Hapoel Katamon Jerusalem, the first football team in Israel to be owned entirely by its fans, made history over the weekend by gaining promotion to Israel’s second division.
Katamon clinched promotion to the professional league with an emphatic 9-1 victory over bottom-placed Lod in front of more 6,000 fanatical fans at Jerusalem’s Teddy stadium – by far the largest attendance ever for a lower league game.
The promotion marked the latest chapter in the rags-to-riches story of a club that was found six years ago when a group of disgruntled fans, fed up after years of chronic mismanagement by a couple of wealthy businessmen, broke away from Hapoel Jerusalem to form the new team.
This was the first experiment in fan-power in Israeli football and pundits predicted it would only last a few months.
However, the vast majority of Hapoel supporters switched allegiances to Katamon, and the club, with a large following, home and away, gradually worked their way up through the lower divisions.
Katamon has more than 400 member –fans who pay an annual membership fee and elect a steering committee to run the day-to-day affairs of the club, although the manager is responsible for team selection.
Katamon, with a progressive ethos and a community outreach programme, attracts a diverse crowd: secular and religious, Jewish and Arab, and many families and children.
The club’s success created a genuine alternative for football fans in Israel’s capital, which is dominated by Beitar Jerusalem.
Whereas Hapoel was always associated with the Histadrut trade union federation and the political left, Beitar was linked to the right-wing Likud, the party of prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
The rise to ascendancy of the political right in Israel in the 1970s coincided with Beitar replacing Hapoel as Jerusalem’s dominant football team.
Beitar is now one of Israel's big-four teams, along with Maccabi Tel Aviv, Hapoel Tel Aviv and Maccabi Haifa.
However, a section of Beitar fans are overtly racist: anti-Arab and anti-Muslim chants are a common occurrence at Beitar games. Despite attempts by the management to change the club’s image, including the controversial decision this season to sign two Muslim players from Chechnya, Beitar remains the only top Israeli club to never have an Arab player on its books.
In contrast, Katamon has a couple of Israeli Arabs in its team and ant-racist and anti-fascist banners can be seen at every game.
Katamon also runs a successful school league, bringing together teams from Jerusalem’s Jewish and Arab neighbourhoods.
Shai Aharon, Katamon's iconic captain, who joined from Hapoel, said the promotion was the happiest moment in his life.
“It’s not just Hapoel Katamon that has won today,” he said. “The whole of Israeli football has won.”
