Four of them are left at the 2024 European Championship. Four of the best five players in the world in Hakan Calhanoglu’s position. Turkey’s captain listed them in order. “Fifth: Enzo Fernandez. Fourth: Joshua Kimmich. Third: Toni Kroos. Second: Rodri. I’ll put myself first.”
Since his reinvention as a deep-lying playmaker in the autumn of 2022, Calhanoglu thinks nobody does it better.
Inter signed him as a free agent, from neighbours Milan, during the last Euros three years ago to replace Christian Eriksen, who could no longer play in Italy after having an implantable cardioverter defibrillator fitted to kick in and save his life in the event of another cardiac arrest like the one he suffered when Denmark played Finland at that tournament.
Calhanoglu crossed the city as a No 10 but, over time, the player he really succeeded was a No 6: Marcelo Brozovic, who had for years been the metronome in front of the Inter defence.
Calhanoglu helped Inter win their 20th Serie A title last season (Mattia Pistoia – Inter/Inter via Getty Images)
Brozovic had been troubled by injury during 2022-23, his final season at San Siro, and his then 20-year-old understudy Kristjan Asllani wasn’t ready to step in. Barcelona were up next in the Champions League group stage and it presented coach Simone Inzaghi with a dilemma. He asked Calhanoglu whether or not he might consider a new role for his new team. “I tried him there in a couple of training sessions,” Inzaghi recalled. “He won me over. But the acid test was the game.”
Inter won 1-0 and Calhanoglu scored the goal, angling a shot past Marc-Andre Ter Stegen from distance. He is convinced his ballistics are what separates him from his peers in the position. They’ve been his calling card ever since he defied physics with this 44-yard free kick for Hamburg against Borussia Dortmund 10 years ago.
True “No one else scores them” stuff.
Although Rodri might have something to say about that, having done so in the 2022-23 Champions League final when Manchester City prevailed over Inter by the grace of his shot from the edge of the box.
While it was heartbreaking to lose that night in Istanbul, Calhanoglu’s stature has only grown. He was voted midfielder of the year in Serie A for 2023-24 and, to his point about goals, he scored 13 times in the league. No Inter player since Lothar Matthaus in his Ballon d’Or-winning pomp over 30 years ago has found the net more in a single campaign from his position.
Ten of the 13 were penalties (a 100 per cent record from the spot) though, and he has argued it’s harder to score — even for a long-range specialist like him — when he’s positioned deeper and has to play a covering role than in his old No 10 position. Only Calhanoglu’s best peer in the division, Stanislav Lobotka, of Napoli, made more passes than him from the position last season. But none of Lobotka’s were as spectacular as this laser beam; a dissecting diagonal for Federico Dimarco against Juventus.
“Anyone can manage possession,” Calhanoglu says. “But I don’t like playing short, 5m (16ft) passes. I always want to make the last pass and increase our chances of scoring, or a long pass. Giving the ball left or right does nothing for me.”
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It shouldn’t come as a surprise who he admired as a kid growing up in the German city of Mannheim. “(Andrea) Pirlo was always my idol,” Calhanoglu revealed. “I liked the way he played, how cool he was on the pitch. He didn’t feel stress. I remember his dinked penalty against Joe Hart in 2012.”
Unlike Germany’s Kimmich and England’s Trent Alexander-Arnold, who have gone from full-back to No 6 and vice-versa, Calhanoglu followed Pirlo’s evolution from No 10 to what Italians call the regista role — sitting, as a film director does while they bring scripts to life.
“Right now, he’s the best midfielder in Italy and possibly the world,” Turkey’s Italian coach Vincenzo Montella opined. Montella was in charge of AC Milan when Calhanoglu arrived from Bayer Leverkusen in summer 2017. They didn’t get to work together for long back then, just 19 appearances — “The club got taken over and the first person to pay whenever problems start to hit is the coach,” Montella reflected — but they’ve since made up for lost time.
Montella, formerly a slick striker who went by the nickname Little Airplane (because of his arms-out goal celebration and 5ft 8in/172cm height), has made Calhanoglu the pilot of Turkey’s national team. Not only is he a leader with the character to cross the divide in Milan, take and score penalties in big games and play a role in which one mistake could let an opponent in between splitting centre-backs but, having turned 30 in February, he’s also the experienced head on the youngest and most emotional team in the Euros.
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He’s the one balancing agent in a team big on exuberance and having-a-go and less big on tactical rigour although, ironically, Turkey have rarely looked more disciplined than they did in the 2-1 win against Austria in Tuesday’s round-of-16 tie, when Montella switched to a hybrid 3-4-3 while Calhanoglu was serving a harsh suspension for being booked twice in the group phase.
(Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images)
“He’s settled into this new position perfectly,” Montella says. “I didn’t expect it from a defensive point of view because, unlike at Inter, he doesn’t have three centre-backs behind him here. We’re very attacking. We’ve got full-backs who are more attacking than defensive (Ferdi Kadioglu and Mert Muldur). We’ve got wingers who are more attacking than defensive (Kenan Yildiz and Arda Guler). Plus a No 10 (Orkun Kokcu) and a striker (Baris Alper Yilmaz).”
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It falls on Calhanoglu not only to get Turkey’s passing game going but also to plug gaps, shuffle across and make tackles. “He’s a complete player,” Montella raved.
Bayern Munich have shown interest in bringing Calhanoglu back to the Bundesliga this summer, forcing him to get ahead of the story and release a mature statement on Instagram declaring himself “extremely happy” at Inter and “fully concentrated on making the people of my country happy” too.
Calhanoglu did just that against the Czech Republic last Wednesday, when he opened the scoring in his old club ground, the Volksparkstadion in Hamburg, in a 2-1 win that secured Turkey’s qualification for the Euros’ knockout stages for the first time since 2008. (They now face the Netherlands in the quarter-finals tomorrow — Saturday — in Berlin, with a semi against England or Switzerland awaiting the winners.)
(Marcus Brandt/picture alliance via Getty Images)
“He can play in every position in midfield. Today, he played a little higher,” Montella said afterwards. “The goal he scored was extraordinary.”
Initially, it seemed like Calhanoglu merely smashed one in from a tight angle after Yildiz and Ismail Yuksek had successive shots blocked. But take a closer look at the technique he applied to the ball.
“The way he took it,” said former striker Montella. “There aren’t many players in the world who could have pulled off that shot, in that tight angle with the outside of his foot.”
Some people didn’t take Calhanoglu seriously when he talked himself up as the best player in his position in the world. But he has walked the walk and deserves to be on the shortlist, regardless of whether he’s right at the top or not.
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(Top photo: Maryam Majd/Getty Images)
