Cup ties wait for somebody to seize them, and Andreas Skov Olsen obliged against Amedspor. 3‑2 on the night, and the name in the next round’s hat is Basaksehir.
Two goals and a mark of 8.77 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
1 for Luccas Claro, marked 7.59, and a centre-half's name in the part of the report he normally only reaches by mistake. He will not be allowed to forget it in the dressing room for a month.
Eldor Shomurodov and a teammate went at it, and not about football. Training grounds are small places and a long season makes them smaller.
Squad9 Nov 2026
Olivier Kemen falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Sariyer this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 22 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
At 34, 3 points below where he was, and a body that has started charging interest. It happens to all of them and it is still the hardest paragraph on this page.
11 new signings in one window. Every one may be an upgrade and the side can still be worse for a while, which is the part of a rebuild the verdicts never mention.
The dugout19 Oct 2026
The manager’s verdict
“That is on me. I pick the team and I picked wrong.” Managers say that when they mean it and when they need to be seen to, and after 1‑2 Ufuk Tokoz left the room before anybody could ask which.
Eren Elmalı was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Squad12 Oct 2026
Words at Basaksehir training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Davie Selke is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Basaksehir know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
Trabzonspor next, and one man in the Basaksehir dressing room knows their training ground better than his own. The reception will tell him what they thought of him.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Aleksandar Jovanović trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
Numbers do not stay secret in a dressing room. He is not asking for more than he is worth; he is asking why somebody beside him is worth more, and Basaksehir have no good answer.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Basaksehir can pretend not to have heard.
It is a specific kind of quiet, a ground watching a winning position dissolve. Fatih Karagumruk kept coming because nothing stopped them, and Basaksehir will be asked about the last half hour all week.
A deal that was a phone call from completion at lunchtime was dead by midnight. Basaksehir will try again when the window opens; Antalyaspor may not be selling by then.
The run now stands at 4, and the questions being asked around Basaksehir are no longer polite ones.
Squad14 Sep 2026
Jerome Opoku falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
200 games in the shirt. Nobody sets out to build a record like that; it happens to a certain kind of player at a certain kind of club, and this town knows what it has.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Basaksehir this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Footballers are asked about their boyhood club so often that nobody listens to the answer. Jeam has just signed for Sariyer, and for once the answer mattered.
Enver Kulašin and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
He is not being dropped. There is simply nowhere in the formation Sariyer are playing to put a man who does what he does, which is a harder thing to be told than any team sheet.