Hapoel Beer Sheva

Zalman Kaspi went looking for footballers where nobody else thought to look, among the new arrivals held in the transit camps that had grown up around Beer Sheva. What he put together there in 1949 was formally established the following year at the local Hapoel centre.

The Israel Football Association suspended the club in 1952, judging it too far from the centre of the country to keep track of. Hapoel Beer Sheva re-registered in 1954 and rebuilt from the third division, working up to the top flight, the Liga Leumit, by 1965.

Alona Barkat bought the club in 2007 and became the first woman to own a professional football club in Israel. The side had not won the league since 1976; under her ownership it won three years running from 2016, then again in 2023.

The Israeli Cup arrived in 1997 and remained the club's only major cup until three more followed, the latest in 2025. Five Super Cup wins sit alongside it, along with three victories in the Toto Cup.

The club left Vasermil, its home since 1960, for the 2015/16 season, moving into the Yaacov Turner Toto Stadium, which holds 16,126. Red shirts and white shorts have stayed constant throughout, and so has a nickname drawn from the surrounding Negev: the Camels, or, locally, the Reds of the South.

Maccabi Netanya carries the old ideological weight as a rival, while Ashdod supplies the newer South Derby; the city's other derby, against Maccabi Beer Sheva, quietened once that club dropped out of the top division. It was in those transit camps, and in the enforced restart of 1954, that Hapoel Beer Sheva's story actually began.