Fenerbahçe Şükrü Saracoğlu Stadyumu

Şükrü Saracoğlu Stadium sits on the same ground where Ottoman football first found a permanent home, and Fenerbahçe have never let the address go: the club moved to buy the land outright in the early 1930s, and the site has stayed theirs through every rebuild since, down to today's iron-and-glass bowl squeezed into the Kadıköy shoreline. Nothing about the plot has changed in over a century, only what stands on it.

The current stadium dates to 1982, but its identity comes from what happened between 1999 and 2006, when the old open bowl was closed in, roofed, and wrapped with hospitality tiers, turning a fairly plain municipal ground into one of the more compact, vertical stadiums in Turkish football — stands rising close and steep over the pitch rather than set back behind a running track. It took the name of Şükrü Saraçoğlu, a former club president and prime minister, only in 1998, after decades under simpler working titles.

Capacity sits at 47,911, modest by the standards of Istanbul's other rebuilt giants, and the stadium's single working record still points to the derby that defines it: 45,070 for Fenerbahçe against Galatasaray on 8 March 2015, a crowd that filled the ground almost to its limit. The pitch itself runs on SIS Grass hybrid turf, a detail more about upkeep than history, but one that marks the stadium out among Süper Lig grounds still on pure natural surfaces.

Ownership stayed with Turkey's Ministry of Youth and Sports even as the club rebuilt and renamed the place around it, with Fenerbahçe running it day to day — a split arrangement common enough in Turkish football, but rarely worn as visibly as it is here, on a ground the club has called home since before the republic itself existed.