Ulvi Yenal

Ulvi Yenal — Biography

Ulvi Ziya Yenal was born on 10 April 1908 in Thessaloniki and died on 26 May 1993 in Istanbul. The son of painter Rıza Bey, he finished Galatasaray High School in 1927 and the Higher School of Economics and Commerce in 1935, having taken up football during his school years. He joined Galatasaray SK as a goalkeeper in 1925 and was soon called up to the national team, earning six caps through 1932 and guarding Turkey's goal at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics; although a goalkeeper for most of his career, he occasionally played as a forward. Besides Galatasaray he played for Gençlerbirliği, and later for Switzerland's Servette FC.

After retiring as a player, Yenal moved into club administration, serving Galatasaray for many years and holding the club presidency across three separate terms (1953-1954, 1962-1963 and 1963-1965); he is remembered as a central figure in an internal club dispute from that era. He was twice elected president of the Turkish Football Federation and also headed the Tennis Federation and the General Directorate of Physical Education, contributing to the institutional development of Turkish sport. He is also recorded as having taken on a senior management role at Turkish Airlines in 1956. From the late 1930s he wrote sports columns for the newspapers Akşam and Tercüman, and in 1943 he published a book titled "Futbol".