Anadolu Ajansı

What is Anadolu Ajansı?

Anadolu Ajansı is a news agency that distributes a wire service and publishes a public news site at aa.com.tr. Its künye names the company as Anadolu Ajansı T.A.Ş. at Eti Mahallesi, GMK Bulvarı No: 132, Çankaya, Ankara, and lists Serdar Karagöz as Yönetim Kurulu Başkanı and Genel Müdür, Yusuf Özhan as Genel Yayın Yönetmeni and Orhan Topal as Sorumlu Yayın Müdürü, alongside the members of the board.^[1] Those are the officers the masthead carried on 23 September 2026 and no earlier holder of any post is asserted here.

The agency's own history page gives its legal form as a joint-stock company from 1925, and the künye carries the same form today.^[2][1] That is the agency's account of itself together with its current masthead, and neither is adopted beyond what each states.

What does Anadolu Ajansı cover?

The agency's sport section at aa.com.tr carries three standing sub-sections — Futbol, Basketbol and Dünyadan Spor, so football, basketball and sport from elsewhere — and the material filed under them runs to domestic league and cup fixtures, national-team matches, transfers, European and North American club competition, and individual results in wrestling, boxing and other Olympic sports.^[3]

The domestic football core of that output is defined by the federation rather than by the agency. The Türkiye Futbol Federasyonu's 2024 – 2025 Sezonu Süper Lig Müsabakaları Statüsü defines the Süper Lig as the country's top professional football division, composed of nineteen clubs playing a double round-robin, with the four clubs finishing sixteenth to nineteenth relegated and international entry following UEFA's criteria and list; its Article 1 reserves the naming of the division exclusively to the federation's board.^[4]

How large is Anadolu Ajansı's audience?

No audited audience, subscription or distribution figure for the agency could be retrieved. Its künye prints the company, the address and the officers and carries no audience figure, and its history page carries none either.^[1][2] Traffic estimators are not audited measurement and are not used here.

The nearest published measurement of sports-content consumption in this market is the regulator's, and it measures television rather than a wire service. The Radyo ve Televizyon Üst Kurulu's Medyametre Medya Kullanım Alışkanlıkları Araştırması 2024 was conducted face to face with 15,766 respondents aged 15 and over across 26 provinces, with fieldwork in January–August 2024, and lists “Spor Yorum Programları” among the television programme types watched at 35.7 per cent. That is a television figure for a programme genre and it does not speak to this agency.^[5]

Since when has Anadolu Ajansı existed?

The agency gives two different dates for two different things, and this page keeps them apart. Its own history page states that the agency was founded on 6 April 1920 at Ankara, seventeen days before the opening of the Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi, on the initiative of the journalists Yunus Nadi Abalıoğlu and Halide Edib Adıvar, who agreed on the need for an agency at Geyve on 31 March. The same page states that the agency was constituted as Anadolu Ajansı Türk Anonim Şirketi on 1 March 1925.^[2]

Both are the agency's claims about itself and are reported here with their claimant rather than adopted; founding and incorporation as a company are two different events and no independent source for either was retrieved for this page. What the current masthead fixes is the company now publishing: Anadolu Ajansı T.A.Ş., as read on 23 September 2026.^[1]

Why does Anadolu Ajansı matter in Turkey's sport?

It is a wire service rather than a title built around a competition, so its sport output is filed for republication by other outlets as well as published direct, and its section list places football and basketball beside a standing section for sport from outside the country.^[3]

The commercial scale of the domestic football it files on is documented by the federation rather than by the agency. The Türkiye Futbol Federasyonu announced on 2 March 2024 that package E of the tender for the transfer of Süper Lig and TFF 1. Lig broadcasting rights had gone to Krea İçerik Hizmetleri ve Prodüksiyon A.Ş. at “sezonluk 182.000.000,00-USD (218.400.000,00-USD KDV DAHİL)”, with 11 March 2024 set as the deadline for completing the legal procedures; the announcement does not state which seasons the contract covers.^[6]

Reporters Without Borders places Türkiye 163rd of 180 countries in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index with a score of 27.94, on indicator scores of 20.16 political, 26.78 economic, 31.20 legal, 28.93 social and 32.61 security.^[7] That measurement is reported as the organisation published it and no inference is drawn from it about this agency. The opening sentence of the Media landscape section of its Türkiye country page reads: “With 90% of national media outlets under government control, the public has turned towards media outlets of varying political stances that are independent and critical of power over the past five years to learn about the impact of the economic and political crisis on the country.” That sentence is quoted as published, at country level.