Bursaspor - A Turkish Delight

The Big Reveal

Name: Bursaspor Kulübü Derneği
Nickname: Yeşil Timsahlar (Green Crocodiles)
Stadium: Bursa Büyükşehir Stadium
Capacity: 43,761

Training Facilities: Excellent
Youth Facilities: Excellent
Junior Coaching: Adequate
Youth Recruitment: Basic

Honours;
Spor Toto Super Lig: 2010
Ziraat Turkiye Kapasi: 1986
TFF 1.Lig: 2006
TFF Super Kupa: 1986, 2010, 2015

Bursaspor Kulübü Derneği commonly known as Bursaspor, is a Turkish sports club located in the city of Bursa. Formed in 1963, the club colours are green and white, with home kits usually featuring both colours in a striped pattern.

In the 2009–10 season, the club's men's football team won its first Süper Lig title after finishing with 75 points, one point ahead of the runners-up Fenerbahçe. Bursaspor became the second club outside Istanbul to win a Süper Lig title, joining Trabzonspor who won the first of its six titles in 1975–76. The club has also won the Turkish Cup once and the Prime Minister's Cup twice, as well as the First League twice. The club's first, and most successful foray into European competition came in the 1974–75 European Cup Winners' Cup when it reached the quarter-finals. Bursaspor also took part in the 1986–87, losing in the first round, as well as the 1995 UEFA Intertoto Cup, where it lost in the quarter-finals.

Since winning the league title in 2010 the club has faced financial difficulites and now finds itself sitting in the 3rd tier of the Turkish football pyramid and is even now only classed as a midtable team showing how far they have fallen in just 12 years since winning the title and competing in European football. The downfall all happened from 2015 when the club started to try and spend big to be able to compete in Europe and it cost them as they ended up being relegated in 2019 before a second relegation 2 years later in 2021.

Stadium

Now this really is worth a google are you really need to see for yourself as its been designed with the clubs nickname in mind and there is a crocodile head on the outside of the stadium.

In 2015, it was time for the Bursa side to bid farewell to their historic Atatürk home, and move into their brand new Timsah Arena. Its imposing construction with plus 43,000 seats made it to the third largest in the league. “Timsah” is Turkish for “crocodile”, which is one of the team's two nicknames (“The Green Crocodiles”).The clubs downfall happened just after the opening of the new stadium sadly so not been able to fufill the full potential of it.

The Why?

So why have I decided to pick Bursaspor well its a number of reasons really. The first being that the Super Lig sits all the way down in 19th spot meaning it has a massive amount to grow which is the same as the national team sitting all the way down in 40th spot with their best finish in an international tournament being 3rd in 2002. Next the save lets me focus on bringing players youth players through the ranks making use of the clubs facilities once we improve the coaching and recruitment but hopefully we can still unearth the odd player before that. Finally its restoring a team back to the top of the country but can we do it quicker going back up than the fall down which is the main question. I've also never managed in Turkey before so getting to grip with the rules should be interesting as well.

Introductions

The Squad

Well there is going to be a hell of a lot of work to do here to get this squad up to a standard where we're even going to be able to compete in this league as we only have 12 players in the first team squad. We are severely lacking in every area of the park apart from in goal where it looks like we have a cracker of a keeper. Our best player is easily our right winger in Enver Cenk Sahin who is on a whopping £4,100 a week so do we keep him for the season and hope he has the goods or cash in on him and sell him to free up his wage from the budget. Its going to be hard to come up with any sort of tactic for the team just now until we can see who we can bring in which is also limited this season as it turns out when in this league we can only sign Turkish players.

The Boards Vision

The board aren't expecting too much from us this season and just expect a mid-table finish which I think will be impressive with the 12 players that we have at the moment. They also expect us to work towards repairing the financial damage of the club which will hopefully go hand in hand with increasing the reputation of the club.

The Supporters Vision

We have a very large core supporter group which is good as they will fill nearly half our stadium. They are a bit more demanding than the board with expecting a top half finish along with playing entertaining football which is something I'd expect to do anyway. The one downside to them though is they have a high influence on the board meaning that we are going to have to keep the fans happy to keep the board happy. We have plenty of space to be selling more season tickets as well with only 3,052 sold so far so it can grow significantly over the years.

Budgets

We have a decent transfer budget for this season considering the shape of the squad and we will be looking to move a good chunk of that into the wage budget as we need to get that increased so we can actually look to bring some players in.

Other Changes

We will be looking to do an over hall of our staff as well as we will look to get the best out of our players and youth intakes going forward.

Season 1

Transfers

With only having 12 first team players available this was going to be a major window for us as we need to sign enough players to be able to try and compete in the league and we were hampered by the fact that we are only able to sign Turkish players as well. We went all out and signed a further 12 players to greatly improve the squad. I won't go into every player at this stage but will introduce you to the 3 I'm most excited about. We even spent some cash with a total of £250,000 on 4 players as well which also weakens other teams in the league around us. The only issue is most players have only signed with us until the end of the year for some reason as we couldn't offer any more than that.

This first player I'm excited about is Ahmet Sivri from Ankara D.S. for a whopping £90,000 and he'll be leading the attack for us and still has some room for improvement as well for the rest of the season

The next player is Emre Aslan who again is a very exciting young player that will be starting down the left wing and can hopefully cause some real issues this season.

Finally its Furkan Balaban who actually looks like he should probably be playing in at least the league above us in a massive coup and he even wanted to sign a 3 year deal with us as well. He's going to be the rock of this team in the centre of defence.

We did even manage to sell a player who fell right down the pecking order after all the new signings came in

As part of the transfers we also did a complete overhaul of the staff at the club as well but the one I'm most impressed with is our new HOYD who use to be Dinamo Zagreb and can hopefully find bring through a few gems over the next few seasons as we welcome Romeo Jozak to the club

The Squad

The squad is looking a lot better now with all our signings and it definitely looks like this team could make a real push now after being touted as finishing mid table.

Tactic

I've decided to try and keep the tactic simple as at this level I don't think the players are really capable of doing anything too fancy just now.

Preseason

It wasn't the best preseason for us at all but I didn't really expect much else with the number of players I signed as we tried to get them to gel as well but onwards and upwards now

The Start

I don;t know too much about any of the teams in this league so we'll just crack on and see how we get on.

The Start

Bursaspor v Sivas Bld.

What a start to the season as we run out well deserved winners as well as Sivri having a dream debut with an excellent brace to get him off the mark

Arnavutkoy Bld. v Bursaspor

A poor game defensively as we seemed to turn off at the end of each have but luckily we were able to outscore them with Aslan repays our faith in signing him with another brace before Sivri scores an excellent lob over the keeper..

Bursaspor v Bayburt Ol Spor

We struggled here for a while as it looked like it was just going to be the penalty that separated us before a 2nd yellow card and late goal secured it for us.

Amed SK v Bursaspor

Guler comes into the starting line up as Srivi is injured for a couple of days and again he gets a brace for the club. Sahin also scores his 3rd penalty in 4 games for us as well as the decisions are going our way at the moment.

Bursaspor v Duzcespor

Aslan was brought into the club to cause the defence problems down the wing and he's doing exactly that with his 4th goal in 5 games to show he should be playing at a higher level.

Isparta 32 Spor v Bursaspor

Our first game where we've had to fight back from behind but we did really well to take the lead before a disastrous piece of goalkeeping saw us conceding to drop points and draw the match

League

We're 2nd on goal difference after 6 games as we've managed to concede a lot more so maybe some defensive work to do and try and tighten up back there

Transfer Embargo

Well this has made things even more difficult as we've been hit with a transfer embargo for the next season and a half so its going to be important to tie our new signings down to another season with us at least.

October

Another 6 games in the league to look forward to this month but we also get our first taste of cup action as well against Usak Spor who play at our level but are in the other league

Great stuff mate. Looking to do a Bursaspor save myself. Could you tell me which packs you downloaded please?

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