Hapoel Sderot

Derby day in Sderot has always meant Maccabi across town, and the two sides have spent decades occupying the lower reaches of Israeli football rather than fighting each other for silverware — the rivalry outlasting any single promotion push. That contest, more than any trophy on the shelf, is what defines a club that has spent most of its life climbing back to where it started.

Yitzhak Triki set the club up in 1957 and ran it himself, as player and manager both. The best spell came within a decade of that: promotion out of Liga Alef South B Division in 1968 sent the team into the second tier for the first time, though the stay lasted only two seasons before relegation pulled them back down. There had been an earlier promotion too, out of Liga Bet in 1961, won through play-offs rather than the table alone.

None of it held. Money ran out in 1992 and the club folded, leaving Sderot without a senior side wearing its name for the better part of thirty years. Meir Azran, who came through the youth ranks and played for the first team between 1981 and 1985 before Hapoel Be'er Sheva signed him, belonged to that vanished era; his brother Czjon, remembered locally as "Legend Number 10," played on into it and died in 2014, by which point there was no club left to mourn him in.

The refounding came in 2018, and the new side wasted no time putting something on the record: a Liga Gimel South Cup, beaten out against Hapoel Mrevavim/Ofakim by a single goal. They play now at the Toto Sderot Stadium, a ground that holds barely over a thousand, in red and white, the colours of the Hapoel movement Triki signed the club up to at the very start.