Maccabi Tel Aviv playing in Turkey

Israel Matzav ^ | 9/14/11 | staff

[Nachum]

A lot of people are worried - really worried - about Maccabi Tel Aviv's soccer match (they insist on calling it 'football') in the Istanbul suburb of Besiktas on Thursday evening. The players were met at the airport by 2,500 policemen, the team has hired an additional security company and has asked UEFA - the European Football Federation - to send a representative, and Israeli fans who insisted on violating the National Security Council directive by going to the game have been told not to wear the Maccabi yellow and blue to the stadium.

Maccabi will be escorted by police throughout its 48-hour stay in Turkey, but its management decided to leave nothing to chance and also hired a private security company, as well as requesting UEFA to send a representative to oversee safety matters.

Players have been told that they will only be allowed to leave the team hotel for training sessions and the match itself, and fans, who decided to follow the team despite the National Security Council's warnings, were requested to take off shirts identifying them as supporters of the yellow-and-blue.

"We are not interested in politics," Maccabi coach Moti Ivanir told Turkish media upon the team's arrival in Istanbul. "We are here to play soccer. We have been here before and we are expecting everything to be the same. We are not scared of anyone and we are not concerned anything will happen to us." Maccabi players were not allowed to speak to media ahead of the match, but one player said: "It is very strange to be traveling to a match abroad with no one talking about soccer. Clearly we would have preferred that the situation would be more calm, but it shouldn't effect our play on the field."