Sakaryaspor

Kocaelispor arrives on the fixture list and Adapazarı braces for the Marmara Derby, a fixture that carries more of the province's pride than any league table does. The rivalry has outlasted relegations on both sides and still colours how a Sakaryaspor season is judged.

The club itself was stitched together from four local sides — Ada Gençlik, İdman Yurdu, Güneşspor and Gençlerbirliği — who merged on 17 June 1965 rather than keep competing against each other in the same small city. Green and black were chosen for the region's landscape and its harder memories, with white left for the Sakarya River running through it.

For a stretch of the 1980s the merger paid off. Sakaryaspor won the TFF First League in 1980–81 and again in 1986–87, then took the Turkish Cup in 1987–88 by beating Samsunspor, a run that carried the club into the following season's UEFA Cup Winners' Cup. Locally the bigger claim to fame has nothing to do with silverware: the production line that sent players such as Hakan Şükür, Tuncay Şanlı and Aykut Kocaman into the national team earned the club its reputation as a "football factory," a name still attached to it more often than any of its trophies.

The 1999 Marmara earthquake stopped the league outright, and a 2002 bus crash killed assistant coach Aykut Yiğit and two players — losses the club does not measure in points. Financial trouble followed later, dragging Sakaryaspor down to the third tier in 2012–13 despite second-division titles won in 1997–98 and 2010–11 either side of that collapse. A play-off promotion took them into the Süper Lig in 2005–06, and by 2021–22 they had climbed back to the second tier once more. The top flight, where the derby with Kocaelispor once mattered most, is still the place Sakaryaspor has not managed to hold.