Football’s oldest debate - aside perhaps from whether you can win anything with kids, or whether female players should be made to wear shorter shorts - is which club provides the best fan experience.

Sorry to disappoint you Anfield Kop-ites, or those at the Britannia Stadium who do admittedly sing fairly loud - by English standards at least - and everyone else who reckon themselves the best fans in the world. I’m not even going to read out the nominations from inside my little golden envelope, as the winner takes it by a country mile.

Football fans take heed: go to Istanbul and attend a home game at Besiktas’s Inönü Stadium once before you depart this mortal coil. You will not regret it. A day at the football in Istanbul is the perfect antidote to England’s increasingly anodyne, sterile and ordered stadium culture. And at £25 a ticket it’s not bad value either.

Despite the warnings of friends, family and the media - including the BBC, who once referred to a “ritualistic violence” among Turkish football fans - I’ve always been envious of Turkish fan culture. Some deplorable incidents notwithstanding - one involving my own boyhood club Leeds United - their fans’ passion seems to me what being a football supporter is all about. And so off I went to witness the madness myself, armed with tickets to a potential tinderbox of a derby game between Besiktas and Galatasaray.

Neither club has had the best of seasons. Despite investing heavily last summer Besiktas had sunk to fifth place, outside the European spots and with only pride to play for in the league - though their victory over Istanbul BB in Wednesday night’s Turkish Cup Final provided both consolation and a place in next year’s Europa League.

Galatasaray were in even direr straits. Coach Gheorghe Hagi, a legend as a player at Gala, was sacked in March with the club languishing in the bottom half of the table. Hagi’s successor Bülent Ünder has struggled to turn things around, and the 17-time champions of Turkey have now set an unwanted club record of 16 league defeats in a season.

If there were any lingering fears that fans of both clubs would turn out only to heap scorn on their underperforming sides, I needn’t have worried. The entire stadium was in full voice, and the only potential harm suffered by the players might be tinnitus, caused by what must be the loudest fans in European, if not world, football.

Before the game I had been made well aware by the home fans of their reputation. Emanating from the working class suburbs to the north of the city, and with faintly leftist affiliations - in stark contrast to more elitist Galatasaray - Besiktas fans are a defiantly proud bunch. “You’ve come to hear our Çarşı [the nickname of Besiktas’s hardcore supporters]?” one fan standing in the queue to enter Inönü asked, half knowingly. “Get ready to become Besiktas’s newest supporter,” said another.

This kind of smugness ought to have grated, but as soon as the players took to the field it was clear why Besiktas fans seemed so pleased with themselves.

It began with the Turkish anthem. Nothing unusual about that, except that the Besiktas fans stood throughout their national hymn with their arms outstretched mimicking a sort of swallow dive. Apparently this is referred to as Kartal Pençesi or “The Eagle Claw”, in reference to Besiktas’s nickname, The Black Eagles. It was visually stunning.

Then kick-off, and the fun started. Standing at the top of the Yeni Açık, the newest of the Inönü‘s home stands, you can look out onto the Bosphorus, flanked by mosques and the 18th century Dolmabahçe Palace, and watch ships float by bound for the ports of the Black Sea or Mediterranean. That view was nothing, however, compared to what was going on in the Kapalı Tribün, the stand which housed the Çarşı, to our left.

The chanting from Kapalı was ear-splitting and incessant. One chant, the otherwise semantically uninspiring “Eagle Goal, Goal, Goal”, set the hairs on the back of the neck tingling.

But not only do Turkish fans understand the nuances of volume in their singing - they also recognise how fan displays can be visually captivating too. Performing what Besiktas fans call the “Dale Show” (their version of the now ubiquitous Dale Cavese), all four sides of the stadium join in a choreographed round of clapping, waving and much else besides that looks simply jaw-dropping. Take a look at it in its full glory.

And then there’s the whistling. If you can contort your mouth to emit some ear-piercing sound you’ll find a friend in Turkey. When a Galatasaray player touched the ball, when the referee waved play-on as a black-and-white shirted player went to ground, when the away fans started chanting, there arose a volley of whistling so loud it hurt your ear drums. Pity the dogs who live around Inönü.

The aural and visual feast continued from start to finish. In the event the result of the game seemed merely incidental, but for the record Besiktas won 2-0 thanks to quick-fire second half goals from Mehmet Aurelio and Simao. The football on show wasn’t bad either - thanks to the technical talents of a Besiktas midfield featuring Simao, Ricardo Quaresma and Guti, the home side played a brand of passing football that was easy on the eye, if a touch one-paced.

Still, despite the household names on the Inönü pitch, the real stars are those off it in the stands. The best place to watch football in the world? You betcha.