Yaakov Turner Toto Stadium

Something happened at this ground: it failed itself. Opened in September 2015 to replace Vasermil, the ageing home Hapoel Beer Sheva had used since 1959, the new stadium had barely settled in before trouble started showing in the roof. Things came to a head in August 2020, when inspectors found cracked beams and loosened bolts and shut the ground down outright. Hapoel spent the whole 2020/21 season playing home games at Teddy Stadium in Jerusalem while crews stripped the old roof covering, waterproofed and reinforced the structure, and fitted new seats and a pitch-access ramp. The gates reopened in September 2021 against Hapoel Hadera.

Before any of that, the stadium had already given the club as good a start as any ground could offer: in its first season, 2015/16, Hapoel Beer Sheva won the Israeli championship without losing a single home match there. Average attendance ran close to 15,000, not far off the stadium's capacity of 16,126.

The name carries its own history. It honours Yaakov Turner, mayor of Beer Sheva from 1998 to 2008 after a career as an Israeli Air Force brigadier general and later founder of the city's Air Force Museum; "Toto" refers to the Israeli sports-betting board that helped fund the build. The Israel national team has played there too, opening its account at the ground in October 2018 with a 2-0 win over Albania.