Sami Ofer Stadium

Sami Ofer Stadium sits by the coast, next to the Haifa-Hof HaCarmel railway station, close enough to the sea that a Mediterranean crosswind is part of the deal on a matchday. It was built from scratch — there was no old ground on the site to knock down first — and opened on 27 August 2014, when Hapoel Haifa met Hapoel Acre in the first official fixture. The league proper followed a few weeks later, on 15 September, with Maccabi Haifa hosting Bnei Sakhnin.

The design came from KSS Group working alongside Mansfeld-Kehat Architects, a pairing of an international stadium specialist with a local practice, which shows in a bowl built for Israeli football rather than adapted from some other purpose. The pitch itself is a hybrid surface, roughly 95 per cent natural grass reinforced with synthetic fibres, the kind of specification clubs choose when they want a lawn that survives a heavy fixture list rather than one that merely looks well on the day it is laid.

No redevelopment has followed since 2014; the stadium has stood as built, without the extensions or roof replacements that mark the biographies of older Israeli grounds.