Kocaelispor FK

It was the kind of season the club has had to repeat more than once, because the route back up has been walked several times.

The club exists because three Izmit sides — Baçspor, Doğanspor and İzmit Gençlik — folded into one on 24 April 1966, and the merger settled both the name, taken from the surrounding province of Kocaeli, and the green and black that the team still wears.

The high point arrived in the spring of 1997, when Kocaelispor beat Trabzonspor to win the Turkish Cup. Five years later they did it again, this time against Beşiktaş, and in the same season took the Swarovski Cup with a 4-1 win over Arsenal — a friendly trophy, but not a scoreline that gets forgotten in Izmit.

What followed was a long fall. By 2015-16 the club was winning the regional amateur league, then the third tier in 2019-20, and it was only in 2024-25 that it took the second-division title again and returned to the top flight. Rashit Çetiner, top scorer in 1977-78, and the 1980 second-division title belong to an era most of the current support never saw.

Home is the Yıldız Entegre Kocaeli Stadium, which holds close to 35,000 — a capacity built for a club expecting to be in the first division rather than the third.

The two cup finals shaped who Kocaelispor measure themselves against. Trabzonspor and Beşiktaş are the names that come up first in Izmit, not because the fixtures come round often, but because each of them was beaten on the one day it counted most.