İstanbul Başakşehir U19

The Başakşehir Fatih Terim Stadyumu holds just over 17,000, a ground built for the senior side that the youth teams share on match nights and around it. Its main pitches sit at the Langa Tesisleri, the training complex where the U19 side actually trains and where the academy that produced it was opened in September 2019, under the İstanbul Başakşehir Futbol Kulübü banner. The parent club itself began life in 1990 as İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyespor, a municipal side run by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, before the football branch was separated out and renamed in 2014. The orange and navy blue that the U19s wear trace back to that senior identity, as does the nickname Boz Baykuşlar, the Grey Owls, taken from the owl on the crest.

The academy's clearest statement came in the 2022/23 season, when the U19s won the U19 Elit A Ligi, beating Galatasaray's under-19 side 7-6 on penalties after the two had drawn 1-1. European football has been less kind: a Youth League tie against Club Brugge's youth side was cancelled in 2020/21, and in 2023/24 Dinamo Zagreb's under-19s eliminated them 5-2 on aggregate. Graduates have started to filter through regardless — goalkeeper Onur Güney and midfielder Harun Kahraman both signed professional terms in 2019, the same year centre-back Mert Çelik and forward Muhammet Arslantaş made their first-team debuts.

Derby weekends carry more weight here than the fixture list alone suggests. Kasımpaşa provide the local rivalry, but it is meetings with Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe and Beşiktaş — the Big Three — that give the İstanbul Derby its edge, and that same rivalry with Galatasaray's academy was exactly what the U19s settled on penalties in 2023.