Maccabi Tel Aviv

Maccabi Tel Aviv's oldest quarrel is with Hapoel Tel Aviv, the club it has shared Bloomfield Stadium with since 2000. Their meetings are known as the Tel Aviv derby; games against the city's other sides, Bnei Yehuda included, are filed separately as the small derby.

Yellow and blue have been the club's colours from the start — yellow a reference to the stars Jews were made to wear under Nazi rule, blue drawn from the flag of Israel — and together they gave Maccabi its nickname, the Yellows. It is the oldest football club in the country.

Five league titles and four cups came inside the 1950s alone. Continental success followed in 1969 and 1971, when Maccabi won the Asian Champions Cup both times, the only international trophies an Israeli club held before the AFC expelled the country's clubs in 1974. Relegation came within a game in 1975/76, averted on the final day against Beitar; the 1980s gave back only two cups and no championships. The club reached the group stage of the Champions League for the first time in 2004/05, drawn with Ajax, Juventus and Bayern Munich, and again in 2015/16. Avi Nimni remains the leading scorer in the club's history with 216 goals, his number 8 retired since. Sheran Yeini's 495 appearances stand as the club record, and Eran Zahavi captained the side through its more recent championships.

That standing has come under pressure since November 2024, when Maccabi supporters rioted in Amsterdam before a match against Ajax; the derby against Hapoel was abandoned at Bloomfield in October 2025 after crowd trouble, and clubs including Aston Villa have since barred Maccabi's travelling fans. The name on the team sheet in 1906 was not Maccabi at all — Ha-Rishon LeZion-Jaffa Association took the field first, and only became Maccabi Tel Aviv three years later.