Team colors and kit

Galatasaray wore red and white colors when founded, then played in dark yellow and dark blue in 1907-1908 season. For a match against the British Royal Navy cruiser HMS Barham football team played in 8 December 1908, Galatasaray finally settled on playing in red and yellow. Ali Sami Yen, the main founder of Galatasaray wrote the following in his diaries: “Our goalkeeper Asım Tevfik, left-forwarder Emin Bülent and right midfielder Ali Sami Yen are commissioned for the task of determining new team colors. “After we have been in and out of several shops, we saw two different elegant-looking wool materials in Fatty Yanko’s store at Bahçekapısı (between Eminönü and Sirkeci in Istanbul, now called Bahçekapı). One of them was quite dark red, resembling the cherry color, and the other a rich yellow with a touch of orange. When the sales clerk made the two fabrics fly together with a twist of his hand they became so bright that it reminded us the beauty of a goldfinch. We thought we were looking at the colors flickering in burning fire. We were picturing the yellow-red flames shining on our team and dreaming that it would take us to victories. Indeed it did.” The red and yellow were inspired from the colors of the roses which Gül Baba offered to Sultan Bayezid II

Home kit

Galatasaray's classic home kit

The Galatasaray home kit have always been fundamentally the same since 1908. The two team colours, yellow and red, split across the shirt. The part at the logo side is red and the other one yellow. The back is the same as the front, making it looking halved also from the side. So the home kit exists of eight parts. The sleeve next to the red body part is yellow and the other one yellow. The shorts are white and the socks red. This classic combination has been used during Ali Sami Yen era as Galatasaray SK president. From 1925-1950, 1987-1991 and 2009-2012 the club used beside the classic style also a back to front style of the halved kit. The shorts stayed white till 1983. Like many other turkish clubs in the 1980s the club started to wear a colorful (red) short. A black short was mainly used during Fatih Terim's time as Galatasaray SK manager in the late 1990s and from 2002-2004. The colour of the shorts were black in the 1920s-1940s and at the black short periods. Because of lack of money the club used to wear standard kits with standard red and yellow colours, which were more brighter than the original colours. From 1943-1983 the red tone stayed mainly the same, but the yellow was still standard like Göztepe SK or Kayserispor. For the 100th anniversary year former Galatasaray SK president Özhan Canaydın brought back the original colours. In some years the clubs also used striped kits as an alternative for the halved one. Ironically the club won the 2000 UEFA Cup Final and the 2000 UEFA Super Cup with striped kits. Since 2008 the club uses again white shorts and for the first time as first alternative / choice white socks. Because of this and the fact that the club uses the back to front style of the halved kit style since 2009 the fans started a campaign to bring back the real classic Galatasray SK home kit back.