Beitar Jerusalem – Israel's most popular club – has announced a new investor.
Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa al Nahyan, a distant member of the United Arab Emirates' royal family,
is the club's new co-owner.
On the face of it, that’s nothing unusual. Gulf investors from the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia have been buying up clubs across the world, big and small, for over a decade now.
But this purchase was different because of Beitar Jerusalem's special place in Israeli football.
An Arab has never played for the club, despite making up more than 20 per cent of
Israel's population. Beitar Jerusalem emerged from the 1920s revisionist zionist movement
founded by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, promoting a more muscular, right-wing zionism. The club draws
its support traditionally from the political right, especially Israel’s mizrahi community,
with its roots in the Middle East. The club also had strong ties to the Likud
party and can count current prime minister Benjamin Netenyahu among its supporters.
But the opposition to fielding Arab and Muslim players has largely been driven
by La Familia, Beitar's far-right and extremely violent ultra-group.
The club has been fined repeatedly for anti-Muslim chanting, as well as rioting and violence. Anytime
an Arab player has been close to signing, like the Israeli international Abbas Suan in 2005,
protests followed and the signing was scuppered. When Ali Mohamed, a midfielder from Niger,
signed in 2019, La Familia protested, demanding he changed his name, despite him being a Christian.
Mohamed was also racially abused during an open training session and, in response,
owner Moshe Hogeg – a tech entrepreneur - threatened to sue the offending supporters.
“They love the club and what it represents ... but
they're racist and that's a big problem,” he told CNN.
When news of Beitar's Arab investment first made the Israeli press following
the historic signing of the Abraham Accords and the normalisation of relations between Israel
and the UAE, La Familia daubed explicit graffiti opposing the move outside their Teddy Stadium.
But Sheikh Hamad isn't the first investor to come to the club in the hope of changing
Beitar's reputation. Over the past 15 years a carousel of owners have tried and failed,
lured by both access to the political elite that the club provides and the promise of
awakening a sleeping giant. More often than not their hopes are destroyed along the way.
It was the Russian born, French-Israeli oligarch Arkardi Gaydamak (who took over
the club in 2005) who promised he would sign Abbas Suan and change the perception of Beitar.
He invested, and the club won back-to-back titles and State Cups.
But La Familia revolted against any attempts at allowing a Muslim or Arab to play for the
club. After one nasty pitch invasion Gaydamak told Israel's Army Radio: “The idiot bastards
can leave … The fans who went wild yesterday are bastards, and I have no respect for them.”
There was, though, a bigger game afoot. Gaydamak – whose son Sacha owned Portsmouth
FC during their most successful recent period – admitted he was more interested in political
power than footballing success. Arkardi Gaydamak set up his own political party
and used the club as a platform to try and get elected as the Mayor of Jerusalem.
“I was never a football fan, I always said that,” he revealed in “Forever Pure”, a documentary about
the club. “But Beitar had more fans than all the other clubs in Israel combined. And this is
why it is a very interesting propaganda tool. It has a huge influence on Israeli society.”
But silverware didn't lead to success at the ballot box. In Jerusalem's 2008 mayoral
election he finished a dismal third with less than four per cent of the vote. The financial crisis
hit him and his son hard too. Sacha sold Portsmouth, shortly before a financial
collapse that saw Portsmouth become the first Premier League club to go into administration.
Enter Guma Aguiar, a young Brazilian-born, US-raised natural gas tycoon eager to invest
in Israel. He initially agreed to invest $4 million in Beitar (to stave of bankruptcy) as
well as the city's basketball team, with the hope of later buying the club off Gaydamak outright.
But first, he wanted to deal with the racism.
“The one thing I would like to see
is more tolerance from the fans,” he told World Soccer magazine.
“I certainly wouldn’t want to go to Barcelona and hear them singing ‘Death to the Jews’.”
But Aguiar had long struggled with drug and alcohol addiction and was in a messy court battle
with his uncle and former business partner over his fortune. A year later Aguiar was committed
to the Abarbanel Mental Health Center outside Jerusalem. A few days earlier he had given an
interview with a local newspaper claiming he was in mobile phone contact with Gilad Shalit, the
Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas militants and held incommunicado in the Gaza Strip since 2006.
Aguiar had claimed he had sneaked into the Gaza Strip and freed Shalit,
who was now holed up in one of his properties. Of course, none of it
was true. Shalit was eventually released in a Palestinian prisoner swap deal in 2011.
By then Aguiar was out of hospital, with multiple court cases closing in.
In 2012 his motorboat, the TT Zion, was found on Fort Lauderdale beach on the Florida coast
with his phone and wallet inside but he nowhere to be found.
At first it seemed like a tragic accident, but a legal battle broke out between the
family over what was left of Aguiar's assets. Lawyers for Aguiar's wife suggested that Guma
might not be dead after all and could in fact be living under a new identity in Amsterdam,
but neither he nor his body have ever been found and he was declared legally dead in January 2015.
Gaydamak was back in charge, but eager to sell, prompting another attempt to break the Muslim
player embargo and improve the club's image. In early 2013, Beitar announced the signing of two
Chechen Muslim players, Zaur Sadayev and Dzhabrail Kadiyev. Their signing was met
with a furious response from the fans, with La Famila barracking the players and management as
“traitors” during training sessions and Beitar's offices being set on fire with a molotov cocktail.
When Sadayev scored his first (and only goal) for Beitar,
hundreds turned their backs and walked out of the Teddy rather than celebrate the goal.
Between them, they played just eight games for Beitar.
The incident marked the end of Arkady's time at Beitar.
He sold the club a few months later but his legal troubles were about to take a turn for the worst.
Gaydamak had been found guilty in a long-running French court case of illegal gun running during
the Angolan civil war, known in France as “Angolagate”. He was later acquitted but then
sentenced to three years in prison for tax evasion related to the “Angolagate” affair.
He was later released with an electronic tag after just a year inside.
The club was sold to businessman Eli Tabib, whose attempts to tame La Familia didn't go well either,
largely thanks to his previous ownership of Hapoel Tel Aviv, a club with a traditionally
more left wing fanbase (Hapoel means “worker” in Hebrew) The group would frequently protest
in his neighbourhood. In 2015 he was shot outside his Tel Aviv home. “It's all about
the soccer,” said Tabib. “True, it was an attempted assassination. Soccer is
bankrupt. I need to sit down and think hard about whether to stay in the world of soccer
and whether to remain in Israel at all or return to the United States.”
He stayed on and in 2018 vowed to rename the club Beitar “Trump” Jerusalem in
honour of the US president. In the same year he sold the club to Hogeg,
who finalised the deal that sold just under 50 per cent of the club to Sheikh Hamad.
The new investment, which is promised to run to $90m over the next decade,
will be focused on infrastructure, youth facilities and signing new players,
the club announced on completion, and represents a “new and exciting light” according to Hogeg.
“Racism is a desecration of God’s name” he wrote on Instagram in early December and in
response to criticism. “We will do what is good for the club, not for the media and the racists…”
Under Hogeg the number of racist incidents at Beitar have fallen.
Although that's not surprising given that he recently told the BBC that if a Beitar fan
shouted a single racist comment he would “sue you for a million dollars”. Still,
even after everything that has happened over the last 15 years,
the announcement that an Arab investor has arrived at Beitar still came as a huge surprise. The next
few months will prove whether the power of La Familia has finally been broken or not.