Kevin Campbell tells all on bizarre time in Turkey, Turkish press marking training sessions and explains how he got into record labels & security firms

In the final part of a Ladbrokes Fanzone exclusive, Kevin Campbell gave us the lowdown on his spell with Trabzonspor in Turkey.

Animal sacrifices and rubber bullets in Turkey; Trabzon’s facilities better than any Premier League team

I’d just won promotion back to the top flight with Nottingham Forest, and out of the blue this move to Trabzonspor came about. Dave Bassett, for weeks, kept telling me to sign a new contract with Forest, but I kept telling him there was no contract there. I’d ring him up and tell him there was no contract on the table, and he’d be adamant there was.

“Well you go and get it for me, then, Harry!”

He didn’t realise there was no contract in place for me, so the people upstairs had been lying to him. Obviously they’ve then gone and done a deal with Trabzonspor, so before we were set to go on our pre-season tour, I was pulled aside and told I wouldn’t be going, and that it would be in my best interests to move to Trabzon and accept the move.

I asked my agent to come with me to find out a bit more about it all. I knew no one in Turkey. The manager at the time was Gordon Milne, his assistant was Ian Wilson. I didn’t know them, but I knew of them. But that was it. I went out there to go and see what it was all about.

I got to the airport. I was just about to board the plane and I had a phone call from Pierre van Hooijdonk – my partner up front – asking me if it was true that Forest were selling me.

“Pierre, I’ll call you from Turkey!”

That must have wound him up, but I did call him and explained what had happened at Forest, and that’s why he went on strike, because they were splitting up our partnership.

So, I’m at the airport, in Istanbul, about 600 miles away from Trabzon, and there’s comfortably between 10,000 and 20,000 supporters there to greet me. It was just crazy.

I never felt worried about anything out there. I just saw it as a different experience. Why not try it out? The only concern I had was around what kind of environment I’d be walking into, at the training ground, and that kind of thing. I wanted to see the training ground before I signed anything. And when I did, it put every club to shame over here! That’s the truth. I’d never seen anything like it! It was a complete level above. I thought to myself, ‘this is an adventure…I’m a Brixton kid. If I could survive in Brixton, I could survive in Turkey!’

All of the crazy stuff you hear about the fans out there, that all happened; the sacrifices and all that kind of thing. I saw it all go down: water cannons, rubber bullets. You’re absolutely worshipped out there…I saw it all in Turkey.

What made things sour for me was the battle between the chairman and the press. You’re with the press out there all the time. It’s not like in England where you might see the press a couple of times in a week. They go absolutely everywhere with you. They travel around with you, they’re there at training, I’m talking between 80 to 120 press; it’s crazy. It’s a lot more intense out there, so you can imagine when I came back to England, the media duties were a piece of cake!

Out there, I learned a lot of valuable lessons. It’s fanatical out there, and that environment makes you ask questions of yourself. Having to deal with it was tough at times. But I got through it and it made me both a better player and a better person, to be honest.

Turkish press used to write about our training sessions – you’d get a double-page spread for a hat-trick in 5-a-side!

You’d get marked for your performances in training, in five-a-side games, and they’d end up in the newspaper; that’s how close the press were to everything. If we played any practice games, you’d get marked. There’d be a double-page spread on the game.

In the papers, the team got five pages a day, so they had to fill them with something! If you did great in a five-a-aide game, there’d be this massive headline in the paper the next day! It’s amazing, the coverage out there. It was always funny to me because I’d never seen anything like it. To those guys out there, it was normal, to make the headlines after a good training session.

My Turkish could only improve while I was out there, because I didn’t have a clue when I first signed! There were some great guys out there, though, and a lot of them spoke English, so they helped me with my Turkish. And, you can imagine, the worst words were the first words they taught me. They were getting me to say some terrible things in meetings, but it was all good fun. In the end, I could conduct small interviews in Turkish, which was great. I embraced it all. If you’re going to be there, at least learn the lingo, you know? I loved it.

I did go back out there 20 years later, or so, and one of my team-mates, Unal [Karaman] was the manager of the team. It was great to see him, and great to go back and see some of the guys who were still working at the club. And I got to see the press guys again. A lot of them were the same guys as when I was playing for the club in 1998! It was nice to see them all, and discuss old times and things like that.

Record labels, security firms and humanitarian work

The record label stuff came about when I was still playing, but that’s all finished now, which is fine. I got into the security business while I was still playing, actually, solely because there were a lot of problems going on with footballers’ houses while they were travelling, so that’s how that came about. For me, it was a needs-must type of thing.

Getting into the humanitarian work, that mostly happened after my playing career was over, purely because I had the time to do it. Going to Iraq and Africa, visiting refugee camps, all of that kind of thing, and supplying them with the goods that they needed, that was something I always wanted to do. And it was something I decided to get involved with as soon as I could, really.

So the first two parts of my work outside of football actually came while I was still playing. I loved music, I still do, and that’s why I got into it. And then the security was because things were happening in football, and I saw a gap in the market. There was nothing around which was similar to what I wanted to do, so I managed to get some friends of mine on board who ran their own security companies.

The humanitarian side is something which is so dear to me, but you can only really get properly involved once you’ve got time on your hands.