Galatasaray

Eighteen Turkish championships sit in Galatasaray's record, and none of them came easily against the club that has always mattered more than the trophy itself: in the 1985 Presidential Cup final they beat Fenerbahçe 85–84, and when the two met again for the 2011 edition it was 103–97. No other Turkish club has managed as many league titles, spread across two eras of the competition and stretching from 1944 to 2013, and the gaps between them say as much as the wins — long stretches without a title, then a return, as in 1990 and again in 2013. The European breakthrough came later than the domestic one. In the 2015–16 EuroCup final, Galatasaray lost the first leg to Strasbourg IG 66–62 before winning the second 78–67 to take the trophy, with Errick McCollum named the competition's MVP and Stephane Lasme picked as Finals MVP. Sinan Güler captained that side. Almost a decade on, the club reached another European final, this time in the Basketball Champions League, but came away beaten by Unicaja Málaga 67–83 in Athens in 2025. The basketball section traces back to 1911, when Ahmet Robenson, a physical education teacher, taught the game to pupils at Galatasaray High School — six years after the wider sports club itself was formed. The team plays in red and yellow, and its lion emblem and nickname, the Lions, come from a former athlete known as Aslan Nihat. Games in Istanbul carry two rivalries: the Intercontinental Derby against Fenerbahçe, played across the city's two continents, and the more local meetings with Beşiktaş, a series Galatasaray leads 76–64. The club left the Sinan Erdem Dome, its home for basketball since 2017, for a new arena built on the site of the old Abdi İpekçi facility in 2024 — a temporary switch, before a planned return to the Dome for 2026–27. Eighteen championships, three cups, one EuroCup.