MK Beer Sheva

Promotion, when it finally came for MK Beer Sheva, arrived through the back door of Israeli handball rather than the front. The 2017/2018 Liga Le'umit title remains the only senior trophy the club has to show, and it bought the team a single season among the elite before the arithmetic of a small hall and a smaller budget pulled it back down.

The club runs as the handball wing of the wider Maccabi Beer Sheva organisation, kept apart from the football side that carries the same name, and its roots go back further than its paperwork does: informal handball in the city was already under way in 2004, two years before the association was registered. That debut top-flight campaign, 2018/2019, produced an eighth-place finish and a quarter-final exit against Maccabi Rishon LeZion — respectable enough for a side playing at that level for the first time. A year later, sitting sixth, the season was cut short before it could be finished. Serbian pair Stefan Ćirić and Miloš Bujisic carried much of the team's attacking weight through that period.

Since then the club has drifted between the top division and the level below it, more often occupied with staying up than pushing for anything higher. Local reporting has attached the word "derby" to meetings with Hapoel Rishon LeZion, though the two clubs sit nowhere near each other on the map. Youth handball has fared better: an under-15/under-17 national title in 2016 pointed to a production line the senior side has not yet matched.

Games are played at the Ramat Reches hall, a venue that holds around 500, a step down in scale from the 3,000-capacity arena the club used before 2017. Red and white remain the colours on court while the team works, this season as in recent ones, at holding its place in whichever division it currently occupies.