Hakan Şükür — Turkey's all-time leading scorer, holder of the fastest World Cup goal on record — has lived in Mountain View for a decade, in exile from the country that erased him. When Turkey plays Paraguay at Levi's Stadium on Friday, he'll watch from his living room, with his cats.

Levi's Stadium is a short drive down US-101 from Mountain View. On Friday night, Hakan Şükür — Turkey's all-time leading scorer, the man who scored the fastest goal in World Cup history — will not make that drive.

He'll watch from his Mountain View living room, with his two cats, Bella and Luna, as Turkey faces Paraguay in a must-win group-stage match just up the road in Santa Clara. He doesn't feel safe attending, he told the SF Standard: people connected to Turkish intelligence may be in the crowd.

The gap between his house and the stadium is not the interesting one. The interesting gap is twenty-four years.

The last time Turkey competed in the World Cup was 2002, when Şükür captained the side to an improbable third-place finish — and scored against South Korea in eleven seconds, the fastest goal in tournament history. He was the captain, the face, a national hero whose first wedding was televised live. He later served in parliament. Then Erdoğan consolidated power, and Şükür spoke out, and the consequences came methodically: his father jailed, his family's assets frozen. Galatasaray — the club where he made more than 400 appearances — scrubbed his name and image from its facilities and website, according to the SF Standard. A 2022 Netflix documentary on legendary coach Fatih Terim cut his goals from archival footage and erased him from team photographs, as if he had never played there. During the 2022 Qatar World Cup, TRT commentator Alper Bakırcıgil was pulled from the broadcast booth at halftime of a Morocco-Canada match for mentioning Şükür's name, per reporting by the Stockholm Center for Freedom.

In 2015, he came to Northern California to explore business opportunities, bringing his wife and three children. A year later, charged with "insulting" Erdoğan on Twitter, he had no country to return to.

Now he runs a YouTube studio out of his Mountain View garage — wall painted black, lighting purchased on credit, 162,000 subscribers. Behind him he keeps a State Medal received in 2002, later revoked by Erdoğan. Turkey has been rated "not free" by Freedom House for seven consecutive years.

When Fox's Jacqui Oatley mentioned his record during Turkey's opening match against Australia, it didn't go unnoticed. His eldest daughter, now 26, was home.

"It was great timing for my kids to hear something positive about me around Father's Day," he told the SF Standard.

"I can't go home," he said, "so God brought [the team] here to San Francisco."

Turkey plays Friday night. Their greatest player will be a few miles up the road, watching.