Adanaspor

Adana is a cotton town, but the club that carries the city's name into the national game grew out of a different trade altogether. In 1940 employees of the Turkish State Railways formed a sports club there and called it Demir — iron — after the tracks and workshops that paid their wages. Adana Demirspor was one of thirty-eight such clubs the railway company set up across the country.

For decades the club's real strength lay in the pool rather than on the pitch: its water polo section won twenty-one Turkish league titles between 1942 and 1965, while the football side spent the 1950s collecting regional Adana League titles. Adana Demirspor became the first club from outside Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir to reach the national top flight, in the 1960–61 season, only to go straight back down. It returned in 1973–74 and stayed eleven years, its best finish a sixth place in 1981–82, the same era in which it lost a Turkish Cup final to Trabzonspor.

The 2020–21 second-tier title ended a twenty-six-year wait for top-flight football, and two seasons later the club finished fourth in the Süper Lig, its highest placing ever, earning a first run in the UEFA Europa Conference League with Mario Balotelli in the squad. Behind that peak sat instability: a fire tore through the club's headquarters in January 2022, and by 2024–25 unpaid debts had brought point deductions from the Turkish Football Federation and FIFA, along with a penalty for walking off during a match against Galatasaray.

None of it touched the derby with Adanaspor.