Kuyt beat Liverpool a day after Fenerbahçe hired Emre, and a week later he is gone too

Dirk Kuyt's last game in charge of Fenerbahçe was a 3-2 Champions League win over Liverpool, the club where he made his name in England. It came one day after Fenerbahçe had announced Emre Belözoğlu as their new head coach. On Wednesday, a week after that night in Istanbul, the club confirmed that Kuyt has left and will not stay on in another role.

Kuyt arrived in Istanbul this summer as an assistant to İsmail Kartal. When Kartal left on Oct. 27, the day after a 2-1 derby defeat at Galatasaray, the 46-year-old Dutchman stepped up as interim coach.

His spell lasted exactly two matches. The first was a 2-1 home loss to Göztepe in the Süper Lig on Oct. 31. The second was the Liverpool game on Nov. 4, which turned into one of the nights of Fenerbahçe's season.

Liverpool led twice, through 19-year-old Trey Nyoni's first senior goal and a header from substitute Alexander Isak. Both times Fenerbahçe answered within minutes. Mason Greenwood's free kick deflected through the wall, Archie Brown finished at the back post after a short corner, and Vedat Muriqi headed the winner in the 79th minute for his first Champions League goal.

The numbers around that win were big for the Turkish club. According to beIN Sports, it ended a 10-game winless run in the Champions League, the longest in Fenerbahçe's history in the competition, in their first appearance in the league proper since 2008-09. ESPN noted it was their first win in any competition in four games. Kuyt called it "another miracle in Istanbul," a nod to Liverpool's 2005 final against AC Milan, a year before he joined the Reds.

What makes the timing unusual is that the result changed nothing. Fenerbahçe announced Emre on Nov. 3, and Kuyt still took the team into the Liverpool game the next evening. Dutch broadcaster NOS reported that Kuyt had said last week he hoped to stay at the club, and Goal reported he was open to working under the new coach, while accepting that the staff decision belonged to the directors.

The directors went for a clean break. Kuyt is not part of Emre's technical staff, even though the two were teammates at Fenerbahçe, where Kuyt played three seasons.

The club's farewell was warm. "You were with us on the pitch first, then in the dugout," Fenerbahçe said in their statement, adding that "some goodbyes are not farewells, but expressions of an eternal bond."

Emre, also 46, signed an 18-month deal and arrived from Kasımpaşa, who had lost only once in the league under him this season. It is his second spell in the Fenerbahçe dugout. In 2020-21 he took over for the final 10 league games and went 7-2-1, an average of 2.30 points per match.

His first game back could hardly have gone better. Fenerbahçe won 5-0 at Arca Çorum FK on Nov. 8, with two goals each from Greenwood and İrfan Can Kahveci and one from Oğuz Aydın. That lifted them to 19 points from 11 games, sixth in the table, nine behind leaders Galatasaray, although their goal difference of +19 is the best in the league.

For Kuyt, a 104-cap Netherlands international, the coaching path has been bumpy. He was let go by ADO Den Haag in the Dutch second tier after barely five months, took Beerschot up to the Belgian top flight and then went down with them the following year, and finished a quiet 10th with FC Dordrecht last season before joining Fenerbahçe as an assistant.

His record as Fenerbahçe's interim coach ends at one win and one loss. The win, though, is the one people will remember: a comeback against Liverpool in the Champions League, earned with a team that had already been handed to someone else. Fenerbahçe return after the international break at Kocaelispor on Nov. 21, with Emre in charge and Kuyt looking for his next job.