Samsunspor

Samsunspor came back up to the Süper Lig after winning the TFF First League in 2022-23, the seventh time the club has taken that title. Markus Gisdol was the coach who took them up.

The club that plays now was assembled on 30 June 1965, when five amateur sides in the city — 19 Mayıs, Fener Gençlik, Akınspor, Samsun Galatasaray Gençlik and Samsunspor itself — merged into a single professional entity. An earlier amateur club dating to 1927 had already carried the name, and it stopped altogether in the 1940s when the money ran out, restarting on 16 November 1950.

The black in the shirt is younger than either date. On 20 January 1989 the team coach crashed on the road; among the dead were the players Mete Adanır and Zoran Tomić, and the coach Nuri Asan. The club added black to the red and white afterwards and has kept it.

Four years later Gheorghe Mulțescu, in the middle of a spell that ran from 1993 to 1997, took the side to the Balkan Cup. The domestic honours are otherwise second-division ones, plus an honorary championship in 1988-89 and a Turkish Cup final lost in 1987-88.

Tanju Çolak spent three seasons here from 1984 and finished top scorer in the league twice before Galatasaray took him. Serkan Aykut did something similar over two spells, scoring 30 in 1999-2000.

Home is the Samsun 19 Mayıs Stadium, 33,919 seats. Trabzonspor and Çaykur Rizespor are the near neighbours, and the meetings are known as the Black Sea derby.