İlhan Cavcav

İlhan Cavcav — Biography

İlhan Cavcav was an Ankara businessman who ran Gençlerbirliği for almost forty years and is remembered as the longest-serving chairman of a single club in Turkish football. He was known for hard bargaining and for selling young players, bought cheaply, to big clubs at high prices; he is said to have left the club debt-free. The club's Beştepe facilities bear his name.

The son of a milling family of Albanian origin, Cavcav left school after middle school to join the family business, played football for Maskespor and PTT as a young man but declined to turn professional. In 1960 he started his own business, and his flour factory put him among Ankara's leading industrialists. In the mid-1970s he briefly chaired Hacettepe, joined the Gençlerbirliği board in 1977 and became chairman in 1978. After a short break he returned in 1981, when the club was close to dropping into the third division; he secured the merger of the second and third leagues, which took the team to the 2. Lig. Gençlerbirliği reached the top flight a season later and won the Turkish Cup twice. By the end of 2015 he had worked with 59 coaches and dismissed 42 of them; Ümit Özat was the last one he appointed before his death.

Some fans criticised him for chasing profit over results and never turning down big clubs' offers. He died in Ankara on 22 January 2017 aged 81, and is remembered at his grave each year on that date.