On Sunday, Bloomfield Stadium will be full of 30,000 spectators, who will come to see a strange Tel Aviv derby.
After ten seasons (!), Hapoel Tel Aviv will come to the game in a better position than Maccabi (fourth vs. seventh). The last time this happened, we coached the late Hapoel Dror Kashtan and Nitzan Shirzi.
The last time Hapoel defeated Maccabi in a league derby was eight years ago, when Sharan Ben Shimon was the coach.
Hapoel won 1: 3, but Maccabi had already secured the championship earlier.
At the moment, Hapoel is in a higher position than usual, but after a 3-0 home defeat to Sakhnin.
Maccabi, which fired its Dutch coach Patrick van Leven, won 1: 3 in Kiryat Shmona, with an Israeli deputy, Barak Yitzhaki, on the lines, whose official position at the club is the director of the football department.
Yitzhaki's appointment, both temporary and permanent - being the club's senior professional authority - is a departure from the line set by Canadian owner Mitch Goldhaar's vision that the team will lead a professional team on the purity of foreigners, with a clear hierarchy of professional manager, coach and assistants.
This week it was announced that Maccabi is willing to pay half a million euros a season to its former coach, Vladimir Ivitch, to bring him back.
But Goldhaar has not visited Israel for two years, including in the recent crisis with the dismissal of Van Leven.
To take care of the matter, from Cyprus he sent his right hand man to the club, Jeff Angelidis, who does not live in Israel and also rarely comes.
Throughout the Corona period Angelidis was not here, both because of entry restrictions and because of the death of his mother.
• • •
I spoke this week with Aviv Bushinsky, a clear Maccabist, and the best man to bring the last two owners of Maccabi, Alex Schneider and Goldhaar.
Schneider, owner of the Formula 1 team (Midland), left Netanya as a child and moved to Canada.
He entered into secret negotiations on the purchase of Maccabi Maloni Hercikovich without the knowledge of Hercikovich, but with the knowledge of David Federman and businessman Meir Shamir. Bushinsky traveled to the Netherlands with Federman and Shamir to meet Schneider.
Schneider paid Lonnie more than NIS 100 million, which covered some of his investments over the years.
But the professional agenda continues with Israeli coaches and managers, Ran Ben Shimon and Avi Nemani.
Maccabi did not rise, lost in the derby, and Schneider wanted to sell.
Bushinsky offered Maccabi to Goldhaar, but he did not want to support a bunch of professional footballers.
Bushinsky offered him to take only the youth department, Goldhar realized that Schneider was under pressure to leave the club, and accepted Maccabi Tel Aviv in the summer of 2009 without compensation. Today, 12 and a half years later, he returned to zero, rebuilding Maccabi Tel Aviv.
Goldhaar brought a new and centralized method of management, with foreign experts to the controversy of youth, including Van Leven.
The Canadian owner also completed the work of icon Avi Nemani, who was general manager, and later a coach.
Nosmani's entourage accused Bushinsky of spreading "Little Red Riding Hood" to Nemanji.
Jordi Cruyff was the significant acquisition.
He outlined a new, professional spirit, with foreign coaches, and mostly successful ones.
But Maccabi has become an almost sterile club in terms of media, and less warm and available to fans as in the Nemanji era.
For this, the fans were compensated with successes in Europe and hegemony in Israel - five championships and two state cups.
Bushinsky thinks Goldhar is tired, which Maccabi is less interested in today.
He supports the team in the amount of $ 7-6 million per season and sees this as a kind of contribution to the State of Israel, no more.
He realized that it is very difficult to break the glass ceiling of Israeli football in the European arena.
Although he introduced codes of professional work and greatly upgraded the club, he has now reached the wall.
In the end, even though he had every reason to come to Israel in recent months to deal with the problems that had piled up, he did not come.
I asked if Goldhaar was happy to put the keys on the table.
"If he had a good chance to leave Maccabi today with dignity, he would do it," Bushinsky replied, "but without being told that he left the ship. Self-respect and personality structure will not let him do it. Sentiments. "
• • •
Although Zvika Sharaf comes from basketball, he is the greatest Maccabist I know, also in football.
Oriented, connected and up to date.
This week he told me that the problem is in the culture of sports management.
"We laugh at the Greeks, but when I went to coach Baris Thessaloniki, they put me in a room and told me: This is your office, coach. I never had a room at Maccabi Tel Aviv.
"We confuse concepts between a coach and a professional manager, a sports director. There is a difference between professional decisions and financial decisions, and there is a difference between a CEO like Ben Mansford, who had a professional understanding, and CEO Sharon Tamam, who has no such understanding and specializes in economics. ".
Sharaf says that Barak Yitzhaki does not have a professional authority with Goldhaar, nor with the players, like that of Cruyff and Mansford.
"It was a mistake to release Eitan Tibi and Itai Schechter, who were very important to the locker room. They did not learn the precedent from Haran Rady, who helped Be'er Sheva win three championships. And it was Jordi's mistake."
"What would you do with Noble and Micah?"
IM asking.
Sharaf says he is in favor of values and good behavior, but in the same breath mentions that he is an apprentice of Shimon Mizrahi.
"If your son falls, do you throw him away? No. First hug, then punish.
"When I was Maccabi's basketball coach, there was an affair with Will Bynum (the player was involved in a nightly brawl on leaving the club and in a hit-and-run accident; AP).
So first we treated him best, and then he got a $ 50,000 fine.
Today decisions are made in Canada, and in Kiryat Shalom there are no professionals who will feel the pulse of the club.
Those who come from outside, take time to understand who Maccabi is.
What Goldhaar has been doing for the last two years is not Maccabism. "
Aviadp65@gmail.com
