Beşiktaş

The handball section, formed in 1978 inside the same club, took longer to make itself known, but once it did, no rival in Turkey came close to matching it.

Nineteen league titles is the headline figure, and the shape of them matters more than the count: eleven in a row between 2009 and 2019, a stretch during which the Turkish Handball Super League effectively became a formality each spring. The Turkish Cup and Super Cup have followed the same pattern often enough that Beşiktaş is now described, without much argument, as the most successful handball club the country has produced.

Domestically settled, the club looked outward. In 2016–17 it became the first Turkish men's team to reach the group stage of the EHF Champions League, and returned there the following two seasons — a level no other side from the country had touched before or has matched since. A run to the semi-finals of the EHF Challenge Cup in 2009 remains the closest the club has come to a European final.

Utku Ergüder captained the side long enough that his number 14 no longer belongs to anyone else; it hangs retired rather than reissued, the usual marker for a player a club decides not to replace, only to remember. Fixtures against Fenerbahçe carry the weight of the city's wider sporting rivalry, sharpened rather than softened by the fact that both sides expect to win.

Home games are played at the Süleyman Seba Sport Complex, a hall built for fifteen hundred — modest set against the arenas of the clubs Beşiktaş now meets in Europe, and a reminder of how far the gap still runs between winning Turkey, which has become routine, and troubling the continent's leading sides, which so far it has not.