Trabzonspor U19

Trabzonspor U19 reached the final of the UEFA Youth League in 2024-25, the first Turkish side ever to get there, beating Budućnost, Sarajevo, Juventus, Atalanta on penalties, Inter and Salzburg along the way before losing 1-4 to Barcelona U19 in Nyon on 28 April 2025. They picked up the tournament's Fair Play award on the way out.

The academy carries the weight of a first team that broke Istanbul's grip on Turkish football between 1975 and 1984, when Trabzonspor won six Süper Lig titles from a city with no history of doing so, then added a seventh in 2021-22. Domestically the youth side has kept that habit going rather than merely inheriting it.

Where the team plays depends on the occasion: league fixtures are worked out at the Kadir Özcan Tesisleri, while the run to the European final was played out at Papara Park in front of the senior club's own crowd. The academy has sent players straight into that first team rather than just past it — Yusuf Yazıcı and Abdülkadir Ömür both came through the same production line that the U19 side now represents on the continental stage.

None of it changes what the fixture list looks like closer to home. The Black Sea Storm's rivalries are geographic before they are anything else — Samsunspor first, then Çaykur Rizespor down the coast — before the older, louder antagonism with Istanbul's Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray and Beşiktaş, the three clubs whose decades of dominance the 1970s title run was built to interrupt.