This weekend probably determined the champions of the Super League and Fenerbahçe now need a miracle to catch Beşiktaş in the following two weeks. It has been a dull competition, I must say. After the first half of the season, Beşiktaş and Fenerbahçe were the only ones left in the race. Despite the quality being really low throughout the race, unfortunately, no other team was able to join them and heighten the tension. Nevertheless, Beşiktaş were slightly better in some aspects than Fenerbahçe and honestly they got away with it by being lucky.

First of all, defensively Fenerbahçe were a much more compact and stable team than Beşiktaş this season, and especially in the second half Beşiktaş defense was truly miserable. Fenerbahçe coach Vitor Pereira's radical decision at the beginning of the season was the determining factor of the team's defensive success. The Portuguese coach initially tried an attacking style, which was aesthetically enjoyable but given the team's inexperience in such a strategy it was ineffective and unstable. Thus, after a short period of time, Fenerbahçe and coach Vitor Pereira's focus was on defense and how to stop the opponent rather than playing their own game.

This, however, was a huge paradigm shift that shook the primary goals of the team this season and how the squad was shaped in the pre-season. Fenerbahçe initially built its squad to dominate the domestic league and mostly spared its budget for high-quality offensive players who would only be effective in an offensive system. But Vitor Pereira understood his team's inability to play an organized, collective game, seeing as individual superstars were not forged to play such a style. Therefore, he switched to a defensive system where the team's only weapon for attack was counter attack.

It was a gamble, given Beşiktaş played a completely different game than Fenerbahçe in the first half of the season and their style was more productive in terms of scoring. Hence, two different philosophies, domination and counter-attacking, clashed until this weekend where Beşiktaş crossed the psychological barrier and beat their archrivals Galatasaray away from home, and Fenerbahçe lost to fifth-place Başakşehirspor, increasing the difference to six points

Even though Beşiktaş and coach Şenol Güneş were more traditional and conservative in their strategies in the second half of the season, the philosophy that they created in the first half carried them to the championship. What Fenerbahçe lacked was the productive and risky game that almost every championship-winning team needs when they are supposed to win. When Fenerbahçe were the defending side, everything was fine given no team in Turkey had enough to open up such a tight defense. But at the end of the season, Fenerbahçe were the side who were supposed to score and the team clearly failed when they had the initiative.

This is what happens when you sacrifice style for results and think that goals will just magically come somehow. Nevertheless, true football philosophy starts when you have the ball and need to score. I do not mean to undermine defensive styles, but if a team does not know how to score when they have the initiative, everyone must question the strategies of their coach. Thus, Vitor Pereira lost this year while trying to sacrifice the future of Fenerbahçe to win this year. Ironically, Beşiktaş did the same but they had the slight philosophical difference at the end which made them champions. In the end, unfortunately, this season contributed almost nothing to Turkish football.