Deep into stoppage time at Wembley Stadium on Saturday afternoon, with 84,506 people packed into the most iconic football ground in England and the most controversial Championship playoff final in recent memory still locked at zero, a cross came in from the right and Oli McBurnie stretched out his leg to tap the ball over the line in the 95th minute.
Hull City were going to the Premier League.
Somewhere in that stadium, Acun Ilicali, the Turkish media mogul who bought this club in January 2022 with a dream that most people in English football considered wildly optimistic, felt something that four decades of building a television empire had never quite given him before.
He had described the buildup to the final as producing “multiple emotions at the same time,” a mix of excitement, pride and anxiety that he could not fully separate from one another no matter how many times he had stood in front of a camera and performed composure for a living.
When McBurnie’s goal went in, all of it presumably collapsed into one feeling.
Hull City return to the top flight for the first time in nine years, completing one of the more dramatic promotions in recent Championship history and doing it against a backdrop of genuine footballing chaos.
Southampton, who were originally scheduled to face Hull in the final, were expelled from the playoffs after being found guilty of spying on opponents in what has been dubbed “Spygate,” one of the most extraordinary scandals English football has produced in years.
Middlesbrough were inserted as replacements with just days’ notice. They prepared for a completely different tactical challenge against a team they had barely days to study and came up short when McBurnie capitalised on poor goalkeeping from Solomon Brynn to score the only goal of the game in the final seconds of added time.
Hull had finished sixth in the Championship, scraping into the playoff spots on the final day of the season, having only stayed up in the division on goal difference twelve months earlier.
Twelve months between near-relegation and Premier League football. That is the kind of turnaround that defines an ownership era and sets the tone for everything that follows.
And the man at the centre of all of it has, for the past year, been sharing his life with a woman who has deliberately chosen to experience all of it as far from the cameras as possible.
The Man Who Turned a Television Empire Into a Football Club
To understand what Saturday meant for Acun Ilicali, you have to understand where he came from, because it was nowhere near obvious that he would end up owning an English football club with a pathway to the Premier League.
Born on May 29, 1969 in Uzunköprü in the Edirne province of Turkey, Ilicali grew up in a family with roots that stretched back to Erzurum and, on his father’s side, to Azerbaijan.
He moved to Istanbul for secondary school, enrolled at Istanbul University to study English Language and Literature, and then did what entrepreneurial people sometimes do when they encounter an institution that does not feel like it fits them. He dropped out.
Before his television career began he ran a small clothing shop on Bağdat Caddesi that went bankrupt before he was 22 years old, a failure he has since described as one of the defining experiences of his early life precisely because it taught him what he did not want to do for a living.
At 22, having learned that retail was not his calling, he walked into Show TV and started working as a sports reporter. It was the beginning of something that would eventually become one of the most significant media operations in Turkish television history.
In 2004, he founded Acun Medya, the production company that would go on to produce Turkish versions of Survivor, The Voice, MasterChef and Dancing with the Stars, among others.
In 2013, he acquired the television channel TV8, later expanding to TV8.5, and launched the streaming platform Exxen, which has accumulated more than a million subscribers and holds broadcasting rights to major European football leagues.
His net worth is estimated at approximately $100 to $200 million, reflecting a career that turned a bankruptcy at 21 into a media empire that reaches tens of millions of viewers across Turkey and internationally.
He had always been open about his passion for football and his dream of one day owning a club. When the opportunity to acquire Hull City arrived in January 2022, he took it without hesitation, completing the takeover from the Allam family who had owned the club for over a decade. On the day of his unveiling, he told the assembled media and supporters exactly what he intended to do.
“In football, happiness comes from results,” he said, “and I will be very, very happy if we come into the Premier League. By the way, I am here for that.”
He said it at a time when Hull were nine points clear of the Championship relegation zone. Nobody who covered English football took it seriously as a timeline. He appears to have meant every word of it.
His personal life across those decades has been complicated and, in Turkey at least, extraordinarily public. He has been married four times.
His first marriage to Seda Başbuğ lasted from 1988 to 1993 and produced his eldest daughter Banu, who is now in her mid-thirties and has a daughter of her own, making Acun a grandfather.
His second marriage to Zeynep Yılmaz in 2003 lasted thirteen years and gave him two more daughters, Leyla and Yasemin. During that marriage, an affair with Şeyma Subaşı, a Turkish model significantly younger than him, became a national scandal that Zeynep initially attempted to fight in court before eventually the couple separated in 2016.
Acun and Şeyma had a daughter together, Melisa, born in 2013, and married briefly in 2017 before divorcing after just a year.
Şeyma, who had appeared on his own reality television programmes, had become well known in her own right through that association, and the collapse of their short marriage played out in precisely the kind of tabloid coverage that follows when two public figures separate.
After those three marriages, each conducted and ultimately dissolved in the full glare of Turkish media, Acun arrived at something different.
The Woman Who Prefers to Stay Out of the Frame
Ayça Çağla Altunkaya was born on July 2, 1999, in Yalova, a city on the southern shore of the Marmara Sea in Turkey, and she came into public consciousness in a way that was almost accidental rather than engineered.
She studied nursing at Nişantaşı University in Istanbul, graduating with a degree in healthcare, and during her student years she played basketball amateurishly, the kind of dual-life that suggests someone who was building practical skills while staying physically active without any particular eye on public attention.
She applied for a position on the medical and health staff team that Acun’s production company put together for the filming of Survivor in the Dominican Republic around 2020, which is how the two of them first appeared in the same place at the same time.
The Survivor set, which Acun himself frequently visited as part of his involvement with the show’s Turkish production, is where she was first photographed alongside him, though at that point the nature of their relationship was not something either of them addressed publicly.
What followed was a courtship that lasted approximately three years, conducted almost entirely away from the media that had documented so much of Acun’s romantic history in vivid detail.
After the very public nature of the Şeyma Subaşı chapter, the extended privacy of this relationship was notable in itself.
They were spotted together on various occasions, in the Greek islands and elsewhere, but neither of them provided the running commentary that Turkish media tends to expect from figures at Acun’s level of public life.
They married on September 4, 2024, in a ceremony held at the Esma Sultan Mansion, a historic Ottoman-era waterfront residence on the Bosphorus in Istanbul, in front of a small and carefully chosen group of guests. The witnesses were Esat Yontuç and Ceren Kocakaplan.
There were no elaborate announcements, no press releases and no formal media documentation of the occasion beyond what filtered through social media second-hand.
Acun confirmed the marriage simply: “We have been together for a long time. Today we had our wedding.” That was the extent of the official statement.
At the time of their wedding, Ayça was 25 years old, making her 30 years younger than her husband. She is, notably, twelve years younger than Acun’s eldest daughter Banu, a fact that generated considerable comment in Turkey.
That conversation did not appear to affect either of them particularly, and those who know the couple have noted that Ayça has developed a warm relationship with Melisa, Acun’s youngest daughter, a detail that says something about how the blended family has taken shape privately away from outside scrutiny.
What defines Ayça Çağla Altunkaya’s public profile, such as it is, is precisely its absence. She does not maintain an active social media presence in the way that would be expected of someone married to one of Turkey’s most recognisable media personalities.
Her family, based in Yalova, have similarly kept their distance from the attention that Acun’s world inevitably generates, and she has spoken in limited interviews about how her family are modest people who have no interest in being part of the public side of her husband’s life.
She made clear that this is a value she shares with them rather than a restriction imposed on her.
When separation rumours surfaced in the Turkish press in early 2025, Acun addressed them in the most direct way available to him, which was to post photographs of the two of them together on social media without any accompanying statement. The implication was clear enough without any words attached.
More recently, when she turned 26 in July 2025, he wrote to her publicly: “Dear wife, I am glad you were born, I am glad you are in my life. May you always smile, always be happy. Never lose your energy.”
For a man who spent decades at the centre of Turkish entertainment culture, where personal life is rarely a private matter, that kind of deliberate restraint in how he presents his marriage is its own kind of statement about what this relationship means to him compared to what came before.
On Saturday at Wembley, while Oli McBurnie’s late winner sent Hull City to the Premier League and Acun Ilicali experienced what he had promised this club from the moment he arrived, Ayça Çağla Altunkaya was doing what she tends to do when the world is pointing its cameras at her husband.
Watching from her own preferred distance, and letting the moment belong to him.
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