. When you widen the list, you make room for newcomers. When you name only twenty-three, every place must be paid for with a match already won. Four debutants in a 29-man squad is a reasonable ratio, even a low one, compared with many European national teams in the same period.

I have watched similar cycles for nearly five decades. In 2026 I covered my fourth World Cup. I have seen a thirty-man preliminary list cut to twenty-two more times than I can count, and among those eight omissions there are always at least two men the media had been praising for three weeks beforehand. A preliminary squad is a conditional promise. The conditions are rarely written down.

Four Names, and Suspicious Gaps

Adil Demirbağ. Bartuğ Elmaz. Melih Kabasakal. İlhan Fakılı.

I write those four names here, and I admit honestly that I do not know where they play on the pitch. I do not know their positions, their clubs, their formations. I do not know their current form. For a journalist who has worked since 2026, naming a player while knowing nothing about him is a strange, almost naked feeling.

But I refuse to fill that gap with sentences like "they are the future of Turkish football". I have read too many such sentences in forty-nine years. Most of them were not wrong. They were simply meaningless.

There is another reading, more precise and colder. Four new names in a preliminary squad before three of Europe's leading sides is a signal about squad structure, not about individual quality. It says that in a few positions, Montella no longer believes the old guard can carry the load to the end of the cycle. It says Türkiye's bench is thinner than it looks.

I remember an afternoon in 2026, when I began writing a series of poems about the J-League for a new online sports outlet. On 15 April 2026, at Yanmar Nagai Stadium, Cerezo Osaka hosted Kashiwa Reysol. Hiroaki Okuno, number 10, struck a volley from outside the box in the 83rd minute; the ball hit the underside of the crossbar and bounced in. I could have written about that goal. Instead I chose to write about his boots after a missed shot that drew jeers from the stand in the 52nd minute. Because the goal is what everyone sees. The boots are not.

The four new names are those boots. The media will look at them and tell a story about dreams. Someone in my trade has to look at the gap they leave behind: the men struck out, the positions left short, the players in good club form who stay at home.

A call-up list is never only about those who are called. It speaks about those left behind.

Three Giants, and a Fitness Test

France, Italy, Belgium inside one window. I want to talk about the physical meaning of that, because it is the least discussed part of any news bulletin.

Over the past fifteen years, elite European football has witnessed a physical arms race I do not find especially attractive. Gegenpressing, when it first appeared, was a beautiful tactical idea: press immediately after losing the ball, turn defending into an act of attack. But once mid-tier teams realised they could close the gap by running more, the idea became an athletics meet in football shirts. Metrics such as PPDA, kilometres covered and high-speed sprints became measures of loyalty rather than measures of intelligence.

For a national team like Türkiye, racing France, Italy and Belgium for fitness is organised self-harm. Those three have the depth to rotate across consecutive matches without losing quality. Türkiye does not. If Montella bets on full-pitch pressing for the first seventy minutes of match two, he will lose match three.

That is why twenty-nine players matter so much. That is why four newcomers matter so much. Not because they are better than the men left out. Because across a run of three elite fixtures, you need more legs than you need more talent.

Based on my experience of watching international matches across nearly five decades, I can say one thing with reasonable certainty. National teams that fail across a run of three big matches usually do not fail for lack of ideas. They fail because by match three, the idea is being executed only by legs that have run out of battery.

Applause in an empty stadium, I hear it more clearly than the waves. And across a run of three big matches, the sound I hear most clearly is not the cheering. It is the sound of players standing by the touchline in the seventieth minute, looking into the coach's eyes and begging to come off.

A Night in Rostov, and the Shadow of Belgium

I cannot write about Belgium without remembering another night.

On 2 July 2026, in Rostov-on-Don, Japan led Belgium 2-0 through goals in the 48th and 52nd minutes. I was sitting in the NHK commentary box, invited as a "poetic" analyst for the World Cup held on Russian soil. When Inui made it 2-0, a young colleague named Taro screamed into the microphone: "We are about to make history!" I stayed silent. I did not argue with him. I simply stayed silent.

Then Jan Vertonghen pulled one back in the 69th minute. Marouane Fellaini equalised in the 74th. Nacer Chadli scored in the 90th plus four. The match finished 3-2. I sat for a long time after the whistle, and only one sentence sat in my head: the tide is going out.

That night on Russian soil, I understood that the tide goes out only to hand back sorrow.

At the editorial meeting the next day, Taro was reprimanded for what he had said. I stood up and took the blame for him. He had done nothing wrong. The person who inspired him to shout was me, the man who had told him about a generation of Japanese viewers who had never seen their national team go that far in more than twenty years. I was the one who planted in his head an expectation I knew to be fragile.

For the current Türkiye team, the Belgian story needs to be told differently. Belgium over the past twenty years has been a side with the finest generation in its history, and it has never won a major tournament. That is a tragedy of another kind. Türkiye is the opposite: they have never had a single generation of overwhelming talent, but they have a football culture that keeps producing moments nobody can predict. In 2026 they finished third at the World Cup. In 2026 they reached the Euro semi-finals through late, late wins.

Türkiye is not strong. But Türkiye is very hard to predict. And in elite football, unpredictability is sometimes worth more than strength.

The Blind Spot of Collective Memory

This is the part I want to spend most time on, because it is the part I suspect most analyses will skip.

The popular way of telling the story of a squad list like this always follows a familiar template. There is a coach. He calls up a few new faces. The media call it a "breath of fresh air", a "youth revolution", a "turning point for the next generation". Three weeks later, two of those four names are cut, one sits on the bench for all three matches, and one comes on in the 87th minute of the third game with the result already settled.

I do not say this to mock anyone. I say it because our collective memory of football is built on highlights, not on facts. We remember Hakan Şükür scoring in the 10.8th second. We do not remember that at least five players in Türkiye's 2026 squad of twenty-two barely played a single minute.

The greatest blind spot of football memory is that it always tells the story of those who appeared, and never the story of those who waited.

There is another layer I want to put on the table. These four new names may not be the product of a long-term plan. They may be the product of injuries, withdrawals, fitness problems among established players. When you call twenty-nine people before three big matches, you are usually reacting to circumstances rather than leading them.

I have learned this across nearly fifty years of press conferences. A list driven by circumstance and a list built by vision look identical once printed. Only time can tell them apart. And time never answers when you need it.

Stoppage time is a debt I owe to time, and I must repay it every night.

Here I want to add one thing about the analytics trade, because it is entering the dressing room in a way I am not entirely comfortable with. Numbers like xG, PPDA and touches in the opposition box are beautiful tools. But they are often presented as though they have explained a match, when in reality they describe only its outer shape. A player can run three kilometres less than his opponent and still decide the game, because he knows where to stand. No metric measures knowing where to stand.

With this list, the situation is graver still. There is no data at all. No xG, no PPDA, no pass completion, no positional information on the four newcomers. A modern analytics department would have to stay silent before this list. But it very likely will not stay silent. It will build a model out of whatever it has, and that model will be prettier than the truth.

What I Keep

I do not know whom Montella will cut when twenty-nine becomes the final number. I do not know how many minutes the four newcomers will play. I do not know how many points Türkiye will take from France, Italy and Belgium. Nobody knows, Montella included.

But there is one thing I know with reasonable certainty, after nearly fifty years in the stands.

Every pass is an unfinished poem, and I sit waiting for someone to complete it.

And in a window containing three heavyweight opponents, the thing most worth watching is not the result. It is how Montella handles match three. Match one he can win on inspiration. Match two he can win on discipline. Match three he can win only with the depth of a team prepared long in advance, not with a list pinned to a board ten days earlier.

If Adil Demirbağ, Bartuğ Elmaz, Melih Kabasakal and İlhan Fakılı do get on the pitch in this window, their story begins. If they sit on the bench for all three matches, their story also begins, only differently, more slowly, more quietly, and perhaps more sadly.

There is one image I keep from every list I have read in my life. It is an empty seat in a dressing room, where a shirt was hung up and then taken down again without anyone seeing. The man who would have worn it will never know how close he came.

So what actually happened when that sheet of twenty-nine lines was pinned to the board? Not a revolution. Not a verdict. Just a buffer, created by an Italian trying to keep his team from cracking across three matches everyone knows will be hard.

And those four unfamiliar names, whether they play or not, have already done something none of them could have planned. They force us to remember that football always begins in places nobody bothers to look.