Rarely has this fixture seen a display like it: 3‑0 against Antalyaspor, and it could have been more.
Player ratings2 Nov 2026
A brace, and Mohamed Salah takes the afternoon — 8.61
There is a particular kind of quiet from an away end watching one man score twice. Mohamed Salah provided it, and the 8.61 beside his name is if anything generous to everybody else.
At 37 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 7.93 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
“I want to be playing for trophies while my legs still let me.” Nothing in that sentence is a transfer request, and nobody at Trabzonspor heard it as anything else.
Centre-halves are allowed forward twice a season and are judged on what they do when they get there. Ozan Tufan scored, was marked 7.73, and got back before anybody noticed he had gone.
400 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.
Nobody at Trabzonspor will say this on the record and the team sheets have been saying it for weeks. There is a small group in every squad who get picked when the fixture is difficult, and he has joined it.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Umut Nayir trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
Every squad has one of these fixtures for somebody every season. This one is Edin Višća’s: the club that knew him first, the supporters who will decide in the first minute whether to applaud, and Trabzonspor needing him to play as if none of it matters.
Franculino has done the arithmetic and does not like the answer. Nothing corrodes a squad faster, and no club has ever solved it by explaining the wage structure to a footballer.
“I have done everything asked of me in training and it has not changed a thing on a Saturday.” The most familiar complaint in football, and one Trabzonspor will have to answer with minutes or with a transfer.
A conversation in the manager’s office, and a commitment that came out of it. Promises like that are cheap to make and expensive to break, and Stefan Savić has written the date down.
Two goals and a mark of 8.58 to go with them. Strikers are judged on afternoons like this one and remembered for far fewer of them than people imagine.
At 33 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 8.17 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 18 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.
“The players deserve the credit. My job was easy today.” It was not, and everybody in the room knew it; after 3‑1, Ibrahim Under could afford to be generous.
Every manager keeps a short list in his head of the men he wants on the pitch when the stakes rise, and it is never published. The team sheets for the big afternoons say Ernest Muçi is on it.
16 attempts, none of them in. He got into the right places all afternoon, which is the hard part, and did the easy part badly — and that is the version of a bad day a manager can live with.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Trabzonspor can pretend not to have heard.
“The supporters are entitled to be angry. So am I. We will put it right.” 0‑1, a manager saying the necessary things, and a dressing room that heard a different version of them.
The team sheet says it in public every week until it changes. The only version of being dropped a footballer cannot argue with, and the one he takes hardest.
5 shots, and a count that reads like a good afternoon until you check the other column. Strikers survive weeks like this on the understanding that the chances keep arriving; the day they stop is the day it becomes a problem.
Every squad has one of these fixtures for somebody every season. This one is Ernest Muçi’s: the club that knew him first, the supporters who will decide in the first minute whether to applaud, and Trabzonspor needing him to play as if none of it matters.
“This is not anger. I have thought about it for months, and nothing that has happened lately changed my mind.” The request is on a desk at Trabzonspor, and it is not being withdrawn.
The offer from Adana Demirspor for Mustafa Eskihellaç was heard out and sent back the same day. First bids are rarely meant to succeed; they are meant to find out how loudly the door closes.
Boardroom7 Sep 2026
Trabzonspor close the window on a squad of their own making
13 in and 5 out, and no more changes for months. The manager has what he has, the supporters have their opinion of it, and the table will have the last word.
The instruction has come from upstairs rather than from the dugout, which is the version of this conversation no manager enjoys. Somebody in that squad is now available whether the man who picks the team thinks so or not.
Trabzonspor asked and Konyaspor said no without discussing a figure. It is the least ambiguous answer in football and the one clubs most often come back to test.
The demotion a club never announces and a dressing room always notices. Ruslan Malinovskyi is further from the side than he was, and the reason will not be given until he asks.
The award goes to Mohamed Salah, and nobody around here is inclined to argue with the choice.
Squad7 Sep 2026
10 new faces, and Trabzonspor are still learning each other
A squad rebuilt inside one window pays for it in a currency nobody budgets for. The football is not worse than the sum of the players; it is worse than the sum of the players who have played together before.
“This is not anger. I have thought about it for months, and nothing that has happened lately changed my mind.” The request is on a desk at Trabzonspor, and it is not being withdrawn.
It is not a grievance and it is not a demand: he wants to play continental football, and he has stopped hiding it. Whether Trabzonspor can give him that is a question about the club, not about him.
The name of Mathias Fjørtoft Løvik has come up in conversations Trabzonspor were not part of. Nothing formal, nothing signed — but nothing about it accidental either.
He is 23 and the ground already sings his name, which is a thing that happens to local boys and almost never to signings. Everything from here is measured against an affection he did nothing to earn except be from here.